How Do Institutional Forces Promote Social Actions in Life-Threatening Events?

Life-threatening events endanger the survival of community members. During these critical times, service businesses that remain operational face increasingly challenging decisions, including whether to maintain regular operations or adapt their service to meet the community’s evolving needs. From the community’s perspective, such operation decisions may transcend mere business strategy and constitute social actions that serve the public interest. Based on employee scheduling of 19,265 restaurants and bars located in 1,773 U.S. counties, our study shows how regulatory institutional force (existing government small business policies), normative institutional force (civic network), and cultural-cognitive institutional force (cultural tightness) jointly affect these small service providers’ operation decisions regarding proactively reducing or maintaining their work time, at the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, reducing work time constitutes a social action that protects public health. The findings suggest that in culturally loose regions, civic network motivates small service providers to reduce work hours. In culturally tight regions with unfavorable small business policies, such a network leads to an increase in work time. Given the close ties between small businesses and local communities, understanding the role of institutional forces can help small service providers align their business strategies with local institutional dynamics during life-threatening events. © The Author(s) 2025.