Entrepreneurs as prime targets: Insights from Mexican ventures on the link between venture visibility and crime of varying severity

This study addresses entrepreneurs as targets of crime. Leveraging insights from strategic responses to institutional pressures as the main theoretical frame, coupled with supporting insights from routine activities theory and interview data from 14 entrepreneurs who have been victims of crime, we introduce entrepreneur-led ventures becoming targets of crime via their engagement in routine activities that increase venture visibility. We then conceptualize that crime severity pushes entrepreneurs toward venture visibility-reduction responses, such as truncating growth, relocating, or discontinuing the venture. Survey data from 87,486 legally registered entrepreneurled ventures in Mexico provide strong support for the relationships in our theoretical model. We find that as routine venture activities increase, entrepreneurs encounter crime of increasing severity, with the routine venture activity of making transactions at a bank serving as the strongest attractor of crime. Building on these findings, we observe an indirect effect through crime severity such that the choice to relocate the venture is the most likely response to being targeted by criminals. Our results advance the literature at the intersection of crime and entrepreneurship, especially in developing economies, and offers venture visibility as a mechanism that shapes both criminals' targeting of ventures and entrepreneurs' attempts to reduce being targeted.