Re-Introducing Consumption to the ‘Circular Economy’: A Sociotechnical Analysis of Domestic Food Provisioning
By Josephine Mylan, H. Holmes, Jessica Paddock. 2016
123 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The paper makes two contributions to the advancement of the ‘circular economy’ as a blueprint for a more sustainable society. The first is to highlight the importance of understanding the dynamics of consumption and waste in the domestic sphere. The second is to illustrate two ways in which using insights from socio-technical literature on sustainable consumption, in combination with the sociology of food, could contribute to redressing this shortfall. This includes understanding why people use or consume particular goods or services, and how this might be altered; and what drives the production of waste and the adoption of strategies for its reduction by consumers. We mobilise insights from a socio-technical perspective on consumption, which highlights the importance of everyday interactions between routine activities, mundane technologies and cultural meanings in (re)producing patterns of consumption. These insights are illustrated with reference to domestic food provisioning, using empirical data generated through twenty semi-structured interviews with consumers in relation to meat consumption and thriftiness. Two suggestions for the development of the ‘circular economy’ to better take account of consumption within the domestic sphere are made. The first is a shift from imagining consumers as ‘users’ of particular products or services, to conceptualisation as ‘doers’ of everyday activities. The second is a broadening of the principle of ‘eco-effectiveness’ to take account for the social value of consumption.
Subfields: Food Science, Geography, Planning and Development, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f03fbfb94779b913fcfea99e95d2f1e258db382
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Food Science
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Barriers to circular food supply chains in China (2019, background): “Although food supply chains are an essential part of a CE implementation driven by the Chinese government (Mylan et al., 2016), yet research in this domain has been scarce.”
- Circular economy engagement: Altruism, status, and cultural orientation as drivers for sustainable consumption (2021, background): “There is a rise of discussions aiming for more detailed investigations relating the CE and consumers (Hobson & Lynch, 2016; Mylan et al., 2016; Welch et al., 2017).”
- Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review (2018, background): “Finally, Mylan [134,135] investigated how practices’ elements change, and their relationship transforms to allow for more participants to join.”
- Consumers’ Perspective on Circular Economy Strategy for Reducing Food Waste (2017, background): “Even though there are examples of final users (consumers) eventually actively involved in process innovation, it is a peculiarity of circular economy to engage consumers, as well as all the other actors of supply chains, in an active participation for the recycling of materials [14,15].”