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.

中文翻译：

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波浪和撕裂：鲍鱼、创业变体和社区功能

虽然创业文献探讨了不同类型的机会，例如可持续、不可持续、社会和商业，但人们对利用每种类型机会的多样化和综合过程仍然知之甚少。事实上，先前的研究倾向于将机会利用概念化为统一和二元的，例如可持续或不可持续的，而不是由当地环境塑造的一组动态过程和活动。通过对南非鲍鱼产业的归纳研究，我们探索了创业变体——机会利用的差异化过程和活动——提供了一个框架，用于识别和解释在当地系统内利用机会的综合机制。我们发现，社区成员认为这些创业变体产生了两个主要动力：有害动力（即社区成员认为削弱社区功能的过程）和共生动力（即社区成员认为增强社区功能的过程）。我们阐明了地方系统如何由多种创业变体组成，每种变体都体现了与当地生态、人民和地方的不同关系和影响。我们还提供了关于何时大多数不可持续的创业可能涉及共生动态，何时大多数可持续创业可能涉及有害动态的见解。最后，我们讨论了对创业理论和实践的影响。