TY - JOUR
T1 - Walking the tightrope and stirring things up
T2 - Exploring the institutional work of sustainable entrepreneurs
AU - Arenas, D.
AU - Strumińska-Kutra, Marta
AU - Landoni, Paolo
N1 - Funding Information:
This research has received funding from the program FP7 Socio‐Economic Sciences and Humanities of the European Union (grant number 613194). We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Elena Perondi, Solange Hai, Julia Binder, Frank‐Martin Belz and Boleslaw Rok for their valuable support in early stages of the research.
Funding Information:
This research has received funding from the program FP7 Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities of the European Union (grant number 613194). We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Elena Perondi, Solange Hai, Julia Binder, Frank-Martin Belz and Boleslaw Rok for their valuable support in early stages of the research.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - Sustainable entrepreneurs (SEs) operate under different institutional pressures, but they also aim to provoke changes in their institutional environment in order to advance the goals of sustainability. These changes are not always large-scale, successful transformations. This article adopts the concept of institutional work to explore how SEs engage in purposive, mundane activities to both fit in and influence the prevailing institutional environment. In particular, our findings allow us to introduce and discuss four specific types of work: making sustainability convenient, politicizing economic action, maneuvering around regulation, and relational work. At the end, we suggest that SEs may find themselves in a situation where they aim to transform the prevailing commercial institutional logic in order to promote sustainability goals while also trying to adapt to, and hence reproducing, this same logic they would like to transform.
AB - Sustainable entrepreneurs (SEs) operate under different institutional pressures, but they also aim to provoke changes in their institutional environment in order to advance the goals of sustainability. These changes are not always large-scale, successful transformations. This article adopts the concept of institutional work to explore how SEs engage in purposive, mundane activities to both fit in and influence the prevailing institutional environment. In particular, our findings allow us to introduce and discuss four specific types of work: making sustainability convenient, politicizing economic action, maneuvering around regulation, and relational work. At the end, we suggest that SEs may find themselves in a situation where they aim to transform the prevailing commercial institutional logic in order to promote sustainability goals while also trying to adapt to, and hence reproducing, this same logic they would like to transform.
KW - entrepreneurship
KW - institutional logics
KW - institutional work
KW - politicizing
KW - sustainable entrepreneurs
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087204607&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1002/bse.2557
DO - 10.1002/bse.2557
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85087204607
SN - 0964-4733
VL - 29
SP - 3055
EP - 3071
JO - Business Strategy and the Environment
JF - Business Strategy and the Environment
IS - 8
ER -