Articlegold2010

Sustainable Entrepreneurship in the Dutch Construction Industry

87 citations0/0 files storedSustainability

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences Environmental Sustainability in Business Sustainability and Innovation in Business

Abstract

This article discusses the strategies that sustainable entrepreneurs use to interact with their environment in the Dutch construction industry. The Dutch construction industry is under great pressure to move towards sustainability, and entrepreneurs are believed to be able to play a large role in this transition by introducing new products and new business practices. But how can entrepreneurs prosper in an environment that is not geared up towards such a change? And which strategies do they use to bend conditions in their favor? In this article we make use of the Market and System Failure Framework to analyze the pressures that entrepreneurs are confronted with when introducing sustainable innovations. We recognize that these pressures can be seen as bottlenecks, but that market and system failures can also create entrepreneurial opportunities. We interviewed 16 entrepreneurs in the Dutch construction industry to determine the influences they experienced from their environment and the strategies they use to deal with these. We conclude that we can distinguish between system building and following entrepreneurs, where the former aims to build a new system to challenge the old one, whereas the latter rather makes use of existing structures to build a business. We find that both strategies can be successful and that overall, the entrepreneurs confirm the belief that sustainability on people, planet and transparency aspects, can contribute very well to the long term profitability of the businesses the entrepreneurs are running. These in-depth insights into the influences from the context on the one hand, and the entrepreneurs’ strategic reactions on the other hand, contribute to our understanding of the interactions between entrepreneurs and the system context. This can help us to more effectively stimulate and support innovating entrepreneurs to contribute to the transition towards sustainability.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 87 citations exist upstream.

References

1984Case Study Research: Design and Methods 1983The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields 2004The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields 1983The Iron Caged Revisited : Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields 1995Institutions and organizations 1991Strategic Responses to Institutional Processes 2006The Oxford Handbook of Innovation 1988An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein

Cited by

2012Institutional entrepreneurship in sustainable urban development: Dutch successes as inspiration for transformation 2018The Epistemology of Humane Entrepreneurship: Theory and Proposal for Future Research Agenda 2017Sustainable Entrepreneurial Orientation in Family Firms 2017Who Takes More Sustainability-Oriented Entrepreneurial Actions? The Role of Entrepreneurs’ Values, Beliefs and Orientations 2021Analysis and Assessment of Sustainable Entrepreneurship Practices in Polish Small and Medium Enterprises

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.