Abstract
The environmental consequences of consumerist societies have become alarmingly high and pose a threat to the survival of humanity. The fast fashion industry alone generates 92 million tonnes of waste and contributes to 10% of global CO2 emissions, 1.5 trillion litres of water consumption, and other environmental costs such as cotton and plastic consumption, and chemical pollution (Niinimäki et al., 2020). These social consumption issues are closely linked to public policy and business decisions, requiring an urgent response. Neglecting to incorporate the social dimension into the production and consumption process may lead to resistance from the public, who may not readily accept sustainable solutions that clash with their values and perception of identity. Without societal recognition, sustainable solutions like the circular economy risk being reduced to mere economic efficiency and lacking legitimacy. To make progress towards sustainable development, new solutions must evolve to reflect societal concerns, interests, and values.
This research advances social dimension conceptualisation for a sustainable circular economy and societal value creation. It seeks to provide insight into the neglected and elusive social dimension of the circular economy by examining societal needs and concerns regarding circular economy activities, which have not been studied before. This is crucial to develop, transform, and harmonise society's everyday consumption patterns to be circular and create societal value. The aim is to ensure the potential and promise of sustainable development can be attained through circular economy implementation to preserve resources and protect the environment for present and future generations. An analytical framework has been developed to achieve the research aim by reviewing the literature on sustainable development, the circular economy, and previous studies on the social dimension. Additionally, societal development for transformations toward the circular economy entails the involvement of the complexity of socio-ecological systems that require reviewing social systems literature as a part of the model. It also reviews sustainable governance tools since they share the purpose of societal wellbeing by attaining non-financial goals. The literature review leads to the formation of an overreaching qualitative research question and two empirical studies to answer the question.
Study one utilises data mining techniques to collect and classify big data, the fourth chapter looks at what the circular economy means for regular members of society by examining a popular arena for global public debates to collect big data, and the social media platform Twitter was chosen. The researcher collected all the Tweets available with the hashtag circular economy, then, using a machine learning technique, namely Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), topics were discovered from the Tweets and then classified based on their relevancy (Berger et al., 2020). The topics were manually grouped into six main themes representing the main topics discussed in the circular economy. The most noteworthy finding is that the circular economy is being presented as a technical concept disconnected from the public with no role for them to contribute. This is significant for establishing grounds for communication between the researcher and the public. The findings indicate that the circular economy is disconnected from the public, and awareness is a significant barrier to its implementation. The findings of this research are significant for designing the data collection methods of the second study. As a result, it is concluded that interviews should educate participants about the circular economy and its meaning in their everyday lives.
Factors influencing public acceptance and engagement in the circular economy are examined in the second study, presented in the fifth chapter. As an outcome of the fourth chapter, the researcher utilised circular activities, namely the 10R by Reike et al. (2018), to simplify the circular economy with members of society. Further application of an elicitation technique, namely the repertory grid, offers interviewees a straightforward approach to expressing their thoughts in a structured manner (Fransella et al., 2004). This technique is helpful in quickly explaining what each of the circular economy activities means for the general public. The data collected looks at the needs, concerns, and implications of the circular activities on members of society. The data collected are used to support society's development, protection, and transformation to be in harmony with the circular economy activities. The thematic analysis of the data identified six main themes as the factors influencing their acceptance of circular economy activities. These themes are accessibility, product roadmap, capability, experience, worthwhileness, and convenience, and they are recommended as constructs to form the social dimension. Collectively, the findings of the two studies address the overreaching research question and formulate the foundations of the social dimension of the circular economy.
The empirical findings of this research and the analytical framework are utilised to formulate the social dimension and the anticipated societal value of the circular economy. The conceptual model, "A Tool for Evaluating the Social Dimension," is developed in order to provide a purpose and benefit for society to change its consumption patterns and engage in circular activities. The conceptual model demonstrates that value chain adaptability to meet members of society's needs and address their concerns plays a vital role in societal acceptance of circular activities. The empirical findings of the studies one and two indicate four main changes needed in the value chain. The changes involve providing society with accessibility, convenience, product roadmap, and experience. This conceptual model proposes internal capability development of members of society, public engagement, and promoting the expected positive impact of the circular economy on social impacts. The model provides a guide for the societal value creation process to make the circular activities worthwhile in their efforts, time, costs, and any other form of sacrifice they have to offer. It also links the circular economy, corporate social responsibility, and social marketing.
This research contributes to the theoretical knowledge of sustainable development theory; it further advances the ongoing debate on the social dimension of the circular economy, which is a significant step in making functional movements to advance toward a sustainable world. The practical conceptual framework was created by integrating overarching and overlapping components from sustainable development, circular economy, value chain, and social systems for the social dimension. This framework offers an extension and new way of approaching society to foster circular economy implementation. It also offers a new way of societal value creation and capture, which increases the potential for improved public engagement in the circular economy. Practitioners have been missing a precise definition of the social dimension of the circular economy (Walker et al., 2021a). Collectively, this doctoral thesis presents a clear definition of the social dimension of the circular economy that is broad enough to be utilised regardless of temporal and spatial limits yet specific enough to assist stakeholders in appropriate decision-making. Furthermore, implementing the social dimension will aid in attaining sustainable development goals (SDGs), specifically (SDG12), which ensures sustainable consumption and production patterns, and (SDG9), which aims to build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialisation, and foster innovation. The circular economy is researched not only to be understood, but it also aspires to make the world a better place.