ABSTRACT
Sustainable development has emerged as an influential concept for business and policy makers. There is a growing awareness of pressing environmental issues such as ecosystem degradation and global climate change and the significance of entrepreneurship as the medium to bring great transformation to entire industries for the provision of more sustainable products, services and processes. Sustainability has become a common denominator in many firms’ corporate strategies since most large firms now have explicit public sustainability policy statements and claim to apply a “triple bottom line” that considers a firm’s financial, environmental, and social performance (Hall et al. 2010). Yet, the theory of entrepreneurship is still unclear on the definition of sustainable entrepreneurship. From a theoretical point of view scholars have mostly used the word ‘sustainability’ to refer to three pillars of a sustainable society, sustainable environment and sustainable economy (Zaman and Goschin 2010). Early literature on sustainable entrepreneurship has addressed these pillars separately and fewer scholars have explored sustainability within the entrepreneurialorientation debate. This chapter contributes to the current scholarly debate on sustainability and entrepreneurship by drawing on Shepherd and Patzelt’s (2011) definition of sustainable entrepreneurship where the focus is on the role of the entrepreneurial action linked to the concept of opportunity recognition in the pursuit of sustainability and development. We augment theoretical knowledge of this phenomenon by positioning the concept of sustainable entrepreneurship within the debate of the firm’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and argue that the balancing of sustainability with development, which is intrinsic in Shepherd and Patzelt’s (2011) definition, depends on the organisational and environmental contexts and needs to be addressed simultaneously over time. Hence, this chapter aims to theoretically understand how the aspects of ‘sustainability’ and ‘development’ can be achieved
over time. To this effect it applies the theoretical lens of ambidexterity largely used in studies of innovation. By doing so we respond to Shepherd and Patzelt’s (2011, 136) call for the need of “sustainable entrepreneurship research to explore the role of entrepreneurial action as a mechanism for sustaining nature and ecosystems while providing economic and non-economic gains for investors, entrepreneurs, and societies”. In the next sections, first definitional issues and context and temporal expects of sustainable entrepreneurship are discussed; this is then followed by the conceptualisation of sustainable entrepreneurship within the firm’s entrepreneurialorientation literature. Subsequently, building on this literature, we further elaborate our conceptual framework by referring to the ambidexterity theoretical perspective. Finally, we apply the contextual ambidexterity perspective to the case of SMEs pursuing a sustainable entrepreneurship posture.
