Hanna Lehtimäki, University of Eastern Finland

Natalia Yakovleva, Kedge Business School

Kristina Leppälä, University of Eastern Finland

Klara Scheurenbrand, ESSCA School of Management

This special issue seeks qualitative research on how organizations and societies can achieve and scale sustainability transitions—fundamental shifts toward more efficient, circular, and equitable production and consumption systems. While regulatory pressures and sustainability initiatives have prompted many organizations to adopt greener practices, significant gaps remain in understanding how sustainable business models are implemented across different organizational types and global contexts, particularly in smaller enterprises and non-industrialized regions.

The issue welcomes critical and reflective contributions examining sustainability from multiple angles: theoretical developments, consumer behavior, circular economy implementation, leadership approaches, waste management, and the interaction between policy and practice. Submissions may explore tensions, failures, unintended consequences, and alternative pathways to environmental and social wellbeing that extend beyond dominant circular economy models, using rigorous qualitative research methods.

Appel publié par Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Theoretical foundations and scaling of sustainable and circular systems
• Sustainability transitions from local and global perspectives
• Sustainable and circular marketing and consumer behaviour
• Sustainable materialities and waste transitions
• Sustainability leadership in organizations
• Circular ecosystems and economic transitions
• Policy engagement and stakeholder collaboration
• Critical and reflexive qualitative methodologies
• Alternative economic practices and context-specific sustainability pathways

Timeline

• November 1, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• May 30, 2027: Closing date for manuscripts submission

While quantitative, positivist approaches have traditionally dominated entrepreneurship research, they often fail to capture the lived experiences of marginalized entrepreneurs who remain underrepresented in scholarship despite their significant contributions to local economies. Qualitative research is better suited to exploring the meanings, practices, and organizing processes that hypothesis-driven designs typically obscure.

This special issue invites qualitative research that examines entrepreneurship at the margins as a site for theory-building. The focus encompasses marginalized entrepreneurs across gender, race, migration, disability, age, and Indigenous contexts, particularly in Global South settings where research access challenges are compounded by institutional barriers and epistemic dominance of Global North perspectives.

Contributions should treat marginality as an analytical lens rather than merely a research setting, bringing together reflexive scholarship that advances cumulative qualitative understanding of entrepreneurship as organizing while exploring core themes of power, inequality, agency, legitimacy, and meaning-making.

Appel publié par Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Entrepreneurship as organizing under conditions of marginalization
• Lived experience and everyday practices of entrepreneurs at the margins
• Marginality as an analytical lens for qualitative theory-building
• Power, inequality, and access in entrepreneurial organizing
• Informal, community-based, and non-market entrepreneurial activity
• Gendered, racialized, Indigenous, and migrant entrepreneurship
• Entrepreneurship in Global South and under-researched contexts
• Legitimacy, stigma, and boundary work in marginalized entrepreneurship
• Resourcefulness, bricolage, and survival strategies under constraint
• Care, affect, ethics, and relational practices in entrepreneurial organizing
• Methodological challenges and innovations in researching entrepreneurship in marginalized populations

Timeline

• April 20, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• February 28, 2027: Closing date for manuscripts submission