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

Abstract

Business models for sustainability (BMfS) enable organizations to create social and environmental value for a wide variety of stakeholders. As BMfS are new for well-established industries, their implementation requires deep organizational change to overcome path dependencies of existing business models. In this article, we present a framework which outlines the organizational change process involved in BMfS development. The framework shows that organizations can experiment with novel configurations of value, resources, and transactions, and follow discursive and cognitive pathways to enable BMfS legitimization and implementation. Although the value, resources, and transactions levers can be used either separately or in concert, discursive and cognitive pathways are most powerful when pursued together. We use our framework to highlight the contributions of the articles in the special issue and to propose new directions for BMfS research. We argue that future research should investigate the impacts of BMfS on the sustainability challenges they seek to address.