Reframing Circular Transitions

Small firms drive circular economy transitions, yet the literature treats them as a single category — SMEs — addressed by the same instruments and policies. This book argues against that homogenisation. Drawing on empirical and conceptual contributions, the chapters demonstrate that entrepreneurial agency and ecosystem structure continuously reshape one another. Owner–manager centrality functions simultaneously as capability and liability. Ecosystem embeddedness provides resource access while generating structural vulnerability. Unidirectional causal models cannot capture these dynamics. The volume advances a theoretically grounded account of co-constitution — the bidirectional feedback through which small firms navigate circular transitions. It offers an analytical framework, policy implications for meso-level intervention, and a research agenda centred on three core tensions: capability versus liability, access versus vulnerability, and unidirectional causality versus bidirectional co-constitution.