Social enterprises as key actors in the emergence of circular service ecosystems: A service-dominant logic approach

Abstract

[Abstract]: The circular economy is generally regarded as a means to tackle the climate crisis, though the social mechanisms required to ensure a just green transition remain unclear. Social enterprises are key actors in this effort, blending environmental and social goals and providing circular services whilst also creating jobs and integrating vulnerable segments of the population into the workforce. This study adopts the service-dominant logic as a theoretical framework to understand the nested, overlapped, and emergent nature of the service ecosystems in which social enterprises operate in this transition to a circular economy. Through qualitative case study research in the textile and electrical waste streams, we identify social enterprises as generic actors with embedded reflexivity and we expand the concept to ‘ecosystem reflexivity’ as a fundamental prerequisite for intentional systems shaping with two dimensions: cross-ecosystem reflexivity, enabling institutional learning across service ecosystems, and nested-ecosystem reflexivity, facilitating actors to reconcile conflicting institutional logics and paradoxes. This research enriches industrial marketing literature by empirically unveiling the institutional dynamics at play in the transition towards a just circular economy whilst also offering policy and strategic insights for preserving ecosystem viability.