Personal Reflection Of A Master's Program Sustainable Citizenship

Before I started the master’s program Sustainable Citizenship as part of Cultural Anthropology, I studied and worked in the fashion industry. My indignation about this industry started to increase while learning more details about how clothes are produced. During this bachelor study, I worked for a very small fashion brand. My responsibility within this brand was to keep the brand as sustainable as possible. However, what is as sustainable as possible? I was the only person of 24 people that envisioned a sustainable brand. Others worked on financial forecasting, production schedules, and brand marketing. How was I able to make this brand as sustainable as possible, and again, what does that mean? During a Friday morning meeting, we discussed

I aimed to discover the critical junctures between sustainable development and commercial interest. For this reason, I decided to study sustainable entrepreneurs during my fieldwork. Sustainable entrepreneurs, here called ecopreneurs (Pastakia 2002, 94), are often mentioned as “agents of change” in the discourse on reformations of capitalist structures. The motivation to study ecopreneurs arose from my own indignation about the conflation of sustainability mechanisms and capitalist mechanisms. As a sustainability fashion manager, I was embedded in dilemmas about the conflation of sustainability and capitalist mechanisms. From a sustainability point of view, I aimed for a stable society and environment. For example, every action for the fashion brand should be focused on sustaining nature. From a capitalist point of view, I aimed for maximization of value to continue the development of fashion products. In this sense, maximizing the production could lead to an end of cotton resources, which would harm nature. Therefore, I believed that the sustainability position and the capitalist position could be understood as conflicting. In this study, I have focused on how narratives about capitalism and sustainability are conflated in the practices of

From an idealistic point of view, ecopreneurs aim to construct business ideas that both solve social and environmental challenges, and realize market success (cf. Schaltegger in: Gibbs 2006, 72). In other words, ecopreneurs are “those business innovators who have a green business orientation and take on a business model that reflects the embeddedness of environmental and social justice” (Affolderback and Krueger 2016, 2). Often, ecopreneurs start with an ideal about sustainability and create wider social and economic influence through entrepreneurship. Therefore, while humane forms of entrepreneurialism start from a capitalist ideology and add “green” marks, ecopreneurs start from a sustainability ideology and add entrepreneurial marks to generate wider impact. As a result, idealistic values about sustainability are often transformed into entrepreneurial values. This form of entrepreneurship can create new forms of