Mainstreaming Business Models for Sustainability in Mature Industries: Leveraging Alternative Institutional Logics for Optimal Distinctiveness

Abstract

Addressing global sustainability challenges requires a mainstreaming of business models for sustainability (BMfS) in mature industries. However, the presence of an already dominant mainstream business model in an industry tends to hold back BMfS. This article investigates how new types of BMfS can become generally accepted and widely adopted in an industry. It presents a qualitative study of the mainstreaming of BMfS in the Dutch electricity industry. The findings show that this process depends on entrepreneurs’ capacity to (1) incorporate alternative institutional logics into the design of BMfS to achieve optimal distinctiveness and (2) to directly alter the dominant institutional logic of the industry to make it more conducive to BMfS. Furthermore, successful BMfS act as anomalies that indirectly alter the industry’s dominant institutional logic. Anomalies support a self-reinforcing loop that accelerates the mainstreaming process. We integrate these findings into a dynamic model of the mainstreaming of BMfS.

Unpacking “Sense of Place” and “Place-making” in Organization Studies: A Toolkit for Place-sensitive Research

“…This material transformation also changes the social meaning of the town, which becomes a sustainable and community-based town (Kibler & Muñoz, 2020). Every day as local inhabitants go to work, or drop the kids at school, they can see the windmills that they helped create (Vernay et al, 2022). In turn, such a physical enactment of place consolidates their sense of belonging to the community and their place-identity (e.g.…”

“…The making of place requires individuals to engage bodily with the socio-material environment—e.g. walk in the place, interact with inhabitants and communities (Lawrence & Dover, 2015), protect it from outsiders (Crawford & Dacin, 2021), develop new infrastructure for the place (Vernay et al, 2022). It requires “to become involved in that place with sight, hearing, touch and smell”.…”

“…Dacin et al, 2018; David et al, 2020). A growing number of qualitative organization studies (Alkhaled & Sasaki, 2021; Cartel et al, 2019; Crawford & Dacin, 2021; Farny et al, 2019; Hultin et al, 2021; Lawrence & Dover, 2015; Siebert et al, 2017; Wright et al, 2021; Zilber, 2018) directly or indirectly grapple with place-sensitive questions to advance our understanding of how the materiality, location or symbolic meaning of specific places—such as communities (Vernay et al, 2022), buildings (e.g. Jones et al, 2019) or streets (e.g.…”

“…By place as experience , we seek to understand how people develop a sense of place: how they identify with or feel attached to a place and develop a strong or weak embodied, emotional commitment of place (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1974). For instance, by cooking for family and friends, a place may become home (Hultin et al, 2021), by investing in local energy cooperatives which nurtures my local community, individuals strengthen their sense of belonginess (Vernay et al, 2022); and (2) by place as practice , we seek to capture how people, either self-consciously or not, make places and develop a socialized meaning of place (Fine, 2010). Place-making is key to the ongoing emergence, maintenance, renewal, and sustenance of place over time.…”

The Organizational Dynamics of Business Models for Sustainability: Discursive and Cognitive Pathways for Change

“…Established business models are deeply embedded in the minds of managers and there tends to be agreement within a given industry what the most successful way of doing business is (Baden-Fuller & Morgan, 2010; Sabatier et al, 2010). Business model change and innovation are highly path-dependent as they are tied to dominant logics (Chesbrough & Rosenbloom, 2002), and changing BMfS in mature industries such as the automotive and energy industry has proven very difficult (Bohnsack et al, 2014; Vernay et al, 2022). It involves deep organizational change because BMfS require organizations to reimagine the concept of value by reorienting the organization toward socially and environmentally sustainable outcomes, to change the resources that underpin the value creation process, and to engage in transactions with a broader set of stakeholders (Carrasco-Farré et al, 2022; Freudenreich et al, 2020; Neesham et al, 2023; Upward & Jones, 2016).…”