Entrepreneurial orientation and its effect on sustainability decision tradeoffs: The case of sustainable fashion firms

Lori DiVito and René Bohnsack

Journal of Business Venturing, 2017, vol. 32, issue 5, 569-587

Abstract: We examined the entrepreneurial orientation and sustainability orientation, a persistent and conflicting duality, of sustainable entrepreneurs and their evaluation of competing priorities in sustainability decision making. We conducted an exploratory, mixed-method study of 24 sustainable fashion firms and collected data through structured surveys and rich in-depth interviews. Through our inductive and deductive analysis, we derive three sustainability decision making profiles (singular, flexible and holistic) with distinct prioritization logic (nested, ordered and aligned, respectively). We find different configurations of entrepreneurial orientation correspond to the sustainability decision making profiles. We extend the literature by showing how the reflexivity of entrepreneurial orientation interacts with sustainability orientation.

Keywords: Sustainable entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurial orientation; Sustainability trade-offs; Environmental entrepreneurship; Ecopreneurship; Social entrepreneurship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902617303750
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbvent:v:32:y:2017:i:5:p:569-587

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2017.05.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Venturing is currently edited by S. Venkataraman

More articles in Journal of Business Venturing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().