Environmental, climate and social leadership of small enterprises: Fairphone’s step-by-step approach

ABSTRACT

Achieving sustainable consumption and production requires a break with current practices in many sectors, including the smartphone sector. Leaders are central actors in catalysing such change by developing, implementing and promoting innovative ideas, products and practices. Not only large but also small enterprises can aspire to assume leadership for sustainability. This contribution explores the environmental, climate and social leadership of the social enterprise Fairphone that seeks to start a movement towards a more sustainable smartphone sector. Endowed with barely any structural power, it relies on other leadership types, especially entrepreneurial leadership, which is based on dialogue, persuasion and coalition-building. Small enterprises can be leaders, but pursuing a goal such as transforming the smartphone sector takes a step-by-step approach targeting different follower groups from suppliers, competitors and consumers to end-of-life processors and policymakers. Those different follower groups are susceptible to different (combinations of) leadership types.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental leadership
• climate leadership
• social leadership
• social enterprise
• Fairphone
• sustainable supply chain management

Acknowledgments

The KU Leuven Research Fund (Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds KU Leuven) under grant STG/14/039 supported this work. We presented an earlier version at the INOGOV workshop ‘Pioneers and Leaders in Polycentric Climate Governance’ (PiLePoC) at the University of Hull, September 2016. We thank all workshop participants for their insightful comments and suggestions. We are particularly grateful to Diarmuid Torney, Duncan Liefferink, Rüdiger Wurzel, Hayley Walker and the anonymous reviewers for their help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.