Sensemaking Degrowth for Coopetition Strategies: Evidence from Finland

For long, the remarkable structural development of business and marketing in various industries has relied on the large cooperation networks among competitors, namely intentional and unintentional parallel activities among the firms, that is “coopetition”. The contemporary global grand challenges, such as global warming, growing economic and social uncertainty, and ensuring sustainability, challenge the traditional aims of business, such as the growth tendency, profit maximisation, competition, and mass consumption. Furthermore, these current concerns also challenge scholars in the fields of business, management, and marketing to follow and even to be proactive with these changes. Most of these issues are linked directly or indirectly with the concept of “degrowth”. Degrowth is an emerging paradigm that questions the logic of continuous growth and proposes profound changes in what has been considered economic development. This theoretical study, which is completed with an analysis of Finnish media texts on degrowth, points out the most important changes that can make and shape future coopetition. The study offers a novel approach to coopetition studies by making sense of the degrowth debate.