On being green and being enterprising: narrative and the ecopreneurial self

Abstract

This article offers a narratological reading of two ‘ecopreneurial’ self-narratives to demonstrate how individuals achieve a relatively coherent sense of self-identity by connecting the discursively available world ‘out there’ with ‘inner selves’. The narratives of ecopreneurs, who claim to be motivated by the creation of social and environmental value over economic value, provide an appropriate empirical platform for this work because ecopreneurs have to negotiate between sets of discourses and social groups relating to the environment and to enterprise which are particularly conflicting. An analysis of the structure and shaping of these narratives demonstrates that narrators draw on a range of such discourses, each of which is felt as essential to a sense of self. These provide underlying scaffolding, within which narrators position characters of self and others. However, this identity positioning reveals existential dissonances resulting from combining conflicting environmental and business commitments. As they attempt to reconcile such conflicts, their appraisals of the same behaviours and values shifts at different points in the narratives, according to whether they attempt to identify themselves with, or against, the characterization of their others. Furthermore, they also employ strategies of distancing and deflection to negotiate a narrow, twisting path between binary oppositions into which they jettison what might disrupt the narration of a coherent identity.

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