Entrepreneurs in the kitchen: Chefs’ effectual logic in food waste management
通过对21位高级厨师的访谈，研究揭示了他们在不确定性下预防食物浪费的五种效果原则，并发现了集体效果、有限效果和浪费容忍三个新因素，对酒店管理和创业学有贡献。
Food waste is a major challenge in professional kitchens, where high work pressures and variable demand make effective prevention uncertain. This study explores how senior chefs prevent food waste under uncertainty through effectuation theory. Findings from 21 semi-structured interviews reveal chefs’ food waste prevention practices align with all five effectual principles: means orientation, affordable loss, leveraging surprises, controlling the uncontrollable, and co-creation. Beyond these, the study extends effectuation by uncovering three novel factors: collective effectuation (distributed decision-making across kitchen teams); bounded effectuation (constraints imposed by structural, organizational, and cultural demands); and waste tolerance (a pragmatic recalibration of the 'affordable loss' effectual principle, which emerges in response to the constraints of 'bounded effectuation’). The study contributes to entrepreneurship and hospitality scholarship by repositioning effectuation as a dynamic logic of environmental sustainability. It offers recommendations to empower chefs through creative adaptation and collaboration, enabling them to navigate the systemic bounds to effectuation.