Abstract
This article traces the experiences of Vicky, a female entrepreneur who runs a circular business that produces swim and activewear from regenerated fishing nets. The idea of a circular economy, which moves away from the linear economic model based on a make-use-dispose logic towards the elimination of waste and a sustainable use of the world’s resources, has rapidly gained popularity. Vicky’s story highlights the often overlooked but critical role of small businesses and their owners in this systemic change. Vicky performs three intertwined but distinct forms of work – entrepreneurial work on the business, identity work on the self and institutional work on the wider world – that all contribute to the circular transition. At the same time, Vicky exemplifies an alternative approach to entrepreneurship through a relational interpretation of circularity. Her case draws attention to how the labour of actors in the grassroots propels large-scale transitions.
Highlights
This article traces the experiences of Vicky, a female small business owner who works on the front line of the ‘circular transition’
Scholars have noted the role entrepreneurs can play in pushing for change (Emilien and Veerta, 2017) and a feminist reading even sees entrepreneurship by women as a social change activity (Calás et al, 2009)
Support for a circular economy ( CE) has been gaining ‘steady momentum’ in recent years (Circle Economy, 2020), challenging the dominant, extractive industrial economic model predicated on a take-make-waste logic
Summary
This article traces the experiences of Vicky, a female small business owner who works on the front line of the ‘circular transition’. Vicky’s work is multifaceted: it includes running her business that makes circular use of waste materials, redefining her professional identity as a circular-economy entrepreneur after a successful corporate career, and contributing to the legitimacy and popularity of circular thinking by illustrating how it can be realised in practice. The role of small businesses and the entrepreneurs who run them as key change actors have largely been overlooked (Heshmati, 2015). This is jarring given how many of the celebrated, imaginative circular business models and solutions in circular use of materials have been generated by small enterprises and the reliance of most economies on their vitality. Her work takes three related but distinct forms, performed simultaneously in overlapping but incommensurable domains: entrepreneurial, identity and institutional
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