Abstract
Entrepreneurs discover opportunities, start new ventures, and are widely considered the forerunners of sustainability transitions. As they address existing market failures and realize entrepreneurial opportunities to preserve nature, life, support, and community, they contribute to sustainable development. However, linking individual entrepreneurial contributions to transitions is difficult. Initially, new ventures lack the leverage to influence broad-scale transitions. For this reason, it is necessary to not only look at individual entrepreneurial contributions to sustainability transitions but rather to investigate them at a broader scale. This article turns to social representations theory to argue how the social representation of micro-level entrepreneurial actions in news media contributes to meso- or macro-level sustainability transitions. Taking this theory lens, we draw on a novel combination of topic modeling and thematic analysis in order to analyze 1167 newspaper articles from 2010 to 2020 on sustainable entrepreneurship with a tie to the Berlin entrepreneurial ecosystem. Our findings highlight the media's role in making entrepreneurial action for sustainability transitions relatable by referencing events like award ceremonies and trade fairs. We find that entrepreneurial contributions are linked to specific discourses ranging from globalization strategies to a TV series' on banking. Also, we identify particular entrepreneurial contributions in Berlin such as local empowerment and challenging agricultural and fashion industries, and suggest a comprehensive approach to investigate impact aggregated within ecosystems. Our social identity conceptualization of sustainable entrepreneurs as localists, researchers, advocates, challengers, and change-makers, can support their strategic communication, benchmarking and impact-oriented decision-making.
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