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This paper aims to examine the experiences of an ecopreneurial venture that was operating before, during and after the 2010-2011 series of earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. The aim is to elucidate on the tension existing between an ecopreneur’s personal green values/ethics and his need to be resilient and do what was necessary to ensure his business’s survival, which was operating before, during and after an extreme event – the 2010-2011 series of earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The data are gathered from a longitudinal case study of Just Organic Ltd (an organic fruit and vegetable delivery service) over a five-year period which covers time before and after the earthquakes. Data were gathered via two in-depth face-to-face interviews with the ecopreneur, along with a number of email and telephone follow-ups.

Findings indicate that an extreme event such as an earthquake will inhibit the green values of an ecopreneur as the ecopreneur works to ensure business survival. To continue to operate successfully, the ecopreneur developed a resilient and hardy nature and adapted operational processes to run in a more entrepreneurial fashion. It would seem that holding firmly to green values irrespective of a changed business environment is detrimental to business viability and survivability. The ecopreneur bounced forward, rather than bouncing back from the disaster.

The implications for research, policy makers and ecopreneurs and entrepreneurs in general are discussed. There are lessons to be learned from the experiences of the ecopreneur who is operating Just Organic Limited.

This paper is one of the few that has examined the impact the Christchurch earthquakes had on an existing eco-business. The longitudinal data enable a unique insight into the operational aspects of an eco-business before and after a series of earthquakes.

Consumer satisfaction towards a brand is one of a firm’s important performance outcomes. However, building a strong green brand to foster consumers’ satisfaction is often challenging for firms. Drawing on the dynamic capability and mechanism-enabling perspectives of ambidexterity. The purpose of this research is to explore mechanisms of perceived brand performance and green trust through which green brand ambidexterity acts as a facilitator of consumer satisfaction.

The hypothesized relationships were tested by both partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM; symmetric approach) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA; asymmetric approach) with data collected from a green consumer questionnaire survey in Hong Kong.

The results from PLS-SEM indicate that green brand ambidexterity affects consumer satisfaction through multiple mediating paths of perceived brand performance, green trust-consumer and the sequential integration of perceived brand performance and green trust. Results from fsQCA further reinforced these findings.

The present research provides a nuanced understanding of how ambidexterity enhances consumer satisfaction in the context of a green brand by identifying multiple mechanisms.

There is a lack of research on how green brand ambidexterity affects green brand outcomes from the perspective of value creation for consumers. The present research fills this gap by providing more comprehensive explanations of mechanisms for green brand ambidexterity to facilitate consumer satisfaction. It also offers a better understanding of how the effects of green brand ambidexterity are viewed on a path-dependency that is aligned with the dynamic capability perspective of ambidexterity and how green trust forms a critical path to enable green brand ambidexterity and perceived brand performance to enhance consumer satisfaction.

Seeks to explore how individuals talk about learning when asked about career.

Brings together three qualitative research studies, based in the UK and New Zealand on how individuals make sense of career; one focused on people in organizational employment and two on “portfolio” workers operating as freelance workers on a variety of contracts with organizations. The debate on the changing nature of careers and the imperative to life‐long learning resonates in the studies and the extent of change that has occurred is questioned.

The findings of the studies suggest that there is less learning activity (in terms of education, training or self‐development activities) being undertaken by these participants than may be expected. While participants generally believe that they should take charge of their own learning and career development, they are less sure what actions to take. Signals from the organization are still an important prompt for learning for those in employment; for those outside the lack of support and specific reasons to learn leads to a lack of formal or structured learning activity and a tendency to rely on previously learned skills.

The paper is offered in a spirit of exploration, based on signals from these specific data. In that vein, it makes tentative suggestions as to the implications of such data for human resource management.

Ecopreneurs are those entrepreneurs who start for‐profit businesses with strong underlying green values and who sell green products or services. This is an emerging field where research is still in its infancy. Research has been called for to understand the factors that motivate these ecopreneurs to start businesses – and that is the focus of this study. The aim of this paper is to compare the findings with results of extant literature on entrepreneurial motivations.

This study comprises 14 in‐depth case studies of ecopreneurial companies in New Zealand in 2008. Participants were interviewed in a face‐to‐face, semi‐structured format. In total, 88 secondary sources such as media reports, industry statistics, and information from company web sites were also collected.

Ecopreneurs were motivated by five factors: their green values; earning a living; passion; being their own boss; and seeing a gap in the market. Ecopreneurs appear to have quite similar motivations to entrepreneurs in general, aside from their green motivations. They had lower level financial motivations than have been found in prior research on entrepreneurs. The ecopreneurs were primarily pulled into entrepreneurship, which bodes well for their ongoing success. The paper presents a number of contributions to both the ecopreneurship and entrepreneurship literatures.

The small sample is a potential limitation and the country context may also influence the findings.

This is one of the largest samples of ecopreneurs to date. Given the emerging nature of the field of ecopreneurship, this study's conclusions require further research and testing. A total of 11 such suggestions for future research are made.

Through an analysis of corporate sustainable development reporting, this paper seeks to examine critically language use and other visual (re)presentations of sustainable development within the business context. It aims to provide a framework to interpret and tease out business representations of sustainable development. Such representations are argued to be constitutive of the way that business has come to “know” and “do” sustainable development and, therefore, to constrain and enable particular actions and developments.

The study uses a mix of synthesis, interpretive and discourse analysis to locate, interpret and critically analyse a corpus of written and presentational texts produced by a New Zealand business association and eight of its founding members' early triple bottom line reports.

The business association and its members' reports are shown to present a pragmatic and middle‐way discourse on business and the environment. Through the use of rhetorical claims to pragmatism and action, this discourse suggests that businesses are “doing” sustainability. But critical analysis and interpretation within a wider framework reveal a narrow, largely economic and instrumental approach to the natural environment.

This paper offers a diagrammatic synthesis of the contested “middle ground” of the sustainable development debate, and thereby provides a frame of reference for further interpretational work on organisations and sustainable development.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the recent history of climate action planning at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), a public university with a long history of sustainability action and commitment. Items discussed include a partnership with Clean Air‐Cool Planet (CA‐CP) to produce a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory tool that adapted national and international inventory methodologies to the unique scale and character of a university community; involvement of administrators, faculty, staff and students in climate action planning, including to meet the requirements of the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC); and the role of climate action planning within a broader institutional goal of integrating sustainability across curricula, operations, research and engagement efforts.

Background and historical information is shared in terms of best practices and lessons learned.

Successful climate action planning includes campus‐wide stakeholder involvement, an institution‐wide commitment to sustainability, and careful planning and partnerships that tie into a higher education institution's educational mission and identity and that take into account the culture and sense of place of each institution.

The paper contains lessons learned and best practices from which other institutions of higher education might learn.

UNH, a recognized national leader in sustainability and climate protection, and CA‐CP developed one of the first emissions inventory tools for higher education in the USA. The tool has been adopted by more than 1,000 campuses and was adopted by the ACUPCC as the recommended tool for campuses not already participating in another GHG inventorying program. Instead of recreating the wheel, campuses may be able to learn from UNH and CA‐CP's climate planning experience and history.

The purpose of this paper is to present an analytical method through which a political analysis of intra and inter-organizational conflicts may be conducted.

The iterative method of data analysis the paper presents is based on a consolidation of work using Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory across both management and organization and social science disciplinary domains.

While the politically orientated discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe has begun to be used by management and organization researchers, little guidance is available for how to actually conduct the analysis of data using this discourse approach. The method the paper proposes involves making explicit an analytical process for reading available textual data.

The value of this paper is primarily for management and organization researchers who are attracted to discourse theory but feel intimidated or confused about how to operationalize this theory into data analytic practice.