ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how small business entrepreneurs engage in activities of importance for social sustainability and development as they undertake entrepreneurial ventures. It illustrates an ethnographic field study that examines the strategies used by small entrepreneurs in an area of extreme resource scarcity to navigate coexisting and potentially contradictory social and market logics. The chapter also examines the strategies through which the entrepreneurs navigate and work with the multiple institutional logics of the different spheres in which they operate in order to facilitate entrepreneurial venturing and contributes to both sustaining and changing societal structures. It explores how customary norms, beliefs and institutions not merely imposed institutional constraints on economic practice, but were used by entrepreneurs to create opportunities for individual value generation. The chapter proposes an alternative conceptualisation of institutional entrepreneurship to the predominant one. Traditionally, institutional entrepreneurship has been conceived as actors' activities with changing social structures to realise opportunities.
