Qualification as corporate activism: How Swedish apparel retailers attach circular fashion qualities to take-back systems

Abstract

This paper explains how corporations can develop market-based activities to influence environmental policies. The empirical focus is on how Swedish apparel retailers qualify take-back systems for used clothes and textiles as steps toward creating circular fashion. An analysis of the qualities that retailers attach to take-back systems shows how qualification helps corporations feature fashion as potentially sustainable and able to develop circular material flows, with the aim to enroll staff, customers, and other stakeholders in new behaviors and patterns of responsibility. We apply the notion of corporate activism to demonstrate how corporations use qualification to engage in market-based activities with the aim of influencing the regulatory agenda.