Evolution of behavioral research on E-waste management: conceptual frameworks and future research directions

The rapid growth of e-waste or waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) has garnered significant attention from scholars, particularly in the behavioral domain. This study aims to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis and content analysis to provide a systematic review of WEEE-behavioral research. Firstly, a bibliometric analysis was performed using Biblioshiny (R packages) on a sample of 293 articles from Scopus and WOS databases. This part addresses the research question: A) How has the WEEE-behavioral domain evolved over time in terms of key journals, institutions, countries, trending topics, and research streams? Secondly, a content analysis was conducted on 41 relevant articles that were able to address the following research questions: B) What are the main theories utilized and their implications in WEEE-behavioral research? and C) what are the potential directions for future research? The findings reveal two distinct research categories, namely circular economic behavior and behavioral spillovers, with seven underlying and emerging clusters followed by corresponding research streams. Additionally, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) emerged as the core theory that was extensively utilized and expanded upon. Consequently, this study contributes to 1) understanding the evolution of the WEEE-behavioral domain, 2) proposing an integrated theoretical framework, 3) identifying the primary research streams and their interconnections, and 4) suggesting avenues for future research, supported by a robust conceptual model for hypothesis generation.