Entrepreneurial practices and the constitution of environmental value for sustainability

Environmental value is a central concept in entrepreneurship research addressing issues of sustainability. However, current accounts often reduce environmental value to predefined categories that can be realized through individual business activities and thus underplay the relational and collective efforts for value to be constituted. We address this by blending theories of entrepreneurship as practices of social change with insights from valuation studies. We further invoke the relationality and materiality of practice perspectives and examine how value is constituted in entrepreneurial practices. Drawing on the analysis of visual and textual data, we develop a model of interlocked entrepreneurial practices composed of articulating matters of concern, performing value cuts, and including human actors. These practices give contours to an apparatus of valuation that establishes, enacts, and stabilizes environmental value. Our study contributes to and has implications for rethinking environmental value in entrepreneurship research. It further adds to the discussion of materiality and (non)human agency and value creation in entrepreneurship studies for environmental sustainability.