Accentuate the positive? Sustainable entrepreneurs' framing of positive and negative impacts

Abstract

Through qualitative studies, we examine how sustainable entrepreneurs frame the positive and negative societal as well as environmental impacts created by their entrepreneurial activities. According to framing literature, entrepreneurs use framing as a communicative strategy to guide an audience's attention on selected features of their ventures. Based on in-depth interviews with ten sustainable ventures in southern India, we found that sustainable entrepreneurs highlight the positive sustainable impacts they strive to create. We show how sustainable entrepreneurs apply a variety of techniques to downplay their ventures' negative sustainability impacts. Our empirically grounded model illustrates how the salience of positive sustainability impacts and the downplay of negative sustainability impacts—in combination—leads entrepreneurs to articulate their sustainability impacts strongly biased in favor of positivity. Overall, this study provides new insights for a critical reflection of a positivity tendency in sustainable entrepreneurship. Our study, therefore, sheds light on a much-neglected issue in the sustainable entrepreneurship domain that must be taken into account when developing new methods for the sustainability impact assessments of young ventures.