The Four-Pillar Intersectionality Framework: Reframing Sustainable Entrepreneurship as a Transdisciplinary Domain

Abstract

This study offers a comprehensive bibliometric and text-mining overview of two decades of sustainability-oriented entrepreneurship research. Drawing on 7563 peer-reviewed articles from the Web of Science Core Collection, we map the field's evolution, thematic structure, and disciplinary convergence, identifying influential authors, networks, and journals. Using rule-based classification and unsupervised learning, we categorize contributions within a four-pillar framework encompassing environmental, social, economic, and cultural dimensions and examine their prevalence, overlap, and temporal trends. The results reveal a pronounced shift toward transdisciplinarity: 77% of articles engage with at least three pillars, and 34.5% address all four simultaneously. Building directly on this empirical evidence, we propose the Four-Pillar Intersectionality Framework (F-PIF), which reconceptualizes sustainable entrepreneurship as a transdisciplinary knowledge domain shaped by interdependent sustainability logics. The F-PIF is therefore both derived from and supported by the bibliometric findings, providing an empirically grounded conceptual model that advances theoretical understanding and offers practical guidance for scholars and practitioners navigating entrepreneurship in the age of sustainability.