Barriers to circular entrepreneurship in Australia: an institutional perspective

The circular economy is increasingly becoming a popular mechanism for achieving environmental sustainability among scholars, practitioners, businesses, and policymakers. However, research related to the business and management aspect of the circular economy has only recently emerged in the literature. Barriers to the circular economy have been explored by various scholars, but few studies have explored the barriers from the perspective of circular entrepreneurship. Informed by the institutional theory, this research aims to explore the barriers to circular entrepreneurship and identify the distinct factors and actors that foster change in the current institutional context in support of circular entrepreneurship. To explore the barriers to circular entrepreneurship, this study adopts a qualitative approach by conducting 18 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with circular start-up enterprises in Australia. The study deploys the grounded theory analysis method (Corley & Gioia, 2011; Glaser & Strauss, 2017) to identify the barriers to circular entrepreneurship. The study derives 15 barriers that are categorized into the three dimensions of institutional theory: cultural–cognitive, normative, and regulative. The barriers are identified as cognitive, collaboration, cultural, human resource, market, novelty, strategy and planning, technology, economic, government, international business, logistics, process, research and development, and regulatory barriers. Empirical illustrations from the data provide a comprehensive picture of barriers to circular entrepreneurship and denote the interactions between them.