The Potential Catalytic Role of Green Entrepreneurship – Technological Eco–Innovations and Ecopreneurs’ Acts – in the Structural Transformation to a Low–Carbon or Green Economy: A Foucauldian Discursive Approach

Sammanfattning: Green entrepreneurship – technological eco–innovations and ecopreneurs’ acts – has recently received much attention from European policymakers as one promising response to the challenges of sustainable economic development due to its potential to catalyze and build a low–carbon or green economy. This topical relationship between green entrepreneurship and sustainable economy has also gained increasing interest among scholars. Indeed, green entrepreneurship has been socially constructed as having a catalytic role in reshaping the sociotechnical landscape of the economy and engendering cultural changes and institutional developments associated with ecological modernization. This is predicated on the assumption that ecopreneurs bring about qualitative changes in enterprise structures, strategies, and practices. However, academic research on this relationship has put emphasis on individual ecopreneurs – although earlier work in technology studies has debunked the notion of lone entrepreneurial heroes in the development of new technologies, neglecting the wider sociotechnical context in which ecopreneurs operate. In this study, it is argued that ecopreneurs do not act in isolation with respect to sustainable economic change. It is moreover postulated that this relationship as part of mainstream debate on economic development and as an evolving hegemonic discourse is constructed in the light of culturally–specific and historically–contingent epistemic conceptions about the economic, technological, social, and political changes. Hence, it is important not to conceive of this relationship as something ahistorical, paradigmatic, universal, neutral, and apolitical–economic or the product of an epistematic understanding. Grounded in a discursive theoretic approach, the aim of this study is to carry out an analysis of the social and epistemic construction of green entrepreneurship in relation to sustainable economy and its economic-political implications. I employ a Foucauldian approach to discourse and discourse analysis to examine a set of research documents – empirical material. The analytical approach consists of six steps: (1) discursive constructions, (2) interdiscursivity, (3) epistemic setting, (4) cultural frames and shifts, (5) discursive–material selective framing, (6) and political practice and knowledge/power relationship. The relationship between green entrepreneurship and sustainable economy as a scholarly discourse highlights the lone ecopreneurial heroes and reinforces new social relations. Apart from reconstructing the ecopreneurs’ image, the discourse reconstitutes their relations to society in such that they are assigned new missions and ascribed vital roles for building a low-carbon/green economy. The discourse also awards highlight to policymakers/governments. It constitutes all these actors into the prime definers of the constructed economic reality. Moreover, the discourse has grounds from which it has emerged and evolved, building on a set of established discourses and thus changing economic and cultural reality. Unsurprisingly, the discourse as an object of knowledge is a matter of episteme, a subset of the order underlying European culture in current historical period. As knowledge claims, it is episteme–conditioned and historically–restricted – hence the need for being open to interrogations yet to come that may fundamentally reconfigure, or lead to abandoning, the current convictions. Furthermore, the discourse is shaped by the prevailing cultural frames and the emerging cultural shifts. In addition, the technological orientation of green entrepreneurship is the product of a selective framing of discursive and material dimensions. Therefore, green entrepreneurship technologization can be conceived as specific business practices which depend on the agency of ecopreneurs and other economic actors promoting technological eco–innovations and on hegemonic discourses on technology for sustainable development and environmental and technology policy and regulation governing the low-carbon/green economy. It is hence not paradigmatic but rather the outcome of social processes. Finally, the discourse is affected by political practice in relation with climate change, low–carbon/green economy, and ecological modernization, as well as by knowledge/power relations established in European society. These two influences determine, expand - and will probably maintain – the success of the relationship under study.