Lauren Eaton
Lauren Eaton is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Business Humanities and Law at Copenhagen Business School. Her academic background is grounded in the business school, but she also incorporates the humanities, drawing on a historical perspective to shed new light on contemporary issues. Her research leverages history as a lens to critically examine the present and to think creatively about the future, particularly in the areas of entrepreneurship, leadership, and innovation.
Lauren is joining the Rethinking Entrepreneurship project supported by the Carlsberg Foundation. She aspires to generate a deeper understanding of the social discourse surrounding entrepreneurship by investigating the popularisation of entrepreneurship concepts from scholarly debates to popular discourse.
Hailing from New Zealand, she holds a Master of Commerce in Management with Distinction and a Bachelor of Commerce in Human Resource Management and Commercial Law from Victoria University of Wellingto
Bounded Emancipation and the Making of the Tupperware Lady
This paper examines why entrepreneurialism resonates with people, even in contexts where autonomy is limited. It brings together two strands of entrepreneurship research: entrepreneurialism and emancipation to explore how practices that feel empowering can also reproduce constraint. Using archival material from the Brownie Wise Papers, it analyzes the Tupperware Home Party system in 1950s United States. The findings show that dealers were encouraged to adopt entrepreneurial identities that framed ambition as a domestic virtue. The paper introduces the concept of bounded emancipation to explain how entrepreneurialism takes hold through constrained but meaningful experiences of autonomy.