Religious Entrepreneurship: Past Contributions and Research Agenda for the Emerging Distinctive Domain
An Integrative Review and Boundary-Theory Framework
Key Finding
Religion and entrepreneurship are most generative in their overlap, not in isolation. Mapping 99 studies through boundary theory, the review shows religious entrepreneurship to be bi-directional and recursive — beliefs shaping ventures, and ventures reshaping beliefs — and argues the field has matured into a distinctive domain with its own constructs, boundaries, and agenda.
Overview
Forthcoming at Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, this integrative review takes a literature that has grown quickly but unevenly and gives it an organizing structure. Interest in religion and entrepreneurship has surged, yet the work remains scattered across inconsistent definitions, theoretical perspectives, and levels of analysis — a fragmentation that has limited what the field can accumulate. Reviewing all articles published through 2024 in journals ranked 3 and above in the ABS rankings, the paper assembles 99 studies from 34 journals and reads them through a single lens: religious entrepreneurship as the overlap of two domains rather than either one in isolation, much as family business or corporate entrepreneurship occupy an intersection rather than a single field.
Building on a recent definition that treats religious entrepreneurship as the scholarly domain concerned with how the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunity is reciprocally shaped by practices grounded in belief in and connection to superhuman powers, the review develops a conceptual framework centered on the integration of religious beliefs and practices with entrepreneurial cognition and action. The framework does the consolidating work the field has lacked: it names the core constructs, draws the domain's boundaries, and lays out where the research can go next.
Contribution to the Research Program
This paper extends the lab's long-running interest in how entrepreneurs reason and act when economic calculation alone cannot account for their commitments. Faith functions here as one of the non-economic rationales that shape judgment under uncertainty — a complement to, not a substitute for, the materialist paradigm that dominates the field. Where the lab's earlier work on religion and entrepreneurship examined the cognitive bridge between belief and venturing, this review supplies the domain-level architecture: a map of what the field has established, where its tensions lie, and which questions remain open.
Its organizing device is boundary theory. Domains can be held fully separate or deeply integrated, and the review uses that continuum — degrees of integration and permeability — to make sense of how entrepreneurs draw, blur, or dissolve the line between religious and entrepreneurial life. That same boundary logic runs through the program's broader concern with how actors construct the categories they then reason within, which makes religious entrepreneurship less a niche topic than a sharp case of judgment formed at the seam between two ways of seeing the world.
Key Insights
- Religious entrepreneurship is best understood as the overlap of religion and entrepreneurship, not either domain studied alone — a distinctive intersection with its own constructs, like family business or corporate entrepreneurship.
- Boundary theory supplies the framework: domains range from fully segmented to highly integrated, and the review maps integration along two components — the integration of beliefs (shaping cognition) and the integration of practices (shaping action).
- The relationship is bi-directional and recursive. Religious beliefs and practices shape entrepreneurial cognition and action; entrepreneurial processes can in turn reshape religion — its congregations, identities, and practices — though the review notes this reverse direction is the newer, less-developed side of the literature. The two can reinforce or erode each other over time.
- Synthesizing 99 studies across 34 journals published through 2024, the review grounds its framework in top-tier empirical work, complementing earlier reviews that predated the field's recent growth.
- It charts a forward agenda by naming the key gaps, tensions, and methodologies at the frontier, treating different degrees of integration and permeability as concrete research opportunities.
- The accumulation of top-tier and Financial Times 50 publications, dedicated research conferences, and special issues signals what the paper argues is underway — the emergence of religious entrepreneurship as a legitimate, distinctive domain.