scholarly journals Reframing Recycling Behaviour through Consumers’ Perceptions: An Exploratory Investigation

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 13849
Author(s):  
Adekunle Oke ◽  
Seonaidh McDonald ◽  
Evagelos Korobilis-Magas ◽  
Oluyomi A. Osobajo ◽  
Bankole Osita Awuzie

Despite the increasing awareness of the consequences of waste, there is no consensus on how and why consumers engage in recycling, making it challenging to design behavioural interventions that might promote recycling, especially in organisational settings. This study is designed to explain consumers’ recycling behaviour and how it differs across contexts, particularly between home and work settings. Using personal accounts of 367 employees from different organisations in the UK, this study explores recycling behaviour at home and work including its motivations and barriers. The findings show that recycling behaviour is different across contexts due to many disparate factors underlying people’s waste generation and recycling behaviours from one context to another. According to the findings, buying and consumption behaviour and waste generation patterns influence the way consumers engage in recycling. The study further demonstrates that contextual factors and individual circumstances are important contributors to consumption behaviour, waste production, and recycling behaviour. While recycling behaviour has been investigated extensively, the findings of this study indicate the need for consumption and waste production patterns to be taken into consideration when designing recycling interventions, enhancing the prospect of a circular economy. This study contributes to theory and practice by associating recycling behaviour with buying and consumption behaviour, including waste generation patterns.

Author(s):  
Margaretta Jolly

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement explores the individual and collective memories of women at its heart. Spanning at least two generations and four nations, and moving through the tumultuous decades from the 1970s to the present, the narrative is powered by feminist oral history, notably the British Library’s Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. The book mines these precious archives to bring fresh insight into the lives of activists and the campaigns and ideas they mobilised. It navigates still-contested questions of class, race, violence, and upbringing—as well as the intimacies, sexualities and passions that helped fire women’s liberation—and shows why many feminists still regard notions of ‘equality’ or even ‘equal rights’ as insufficient. It casts new light on iconic campaigns and actions in what is sometimes simplified as feminism’s ‘second wave’, and enlivens a narrative too easily framed by ideological abstraction with candid, insightful, sometimes painful personal accounts of national and less well-known women activists. They describe lives shaped not only by structures of race, class, gender, sexuality and physical ability, but by education, age, love and cultural taste. At the same time, they offer extraordinary insights into feminist lifestyles and domestic pleasures, and the crossovers and conflicts between feminists. The work draws on oral history’s strength as creative method, as seen with its conclusion, where readers are urged to enter the archives of feminist memory and use what they find there to shape their own political futures.


Author(s):  
Emilia Marie Wersig ◽  
Kevin Wilson-Smith

AbstractThis interpretative phenomenological analysis explores aid workers’ understanding of identity and belonging through the transition from working in humanitarian aid to returning home. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 participants who had returned to the UK after working in recently founded non-governmental organisations in Northern France between 2016 and 2019. Analysis of interview data identified four superordinate themes: (1) shared humanitarian identity, (2) limits and borders, (3) holding on to humanitarian identity and (4) redefining belonging and identity. Aid workers’ belonging in humanitarian work settings is rooted in shared moral values and being able to fulfil a clearly defined role. Upon returning, aid workers struggled to reintegrate, manifesting as denial of having left humanitarian work, re-creation of the social setting and moral demarcation. Participants formed a new sense of belonging through redefining their social in-group. The study sheds light on a previously unexplored area of research, specifically characterised through the closeness of the international humanitarian setting and participants’ homes. Findings suggest organisations can assist aid workers’ re-entry by supporting professional distance in the field, and through opportunities that allow to sustain moral values post-mission. Future research should focus on the role of peer support in the re-entry process and the re-entry experiences of aid workers returning from comparable settings further afield (e.g. Greece).


Author(s):  
M. John Foster

AbstractIn essence firms or companies are usually thought to exist to make products for or provide services of some sort to third parties, other companies or individuals. The philosophical question which naturally arises then is ‘to the benefit of whom should a firm’s activities be aimed?’ Possible answers include the owners of the firm, the firm’s employees or wider society, the firm’s local community or their host nation. It is because of firms’ location within a wider society that the issue of corporate social responsibility arises. The issue is do they contribute in a positive way to the fabric of society. In this paper we conduct an exploratory investigation whose research questions, broadly, are whether there is public evidence of corporate social responsibility activity by firms listed in the UK and to what extent, if any, such activities may amount to genuinely socially responsible management by the firms. We examined the most up to date annual reports of a split sample of 36 firms listed in the FTSE 350. The short answers to the two research questions above are: to some degree and no by some margin, based on data from the sample firms.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eléonore Maitre-Ekern ◽  
Carl Dalhammar

In their roles as purchasers, users and dischargers of used products, consumers play an important role in the circular economy. In this article, we put forward a ‘hierarchy of consumption behaviour’ to support European Union policymaking. Among the priorities are avoiding the purchase of single-use and unnecessary products, prolonging the lifetime of products through maintenance and engaging in repair activities. Moreover, the hierarchy intends to privilege sharing and leasing to buying and second-hand products to new ones. Finally, consumption in the circular economy also requires allowing products to re-circulate. Changing consumption patterns is difficult insofar as they are largely determined by the paradigm upon which our economy is built and are enabled by the existing legal framework, most notably European Union consumer law. The article contains concrete recommendations to develop European Union law and promote the proposed hierarchy.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phuc Hong Huynh

PurposeDigital innovation and circular business model innovation are two critical enablers of a circular economy. A wide variety of digital technologies such as blockchain, 3D printing, cyber-physical systems, or big data also diverges the applications of digital technologies in circular business models. Given heterogeneous attributes of circular business models and digital technologies, the selections of digital technologies and circular business models might be highly distinctive within and between sectorial contexts. This paper examines digital circular business models in the context of the fashion industry and its multiple actors. This industry as the world’s second polluting industry requires an urgent circular economy (CE) transition with less resource consumption, lower waste emissions and a more stable economy.Design/methodology/approachAn inductive, exploratory multiple-case study method is employed to investigate the ten cases of different sized fashion companies (i.e. large, small medium-sized firm (SME) and startup firms). The comparison across cases is conducted to understand fashion firms' distinct behaviours in adopting various digital circular economy strategies.FindingsThe paper presents three archetypes of digital-based circular business models in the fashion industry: the blockchain-based supply chain model, the service-based model and the pull demand-driven model. Besides incremental innovations, the radical business model and digital innovations as presented in the pull demand-driven model may be crucial to the fashion circular economy transition. The pull demand–driven model may shift the economy from scales to scopes, change the whole process of how the fashion items are forecasted, produced, and used, and reform consumer behaviours. The paths of adopting digital fashion circular business models are also different among large, SMEs and startup fashion firms.Practical implicationsThe study provides business managers with empirical insights on how circular business models (CBMs) should be chosen according to intrinsic business capacities, technological competences and CE strategies. The emerging trends of new fashion markets (e.g. rental, subscription) and consumers' sustainable awareness should be not be neglected. Moreover, besides adopting recycling and reuse strategies, large fashion incumbents consider collaborating with other technology suppliers and startup companies to incubate more radical innovations.Social implicationsAppropriate policies and regulations should be enacted to enable the digital CE transition. Market patterns and consumer acceptances are considered highly challenging to these digital fashion models. A balanced policy on both the demand and supply sides are suggested. The one-side policy may fail CBMs that entail an upside-down collaboration of both producers and consumers. Moreover, it is perhaps time to rethink how to reduce unnecessary new demand rather than repeatedly producing and recycling.Originality/valueThe pace of CE research is lagging far behind the accelerating environmental contamination by the fashion industry. The study aims to narrow the gap between theory and practice to harmonise fashion firms' orchestration and accelerate the transition of the fashion industry towards the CE. This study examines diverse types of digital technologies in different circular business models in a homogeneous context of the fashion industry with heterogeneous firm types.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Cartwright ◽  
Rebecca Donkin

Malingering mental disorder for financial compensation can offer substantial rewards to those willing to do so. A recent review of UK medico-legal experts’ practices for detecting claimants evidenced that they are not well equipped to detect those that do. This is not surprising, considering that very little is known regarding why individuals opt to malinger. A potential construct which may influence an individual’s choice to malinger is their knowledge of the disorder, and when one considers the high levels of depression literacy within the UK, it is imperative that this hypothesis is investigated. A brief depression knowledge scale was devised and administered to undergraduate students (n = 155) alongside a series of questions exploring how likely participants were to malinger in both workplace stress and claiming for benefit vignettes. Depression knowledge did not affect the likelihood of engaging in any malingering strategy in either the workplace stress vignettes or the benefit claimant vignettes. Differences were found between the two vignettes providing evidence for the context-specific nature of malingering, and an individual’s previous mental disorder was also influential.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Caitlin Bruce

<p>New Zealand is ranked among the top nations in waste production, including a million tonnes of plastic waste. Currently, there are methods for recycling plastic within New Zealand but these methods can be expensive and time-consuming, resulting in most of the plastic being thrown into the landfill. Because plastic does not fully degrade, it ends up in the ocean and other waterways, poisoning the water with toxins. The purpose of this research is to provide a solution to reducing plastic waste by creating an alternative method of recycling that utilises new technologies such as additive manufacturing, to create a building material that fits into the concept of the circular economy. The findings of this research explored the recycling of plastic by collecting plastic waste such as PLA (Polylactic Acid) from old 3D printed models. The plastic was recycled into filament for additive manufacturing (AM) and used to print building tile, establishing an initial proof of concept for the use of recycled plastic as a potential building material.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 645
Author(s):  
Janet Batsleer

This essay offers a broken narrative concerning the early history of anti-oppressive practice as an approach in the U.K. to youth and community work and the struggles over this in the context of UK higher education between the 1960′s and the early 2000’s. Educating informal educators as youth and community workers in the UK has been a site of contestation. Aspects of a genealogy of that struggle are presented in ways which link publicly available histories with personal memories and narratives, through the use of a personal archive developed through collective memory work. These are chosen to illuminate the links between theory and practice: on the one hand, the conceptual field which has framed the education of youth and community workers, whose sources lie in the academic disciplines of education and sociology, and, on the other hand, the social movements which have formed the practice of informal educators. Six have been chosen: (1) The long 1968: challenging approaches to authority; (2) the group as a source of learning; (3) The personal and political: experiential learning from discontent; (4) Paolo Freire and Critical Praxis; (5) A critical break in social education and the reality of youth work spaces as defensive spaces; (6) New managerialism: ethics vs. paper trails. The approach taken, of linking memory work with present struggles, is argued to be a generative form for current critical and enlivening practice.


2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Swanwick

A brief review of the state of music education in the UK at the time of the creation of the British Journal of Music Education (BJME) leads to a consideration of the range and focus of topics since the initiation of the Journal. In particular, the initial requirement of careful and critical enquiry is amplified, drawing out the inevitability of theorising, an activity which is considered to be essential for reflective practice. The relationship of theory and data is examined, in particular differentiating between the sciences and the arts. A ‘case study’ of theorising is presented and examined in some detail and possible strands of future development are identified.


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