Diversifying and de-growing the circular economy: Radical social transformation in a resource-scarce world

By K. Hobson, Nicholas Lynch. 2016

433 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Programmes and policies for a Circular Economy (CE) are fast becoming key to regional and international plans for creating sustainable futures. Framed as a technologically driven and economically profitable vision of continued growth in a resource-scarce world, the CE has of late been taken up by the European Commission and global business leaders alike. However, within CE debates and documentation, little is said about the social and political implications of such transformative agendas. Whilst CE proponents claim their agenda is ‘radical’, this paper outlines its inability to address many deeply embedded challenges around issues of consumption and the consumer, echoing as it does the problematic (and arguably failed) agendas of sustainable consumption/lifestyles. Using the Sharing Economy as an example, we argue here that the ontological and sociological assumptions of the CE must be open to more ‘radical’ critique and reconsideration if this agenda is to deliver the profound transformations that its advocates claim are within our collective reach.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9378ad2bd966bfb73a65b0434a89c756eb0a9c1d

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Citations in the corpus

The circular economy and the bio-based sector - Perspectives of European and German stakeholders (2018, background): “Searching for conceptual and theoretical approaches that may help to find answers to this question in the business literature, one finds an emerging conceptual literature (Hobson and Lynch, 2016; Witjes and Lozano, 2016).”
Defining the Sharing Economy for Sustainability (2019, background): “Ultimately, it is claimed that the sharing economy leads to reduced greenhouse gas emissions [15,17,93,106], positioning sharing as an alternative consumption practice to address climate change [12,44,76,107].”
Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review (2018, background): “Although this definition still has some shortcomings, such as for example, ignoring the role of other actors besides companies and consumers, or limiting the role of citizens to consumers or users as pointed out by Hobson and Lynch [6], it is deemed operational for the purpose of this review.”
The Circular Economy at a Crossroads: Technocratic Eco-Modernism or Convivial Technology for Social Revolution? (2020, background): “Thus, CE can be conceptualised as an “umbrella” concept (Homrich et al. 2018).”
Going around in circles? Conceptual recycling, patching and policy layering in the EU circular economy package (2019, background): “…modest degree of genuine policy innovation we observe in the EU case certainly supports a view of CE as an ‘economically and politically palatable response to aspirations for sustainable growth’ (Hobson and Lynch 2016, p. 17), rather than the genuinely paradigmatic shift some have portrayed it as.”
The economy that runs on waste: accumulation in the circular city (2019, methodology): “As Hobson and Lynch write, ‘frameworks for, and analysis of, the CE [circular economy] have arguably side-stepped detailed considerations of its broader socio-economic implications, being all-but silent on what a CE society might look like’ (Hobson & Lynch, 2016, p. 16).”
Critiques of the circular economy (2021, positive): “…technocentric bias driving the circular economy agenda, a growing body of research has criticized the noticeable absence of socio-cultural and political issues (Zwiers et al., 2020), and this is illustrated in concerns with the social dimension of circular economy business models (Hofmann, 2019).”