It's a waste to waste waste

Abstract: In a world with scarce resources and urgent environmental constraints, companies must secure a stable flow of materials. It can be achieved by adopting the concept of Circular Economy, which aims to re-use material at its highest utility. For companies this can be accomplished by utilizing and valorizing waste, which is a challenging process. The process could be facilitated by manageable methods, possibly a well-known framework in organizational development. Therefore, this thesis has researched what factors affect the change of turning waste into resources, and if the process can be explained by dominant Diagnostic theories. Our findings suggest that the change can be explained by Burke and Litwin's A Casual Model for Organizational Performance and Change (1992) to a high extent. The empirical evidence also indicates that collaboration between external parties is a key factor, which is omitted in the theories studied in this thesis. This implies that existing Diagnostic theories must be revised for them to fully explain a change of this nature. Furthermore, we question if changes towards an increased circular business approach are different from other organizational developments, or if Diagnostic theories are outdated.