I am looking for a research object for the topic "circular economy" and the sustainable transformation in the company/ on the value chain.
I thought about risks and chances for the value chain;
or "requirements" which have to be fulfilled for a successful transformation;
or a critical comparison of the circular economy/value chain in connection with potentials and challenges (by using some models/studies)
Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this!
Books that Bernhard Wern cited must be the first readings. You should find a theme that seems (1) interesting for you, (2) important or useful for the society, and (3) implementable until your time limit.
Most provably you must be interested of circular economy from ecological and environmental viewpoint, but it is also a serious and profound theoretical problems for economics itself. Today's mainstream economics has lost to see economy as circular system and consider it uniquely from general equilibrium viewpoint. However, the idea of circular economy is as old as economics. A typical example is François Quesnay's Tableau Économique. The modern dominance of equilibrium view wiped away this idea. However, as the notion of general equilibrium is now severely criticized by many economists, circular view of economy may become the future core idea for economics.
Circular economy view remained undercurrent for almost all times of economics, history of this idea itself is most uncultivated topic in economics.
You may find various authors who thought by an idea of circular economy. Jane Jacobs was one of them. Her book The Nature of Economies (2000) is a book about circular economy in the standard sense of the term. In my interpretation, it was a rare book that treated circular economy as a dissipative structure. This concept does not appear in her book but I am sure that her problem can be more analytically analyzed in this framework. Lacking this kind of interpretation, Robert Solow criticized her book as a product of amateur in his book review. This episode only reveals how difficult it is for those economists who are trained in terms of equilibrium to understand circular economy.
Dissipative structure is rather unfamiliar notion in economics. This term was the key concept for Ilya Prigogine who claimed that dissipative structure can exists only far from thermal equilibrium. The planet Earth can be interpreted as dissipative structure. The heat comes partly from the Sun and partly from the Inner Core of the eath and wasted heat is dissipated into the space.
If you know nothing about dissipative structure, please read my short presentation below:
Conference Paper Economy as a Dissipative Structure
If you really want to understand the mechanism of our Earth of Gaia, you should also learn the basics of Earth Physics and Earth Chemistry. Global warming cannot be analyzed without knowledge of those sciences. So, the burden is extremely heavy for a thesis, but I also hope you have the challenging spirit to overcome these hurdles. Good luck for you research. I hope you a big success.
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