Collective entrepreneurship: the mobilization of college and university recycling coordinators

Abstract

Most theories of entrepreneurship have focused on explaining individual actions, neglecting the extent to which entrepreneurs are embedded in particular socio‐historical contexts that shape both opportunity structures and the interactions that enable particular entrepreneurial responses to opportunities. Evidence from an ethnography of college and university recycling coordinators and programs is drawn on to extend the concept of “collective entrepreneurship” to account for broader social dynamics having to do with the construction of a recycling coordinator occupational identity and resource mobilization oriented towards the defense of that identity. Social marginality and linkage to a wider environmental social movement are argued to be the key conditions that made the collective efforts of recycling coordinators to safeguard and increase the status of their nascent occupation possible.