Waves and rips: Abalone, entrepreneurial variants, and community functioning

While the entrepreneurship literature has explored distinct types of opportunities, such as sustainable, unsustainable, social, and commercial, the diverse and integrated processes through which each type of opportunity is exploited remain poorly understood. Indeed, prior research tends to conceptualize opportunity exploitation as uniform and binary, such as sustainable or unsustainable, rather than as a set of dynamic processes and activities shaped by local contexts. Through an inductive study of the South African abalone industry, we explore entrepreneurial variants—differentiated processes and activities of opportunity exploitation—offering a framework for identifying and interpreting the integrated mechanisms through which opportunities are exploited within a local system. We found that the community members perceive that these entrepreneurial variants generate two primary dynamics: pernicious dynamics (i.e., processes that community members believe diminish the functioning of the community) and symbiotic dynamics (i.e., processes that community members believe enhance the functioning of the community). We shed light on how a local system comprises multiple entrepreneurial variants, each embodying distinct relationships with and implications for the local ecology, people, and place. We also offer insights into when mostly unsustainable entrepreneurship can involve symbiotic dynamics and when mostly sustainable entrepreneurship can involve pernicious dynamics. We conclude by discussing the implications for both entrepreneurship theory and practice.