Organizational change towards the circular economy: A systematic review of the literature

DOI

Scholars have long studied how organizations can transition towards greater sustainability, but it is only recently that they have begun to investigate a funda- mentally new stream in sustainability thinking: the circular economy paradigm. Instead of the ‘make-use-dispose’ approach of a linear economy, a circular econ- omy aims at eliminating waste and avoiding damage to the environment by closing resource loops. Given the recent surge of scholarly interest in the ways in which organizations can change towards working in a more circular way, it is important and timely to verify what scholars have learnt, what remains contested, and what should be done next. To this end, we are reviewing literature on the emerging field of ‘Organizational Change towards a Circular Economy’ (OCCE). We identify and analyse research that sits at the interface of organizational change theory and the circular economy paradigm and provide a systematic literature review. Our review reveals consensus, ambiguities, and differences in the OCCE literature along three main dimensions of organizational change (i.e., content, process, and context). Furthermore, we develop a novel and encompassing conceptualization of OCCE as well as outline future research opportunities. Overall, our study brings together the growing but fragmented body of OCCE research and outlines scientific and practical avenues for making progress in a more unified and systematic way

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/I6RXBX
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/I6RXBX
Provenance
Creator Graessler, Sophie ORCID logo; Guenter, Hannes; de Jong, Simon B.
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Gräßler, Sophie; SBE Research Data Management (Maastricht University)
Publication Year 2025
Rights CC-BY-4.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
OpenAccess true
Contact Gräßler, Sophie (maastrichtuniversity.nl); SBE Research Data Management (Maastricht University) (maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format application/pdf
Size 188235; 584134
Version 1.0
Discipline Business and Management; Economics; Social and Behavioural Sciences