Abstract
Sustainability, responsibility, innovativeness, social value creation and entrepreneurship are all over-used buzzwords, but they are also relevant responses to many of the local and global ills of modern societies. In our era of climate change, overpopulation and persistent social injustice, high expectations have been placed on entrepreneurship to find solutions to wicked social and environmental problems. Social Innovation and Sustainable Entrepreneurship is an anthology of papers presented at the Sustainability, Ethics and Entrepreneurship (SEE) Conference. It aims to ‘report the state of the art in social innovation and entrepreneurship research around the world’ (p. 1) while also addressing the related topics of social entrepreneurship, institutional entrepreneurship, eco-friendly consumption and sustainable development. These are all growing fields of study and contentious areas of literature.
Social Innovation and Sustainable Entrepreneurship is a book of four parts comprising a total of 11 chapters. The first part introduces theoretical approaches to sustainable entrepreneurship research. The second part focuses on the entrepreneurial solutions to one of the most urgent global problems, climate change. Then, the book proceeds to investigate the social innovation process, and the last part is dedicated to pondering the ethical aspects of decision-making and consumer behaviour.
The first part starts with an article contrasting dystopian and utopian environmental scenarios. It concludes that since we know very little of how technologies, businesses, institutions, and consumers will influence the development of markets and the global environment in the future, the utopian, Brave New World, scenario seems quite unlikely to become reality. The second article introduces how institutional voids in emerging markets, together with policy changes favouring sustainability, offer business opportunities and can legitimate business activity. The article offers a case story of Chinese car manufacturer Geely and its founder.
As calls for companies to embrace sustainability have increased, sustainability reporting has become more common. However, the motives behind reporting, stakeholder accountability and legitimacy have been questioned. Contradictory stakeholder expectations for sustainability reporting are analysed and categorised in the third article, which uses social contract theory to identify how stakeholders legitimise sustainability reporting.
Following its more theoretical first part, the second part of the book introduces chapters dealing with the entrepreneurial responses to climate change. The benefits of solving the problems of climate change together are reiterated and the likely challenges involved are introduced. The first chapter gives us an inside view on the networking process of social venture creation through a reflexive autoethnography of the first author of the account, an entrepreneur–researcher of The Scottish Global Relations Forum – an entrepreneurial project spotting business opportunity and gaps in market-based offerings. The second chapter highlights the role of networks in addressing climate change in an impactful way. It shows how informal, face-to-face networking enables entrepreneurs to create a joint belief system and make sense of climate change. The article emphasises that this is a nonlinear, iterative and interactive process. The next article takes us to California and a study of water rights, intragroup fault lines and the role of competition and co-operation behaviour in the negotiation processes over a scarce natural resource such as water.
The third part of the book offers a glimpse into social innovation processes. The first chapter drills down to the main concepts of the book, in that it aims to clarify the interdependencies and definitions of social innovation, social entrepreneurship and institutional entrepreneurship. The authors shed light on how social entrepreneurs and their organisations trigger field-level changes and, hence, also act as institutional entrepreneurs. The article illuminates the systemic interplay between bottom-up and top-down activities, in other words the interwoven nature of agency and structure. This article deserves a more prominent role in the book and could perhaps even have been the introductory chapter. The next article steers the storyline towards ethical issues, experiences of the employees in engagement with their organisation and potential ways to make work meaningful. The article builds on Levinas’ work on ethical love, contrasting it with political love and then discussing the role of both forms in the social innovation process. The third article uses data collected from benefit corporations (B-corporations) and internal corporate ventures (ICVs) to identify characteristics of corporate innovation behaviour that foster social innovation.
The last part of the book is titled The ethics of social innovations and consists of two chapters. In this part, the focus moves from companies to consumers. Ethical and responsible consuming is predicted to become prevalent, especially among younger generations, and these two articles study the topic from a Latin American (Puerto Rican, to be precise) perspective. The first chapter aims to create a theoretical model capable of explaining the ethical decision-making of Millennials and the role of bioethical principles in that process. The next chapter also takes a generational perspective in studying the effect of eco-friendly packaging on the buying behaviour of different generations. Surprisingly, the authors find no differences in purchasing behaviour between generations and also note that there are few indications of eco-friendly behaviour influencing the purchasing decision.
This kind of anthology is certainly warranted, and the book introduces readers to a wide variety of different topics, different theoretical perspectives and different methods. But unfortunately, this versatility takes its toll. The collection fails to provide a concise picture of the research field, and there are shortcomings in terms of its coherence. The level of rigour and relevance varies considerably across chapters. Some chapters would have benefitted from a stricter review process, but the book does feature several contributions that offer stimulating perspectives on social innovations and sustainable entrepreneurship. My favourite chapters were Michael Zhang’s article on the entrepreneurial journey of Geely’s founder, which provided a well-contextualised case study of the use of institutional voids as a source of business opportunities, and Turell and Earle’s piece Social Entrepreneurs and Field Level Change, which was a rigorous presentation of the interconnectedness of social and institutional entrepreneurship. I believe both would make for inspiring reading for undergraduate students and academic scholars alike.