Hans Bennink

Organizational Consultant, Netherlands

Title: Cooperating for Recycling

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Biography

Hans Bennink (born 1955) is a Dutch researcher, organizational consultant, coach, and author. He studied social pedagogy and andragogy (1979) and philosophy of science (1985) at Radboud University Nijmegen. He earned his PhD in 2012 with a dissertation on Foundations of Organizational Moral Climate Theory.

From 1975 to 1980, Bennink worked as an assistant lecturer in social work and philosophy of education at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. Between 1980 and 2024, he taught management sciences, HRM, social work, and psychiatry at HAN University of Applied Sciences. He contributed to minors and master’s programs in Organization Development, International Business, HRM, and related fields. In 2023–2024, he was a lecturer in management sciences at Radboud University.

His interests include organizational change, narrative research, innovation, ethics, intercultural management, neurodivergence, coaching, and supervision. He has served as editor and reviewer for Dutch and international journals.

He is currently active as an independent researcher, registered supervisor®, organizational consultant®, coach, and author. His forthcoming publication is Responsible Neurodivergence in the Workplace.

Abstract

Despite high hopes and great expectations, the practice of recycling leaves much to be desired when related to its targets. The environmental objectives are manyfold, including resource conservation, reduced demands for logging, mining, and quarrying for timber, water, and mineral, energy savings, reduced emissions, lower energy use translated to fewer carbon dioxide emissions, combating climate chang, less landfill, reduced pollution, and pollution prevention. Economic and social objectives may include job creation in collection, processing, and manufacturing. Furthermore, recycling can be cheaper than waste disposal while new markets for recycled content can be created. Recycling can also foster community building by encouraging citizen engagement (feelgood) , based on public education about environmental protection. Apart from this, other motives may also be active, though perhaps in a tacit way.

Recycling is a praiseworthy activity, but results fall short of expectations cherished. Global rates are low, for instance, only ~9% of plastic recycled worldwide. In the Netherlands, a system is rigged for recycling PET plastic bottles and beer and soda cans, functioning far below expectations, despite good intentions. (to be explained in some detail in terms of parties involved and proceedings of this particular case).

Recycling is a complex issue, perhaps not recycling technology as such, but rather the organization of recycling. In order to function well, it demands appropriate cooperation of several kinds of stakeholders (strategic core, complementary circle, and ‘the free space’ (explained), from a diversity of institutional fields with both diverging time horizons and diverging if not conflicting institutional logics. Therefore, he organization of recycling constitutes a so-called wicked problem.

At the heart of this wicked problem lies a ‘many hands issue’, organizations intending to cooperate in recycling, coming from several institutional domains (for-profit, not-for-profit, governmental, non-governmental) each with its own institutional logics (explained), further conditioned by the type of cooperation chosen (exploring cooperation, transactional cooperation, functional cooperation, and entrepreneurial cooperation).

Because of this, cooperation in recycling alliances is a complicated issue that can be explained with the Alliance Processing Model (explained). Successful recycling alliances can only be effective when arriving at a fit in terms of seven dimensions, or put reversely, when avoiding misfits in these dimensions: strategic fit, urgency and pace fit, positional fit, organizational/operational fit, cultural fit, competence fit, and personal fit (all briefly explained). These seven dimensions of (mis)fit can be found in standard issues in alliances.

As an outlook on solutions, fourteen building blocks for governing alliances are presented, as is a wide range of success factors for fruitful cooperation (most of all mutual trust), and more specific, criteria and guidelines for finding and binding a partner, as well a number of major design questions in cooperation.

The contribution is accompanied by an elaborated list of references and suggestions for further reading.