Leveraging sustainability tensions: A framework for understanding multi-level dynamics in small entrepreneurial firms

Sustainability creates tensions for small entrepreneurial firms yet understanding of how these firms navigate such tensions within business networks remains limited. Drawing from an Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) perspective, this paper explores how small entrepreneurial firms experience and navigate sustainability tensions. Using in-depth interviews with 32 craft food and drink enterprises across Ireland and Scotland, we develop a conceptual framework revealing how sustainability and network paradoxes become knotted in resource-constrained entrepreneurial contexts. Our findings identify four novel relational sustainability tensions: Values vs. Commerciality, Legitimacy vs. Authenticity, Competition vs. Collaboration, and Fidelity to Craft vs. Scaled Production. Rather than viewing these tensions solely as constraints, we demonstrate that they can be actively leveraged, functioning simultaneously as catalysts for innovation, collaboration, and competitive advantage. Three network-level mechanisms enable this leveraging: circular innovation emerging from environmental constraints, sustainability certification as strategic asset, and collaborative sustainability networks. We extend paradox theory by revealing leverage as a third response beyond resolution and acceptance, advance IMP scholarship by demonstrating how sustainability tensions catalyse novel network configurations, and contribute to sustainability entrepreneurship by showing how resource constraints become sources of competitive advantage. Implications for entrepreneurial practice and policy are discussed. We propose a research agenda for examining how leveraging capabilities develop over time and across contexts.