Doctoral Dissertation Research: Explaining the valuation of non-standard goods in the global economy.

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Explaining the Valuation of Non-Standard Goods in the Global Economy Sustainable production and consumption have become a focus of policy-making as growing scientific evidence points to the possibility that current economic practices are depleting valuable resources on a broad scale. Recycling and prevention of waste through reuse are key aspects of these policies, yet little is known about how these waste management measures are practiced, especially as goods for reuse are exported from one country to another. This dissertation focuses on the global value chain for used clothing to understand what happens to discarded items that are transformed from waste and diverted from landfill by being given value. Drawing from economic sociology and waste studies, this project seeks to provide an account of valuation of these waste flows. This dissertation will develop a theory of valuation that can account for cases in which goods are highly unstandardized. Existing sociological explanations of valuation cannot account for how value is created along the global value chain of used clothing, where goods are highly variable and supply is unpredictable. Understanding how waste is transformed into a commodity is important to countries seeking to develop waste management policies that are nationally and globally effective and sustainable. This study is a multi-sited, mixed-methods study that traces the value chain of used clothing from the United Kingdom to Poland. The central empirical question asks how value is created along the global value chain of used clothing. This dissertation relies on a comparison of how used clothing market actors at different points along the global value chain of used clothing make decisions about value and waste. Data will include in-depth, semi-structured interviews with actors involved in the collection, sorting, processing, exporting, importing, or selling of used clothing in the UK and Poland. Interviews will be informed and supplemented by observation and participant observation in sites at each of six analytically-identified stages along the value chain of used clothing between the UK and Poland. Field notes, interview transcripts, and photographs will be qualitatively coded. Quantitative data regarding amounts and percentages of clothing sold/discarded will come from a structured component of interviews and supplemented by existing industry data. These data, as well as existing business register data, will be analyzed using tabular and multivariate analysis to help explain variations found in the qualitative data and to assess the generalizability of the qualitative findings. This research contributes both to economic sociology and to recycling and waste policy.