Waste as scats: For an organizational engagement with waste.

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This article coins the term ‘scatolic’ to suggest a new way for organizations to think about and engage with waste. Scatolic engagement draws on Reno’s analogy of waste as scats and of scats as signs for enabling interspecies communication. This analogy stresses the impossibility for waste producers to dissociate themselves from their waste and emphasizes the contingent, multiple, and transient value of waste. Correspondingly, the article suggests that organizations grow a semiotic competence at reading waste and develop a sense of responsibility for materials. Adopting a scatolic approach to waste is featured as a way for organizations to deal with waste in the Anthropocene.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)217–235
Number of pages19
JournalOrganization
Volume26
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019 Mar 12

Bibliographical note

Hervé Corvellec, PhD in business administration, has over 20 years of experience in interdisciplinary research environments during which he has conducted research about railroad planning, risk in public transportation, and wind power siting. This general interest in infrastructures has guided him to focus on the governance, planning, and organizing of waste management; wasting behaviors and practices; waste ethics; waste narratives and discourses; and social-scientific theories of waste. He has published his research about waste in waste journals, as well as journals within the fields of accounting, cultural geography, management, organization theory, and social anthropology.

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Business Administration
  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

Keywords

  • Anthropocene
  • biosemiotics
  • Circular Economy
  • Leonia
  • Material responsibility
  • Value
  • Waste

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