Cultural Pathways to Sustainable Entrepreneurship: A Comparative Conceptual Analysis of Ahilik, Takumi (Monozukuri), and Guanxi

ABSTRACT

This study examines how culturally embedded informal institutions can advance the environmental, social, and economic value‐creation goals of sustainable entrepreneurship. It compares three traditions: Ahilik, Takumi/Monozukuri, and Guanxi. A comparative conceptual analysis is combined with a bibliometric mapping of a consolidated Web of Science and Scopus corpus ( N  = 270 records after de‐duplication, 2001–2026) and a thematic synthesis of the retrieved literature. The bibliometric mapping shows that the international literature is overwhelmingly concentrated on Guanxi, while Ahilik (2 records) and Takumi/Monozukuri (0 records at the entrepreneurship intersection) are almost absent from the indexed international corpus. This asymmetry is treated not as a flaw but as the empirical motivation for a conceptual, theory‐building comparison rather than as evidence of equivalent scholarly maturity across the three traditions. The synthesis distinguishes the three traditions along their normative‐ethical core, trust and governance logic, learning‐and‐mastery logic, and value‐quality logic, and develops a modular hybridity framework in which the three traditions function as recombinable institutional modules rather than as a single transplanted system. The study contributes to sustainable‐entrepreneurship and informal‐institutions theory by proposing the mechanisms through which each tradition may address a distinct entrepreneurial problem: legitimacy, operational excellence, and resource mobilization—and by articulating the governance conditions under which their combination may support triple‐value creation. For managers and policymakers in international and cross‐cultural settings, the framework offers a design logic for selectively activating cultural resources while containing their respective dark sides.