Montpellier Business School

This article introduces the special issue “Antecedents and Impact of Sustainable Entrepreneurship: An International Perspective.” It reviews previous special issues in the field and situates the present volume within this evolving body of scholarship. Common thematic and methodological patterns are identified alongside persistent shortcomings. The article concludes with a research agenda that highlights several critical gaps, including the limited number of rigorous studies assessing the actual impact of sustainable entrepreneurship, insufficient research on scaling and diffusion processes, and the need for replication studies to mitigate potential biases stemming from single-context empirical designs. This article introduces a special issue examining the antecedents and impact of sustainable entrepreneurship. As guest editors, we review the extant literature and observe that although considerable progress has been made in understanding the motivations and processes underlying sustainable entrepreneurial activity, the field lacks systematic evidence of its actual environmental and societal outcomes. Existing research predominantly relies on small-scale, context-specific studies, which constrain the generalizability of findings across national and institutional settings. The present special issue addresses these limitations by featuring studies employing cross-country comparative designs and longitudinal data. We advocate for future research to prioritize several complementary avenues: the scaling of sustainable ventures, replication studies across different institutional settings to enhance empirical rigor, and improved measurement of impacts, particularly those extending beyond firm-level financial performance. Without such evidence, the central proposition of sustainable entrepreneurship that profit and purpose can be jointly advanced to generate meaningful well-being change remains insufficiently substantiated.

As seven of nine planetary boundaries are breached, management scholars face an urgent challenge: how can organizations address complex social-ecological crises that transcend traditional organizational boundaries and objectives? Responding to this need, researchers have leveraged a plurality of systems perspectives, yet current approaches remain nascent and fragmented. In this paper, we review 25 years (2000–2024) of empirical sustainability management research across 17 leading journals. We identify core systems properties—interrelatedness, nestedness, non-linearity, and emergence—that collectively illuminate four critical systems-wide dynamics: equilibrium, disequilibrium, adaptation, and organized systems change. This systematic review offers scholars a unified framework for theorizing and addressing critical sustainability challenges facing organizations, society, and the planet.

To explore the impact mechanism and boundary conditions of digital empowerment on China's low-carbon energy transition, this paper conducts a study using multiple empirical analysis methods, with panel data from 285 prefecture-level cities and above in China from 2012 to 2022 as the sample. The results show that digital empowerment has a significant promoting effect on the low-carbon transformation of energy and presents distinct temporal characteristics. In the long-term dimension, the intensity of its impact gradually increases as the integration of digital technology and energy systems deepens. The short-term effect exhibits an inverted U-shaped dynamic trajectory, where the effect reaches a peak in the short term and then fluctuates and declines as the adaptation process unfolds. This impact also has obvious threshold characteristics. When the per capita GDP and the actual amount of foreign capital used reach specific levels, the promoting effect of digital empowerment on low-carbon energy transformation will increase significantly. Spatially, the impact of digital empowerment exhibits the characteristic of geographical radiation attenuation, and the cross-regional indirect spillover effect weakens significantly beyond a certain distance. Mechanistic analysis reveals that economic growth, technical support, optimization of enterprise energy consumption, and upgrading of household energy structures are the core pathways through which digital empowerment drives the low-carbon transition of energy.

This study investigates how organizational ethical culture influences organizational competitiveness via supply chain social sustainability practices, using resource orchestration theory as a framework. Analyzing survey data from 214 French manufacturing firms with structural equation modeling, the results show that organizational ethical culture enhances competitiveness indirectly through supply chain social sustainability, confirming its role as a key mediator. However, the effectiveness of supply chain social sustainability in driving competitiveness weakens significantly under high environmental uncertainty. The findings suggest that while integrating ethical culture into supply chain practices is essential for fostering competitiveness, firms operating in uncertain environments may need to prioritize flexibility over long-term supply chain social sustainability commitments. By applying resource orchestration theory to socially sustainable supply chain management, this study provides fresh insights into how ethical culture orchestrates external resources and highlights the contingent nature of supply chain social sustainability effectiveness in dynamic conditions.