Réka Tölg

In circular economies, consumers are expected to extend product lifetimes and ensure recycling—a considerable departure from the linear take-make-dispose model. To support this shift, we need to understand how circular consumption is currently enabled in retail markets and how consumers navigate these tasks. Thus, in this dissertation, I aim to explore and conceptualise how circular consumption is practically and socio-materially brought into being in a landscape configured for linear modes of consumption.

Theoretically, I combine market studies with a practice theoretical approach to consumption. I use various enabling lenses—qualification, scripting, care-in-practice, and valuation work—to explore the production of circular consumption in retail settings and its performance in household settings, in the context of clothing consumption in Sweden. Empirically, Study 1 explores the production of circular consumption in retail settings through an ethnographic study of circularity products and services. Study 2 investigates the performance of circular consumption in household settings using ethnographic material from a field trial of circularity services.

The findings of the included research papers show that retail settings produce circular consumption to be performed by consumers through caring and value-protecting work, often as part of additional household chores, and without widespread support from market materialities. Furthermore, it is shown that consumers enact care for others and valuation work to perform circular consumption. However, various challenges arise in securing and coordinating the resources, devices and skills required for care and valuations, complicating the performance of circular consumption.

This dissertation contributes to circular consumption research and the sociology of consumption by showing that circular consumption is produced and performed to co-exist with the dominant linear modes of consumption, rather than challenging and displacing them. Studying circular consumption both in everyday life and in retail markets helped to further the knowledge of how retail market materialities shape such (im)possibilities. For a shift to circularity, retail markets need to be re-arranged to enable consumers to sidestep linear modes of consumption and reduce the complexities of circular practices.