5. Discussion and conclusion
Based on the presented insights, we introduce the decisive role of a sustainable entrepreneur's attachment to the operating place. We argue that distinguishing between emotional (‘caring about the place’) and instrumental (‘using the place’) place attachment of sustainable entrepreneurs helps further developing a holistic, more dynamic understanding of conformist and insurgent paths in the sustainable entrepreneurship journey. Thus, in spite of the limitations of small-N case study research, we seek to stimulate further process- and spatially-orientated research on sustainable entrepreneurship (McKeever et al., 2015; Muñoz and Dimov, 2014) by introducing a ‘place-based’ path model focusing on the temporal interplay between place attachment and place-based legitimacy. Our findings contribute to literature by uncovering how founding conditions – resulting from combinations of place attachment and social conditions – influence subsequent entrepreneurial decision making (Shepherd et al. 2015) and ways to manage challenges of legitimacy during the course of a venture journey (Garud et al., 2014). We suggest that if an entrepreneur is strongly emotionally-driven in founding her/his venture, their disappointment to have lost social legitimacy, in time 0 and place A, can strengthen the entrepreneur’s motivation to substantially grow with their business in time 1 and place B. Thus, an entrepreneur's social divergence in place A can enhance opportunity-cost considerations that trigger the decision to maneuver her/his lack of legitimacy by switching place. At the same time, if insurgent entrepreneurs show a strong emotional attachment to place A, they can develop a strong intention to strike back in time 2 and regain the once lost legitimacy in place A. Accordingly, we encourage future research to more explicitly address the role of place-attached emotions – for instance, linked to emotional loyalty (Jasper, 2011) and emotional investment (Voronov and Vince, 2012) – in order to deepen our knowledge of where and how sustainable entrepreneurs manage legitimacy and engage in regional development during their venture's journey. Moreover,
