ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurs are becoming an important power in promoting a transformation to sustainable development through various ways (Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011). Some scholars even see entrepreneurship as panacea for many social and environmental concerns (Brugmann and Prahalad, 2007; Senge et al., 2007). In previous studies discussing why firms engage in corporate sustainability activities, many authors followed organizational or industry level approaches, often drawing on social movements and institutional theory at the macro level (e.g., Campbell, 2006; Doh and Guay, 2006; Husted and Allen, 2006; Schneiberg et al., 2008; Sine and Lee, 2009; Jackson and Apostolakou, 2010; Brammer et al., 2012). Although they acknowledged that personal values of entrepreneurs can lead to specific entrepreneurial actions including sustainable entrepreneurship (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2011), it remains open what values are most influential among entrepreneurs when discovering or creating opportunities to both create personal economic and societal benefits. The question of how entrepreneurs discover and develop opportunities leading to emerging sustainable businesses has not been investigated so far. We believe it is important to understand to what extent and how entrepreneurs seek opportunities in the bottom-up processes of promoting the development of new industry (Walker et al., 2014). While entrepreneurs respond to challenges of social development with positive and legitimate participation in policymaking, scholars still lack explanations why entrepreneurs engage in social and public welfare and how entrepreneurs secure both personal economic and societal benefits through seeking social and/or sustainable opportunities. A recent study argues that culturaldependent ideologies or values drive successful private-firm entrepreneurs’ motivation to pursue political appointments for the sake of influencing policymaking and contribute to the greater good (Li and Liang, 2015). Li and Liang provide a good foundation to understand why private-firm entrepreneurs in a Confucian cultural context pursue pro-self and pro-social objectives through political engagement. However, they neither explored how private-firm entrepreneurs identify and create entrepreneurial opportunities to simultaneously realize pro-social welfare and business sustainability nor how entrepreneurial
political appointments impact on institutional change. This latter aspect is relevant as political engagement of private-firm entrepreneurs had a notable increase in recent years at least in China. In order to grasp the relation between private-firm entrepreneurs’ ideology and the creation of opportunities for sustainable entrepreneurship, this study introduces a corporate political activity (CPA) perspective which allows bridging the aspect of entrepreneurial behavior at the micro level and the change of industry and institutions at the macro level. Accordingly, we address the following research question: How do entrepreneurs create opportunities for sustainable entrepreneurship through engaging in CPA? We answer our research question using a longitudinal case study of a privatefirm entrepreneur in the solar PV industry in China from 2007 to 2014. Our study addresses the interrelationship between sustainable entrepreneurship and CPA. First, we argue that sustainable entrepreneurs’ values influence how they identify and create opportunities and corporations’ engagement in sustainable business. Second, sustainable entrepreneurs seek and create sustainable business opportunities through their CPAs with stakeholders in different issue areas. Third, sustainable business opportunities evolve dynamically with entrepreneurs’ CPAs, thereby creating a positive impact on industrial and institutional change towards sustainability-orientation.
