ABSTRACT
It is widely acknowledged that economic phenomena do not occur in a vacuum and are embedded in social relations (Granovetter 1985). Sustainable entrepreneurship, defined here as the pursuit of opportunities focusing on the preservation of nature, life support and community for the creation of economic and non-economic gains (Shepherd and Patzelt 2011), is no exception to this. Indeed, by its very nature and aim, sustainable entrepreneurship is likely to be strongly embedded as it intends to act sustainably with regard to its (social) environment. This conceptual chapter makes the case for a strong embeddedness at all stages of sustainable entrepreneurship: opportunity identification and/or creation, opportunity evaluation and opportunity exploitation (Shane and Venkataraman 2000; Alvarez and Barney 2007). Using stakeholder theory (Mitchell et al. 1997; Parmar et al. 2010), this strong embeddedness is argued here to be an important incentive for sustainability, because it involves entering into longterm relationships with multiple stakeholders, which put pressure on the entrepreneur to respect the triple bottom line. Overall, this chapter aims to shift from the ‘What is to be sustained/ developed’ (Shepherd and Patzelt 2011) to the ‘How’ questions by addressing the following research problem: How does embeddedness of entrepreneurship facilitate sustainability? More precisely, drawing on extant literature, it develops a model showing (1) that sustainable entrepreneurship is strongly embedded, and (2) that this strong embeddedness contributes to its sustainable1 character. Thereby, it contributes to theory by highlighting that the different stages of sustainable entrepreneurship take place in interrelated contexts, which in turn influence sustainability. The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. First, the literature on embeddedness and stakeholder theory is reviewed against the backdrop of sustainable entrepreneurship and related notions of environmental entrepreneurship – sometimes also called eco or green entrepreneurship (for a review of the use of these terms, see Levinsohn 2013) – and social entrepreneurship (Tilley and Young 2009; De Hoe and Janssen 2014). Next, a model is developed and
propositions are articulated. Finally, the model and its implications, as well as the contributions of this chapter, are discussed.
