Ecopreneurship – Assessing the field and outlining the research potential

Abstract

AbstractThis article assesses ecopreneurship from the point of view of an admittance-seeking social movement. We use the three criteria for evaluating the present status of the ecopreneurship research domain - differentiation, mobolization, and legitimacy building. Our analysis shows that ecopreneurship is still in the early stages of its development as a field of academic study, thus its further development in terms of theoretical contributions, questions to be asked, and research design must be understood in relation to its current status. We conclude that ecopreneurship research should remain open to the contributions from other fields of study in order to formulate its goals more precisely and to build a more solid foundation as an area of scientific inquiry.Keywords: ecopreneurshipacademic fieldtransitional agencyplanetary boundariesadmittance-seeking social movement Notes1 Those that are listed on Thomson Reuters's Journal Citation Reports and appeared in the Financial Times list of top academic journals in business.2 http://www.usbe.umu.se/enheter/fek/utbildning/kurser/kurs/?code=2FE2093 http://sierc.massey.ac.nz/4 http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/academics/eco_entrepreneur.htm5 http://www.fhnw.ch/lifesciences/iec6 http://www.org.umu.se/usste/english/research/workshops-and-conferences/transitional-green-entrepreneurs/7 http://www.icsb2014.org/index.html8 This kind of analysis has been done for effectuation research by Perry, Chandler, and Markova (Citation2012).