Entrepreneurs in developing economies try to cope with weak or absent formal institutions—often referred to as “institutional voids”—by relying extensively on intermediary organizations such as business incubators and development organizations or informal institutions such as political, kinship, or family relationships. However, in many African countries, intermediary support is limited and informal institutions are also unreliable, adding risks and costs to doing business and increasing the severity of institutional voids in the surrounding ecosystem. We investigate the practices followed by 47 commercial entrepreneurs in Kenya to “work around” these severe institutional voids to achieve their goals of business creation and growth. We find that severe institutional voids stimulate the hybridization of goals to include social value creation, create a need for a more strategic orchestration of business relationships, and motivate entrepreneurs to proactively cross-brace the institutional infrastructure around them. We contribute by unveiling the important role of entrepreneurs as microinstitutional agents in developing economies and by detailing how commercial and social goals become intertwined in the context of African entrepreneurship.

In the Global North, where social entrepreneurs and their stakeholders agree that social enterprise needs to do more for stakeholders than traditional business, social entrepreneurs balancing financial and pro-social goals seek to avoid mission drift by being responsive to their stakeholders. In many areas of the Global South, despite the work of NGOs and foreign aid, social problems remain persistent and pervasive, so social entrepreneurs face vastly different stakeholder demands. Our qualitative study of 36 social entrepreneurs in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda builds on behavioral theory to understand how social entrepreneurs balance pro-social and financial goals in this context. We find that they experience a mismatch between their social impact aspirations and the expectations of stakeholders, which leads to concerns of Impact Drift, which we define as the decoupling of pro-social actions from enduring social impact outcomes. Concerns of impact drift prompt a norm-breaking approach to social impact, involving orchestrating novel coalitions of stakeholders and employing heuristics to limit their focus and reassure them about their approach.