Abstract
Entrepreneurial behavior research has widened its scope to focus on founders who engage in creating enterprises for both their economic self-interest and their concern for others. Yet, there is a lack of an empirically grounded understanding of the sustainable enterprise creation behavior of entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid. This study contributes to sustainable entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behavior literature streams by applying founder identity theoretical perspectives to explore and understand bottom of the pyramid entrepreneurs’ self-perceived identities in the creation of sustainable enterprises. The study applies a multiple case study design with qualitative data collected through field observations and in-depth interviews with enterprise founders and stakeholders. The data were complemented with secondary materials such as websites, founder blogs, online videos, news articles, and other media coverage. The data were analyzed in stages through thematic analysis. Findings show that sustainable entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid possess multiple frames of reference, basic social motivations and adopt either single or multiple role identities, which influence their behavior during the process of creating their enterprises. Moreover, the analysis reveals that Fauchart and Gruber’s social identity typologies and the role identities of Cardon et al. can be applied to entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid to understand their identity profiles and illuminate on how these identities result in observed behavioral differences during the process of creating their enterprises.
Highlights
There has been a surge in scholarly interest in the role that businesses play in addressing environmental, social, and developmental challenges [1,2,3]
The analysis of the data revealed that the existing social identity typologies and role identities can be applied to bottom of the pyramid (BOP) actors to understand what it means to be entrepreneurs engaged in activities focused on sustainability issues and the self-worth they seek to obtain from becoming founders in such contexts
The findings of this study revealed that, due to their multiple frames of reference and basic social motivations, respondents are heterogenous and could be assigned into two groups based on their social identity salience and five subgroups based on their role identity salience
Summary
There has been a surge in scholarly interest in the role that businesses play in addressing environmental, social, and developmental challenges [1,2,3]. Sustainable entrepreneurship emerged as part of a broader paradigm shift from the business-as-usual approach, to creating extra value by increasingly focusing on societal and environmental outcomes [4,5]. Sustainable entrepreneurship is a form of entrepreneurship, which focuses on creating three types of values, namely social, environmental and economic [6]. The emerging sustainable entrepreneurship literature suggests that entrepreneurs’ capacity to innovate towards environmental and social challenges sustainably transforms economies [7,8]. BOP entrepreneurs are actors who engage in entrepreneurial activities within markets involving approximately four billion consumers with an annual per capita income of less than $1500 [10]. Despite income, resource and other contextual constraints, BOP entrepreneurs can significantly contribute to global sustainability through their entrepreneurial activities that harmoniously combine economic
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