Ambiguity of Purpose and the Politics of Failure: Sustainability as Macromarketing’s Compelling Political Calling (original) (raw)
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Journal of Macromarketing
In their essays published in the Silver Anniversary Issue (SAI) of the Journal of Macromarketing (2006), George Fisk and Mark Peterson independently outlined the current state of the discipline and made a list of visionary recommendations that would help macromarketers adapt and respond to the changing markets, marketing, and societies. These recommendations ranged from repositioning the discipline around the ideas of societal development to leading the way across disciplines toward achieving a sustainable world. Based on a thorough content analysis of the articles published in the Journal of Macromarketing since the SAI, we aim to report the extent to which macromarketing scholarship has responded to the recommendations of Fisk and Peterson. Utilizing the findings, we make a list of new recommendations that can assist macromarketers in fulfilling their mission of ‘saving the world’.
Journal of Public Affairs - Special Issue 2018 "The Marketing And Public Affairs Of Sustainability"
Affairs published the special issue 'CSR and Public Affairs', edited by Paul Baines and Phil Harris (Volume 6, Issue 3-4). The editors write: " We continue to see large growth in the amount of academic works in the field and widespread public recognition of the concept, if not agreement on its importance. (…) What CSR actually means depends very much on the business environment, i.e. political, market, cultural and legal. " (Baines & Harris, 2006, p 171). The special issue attracted some well-known early authors and contributions went from theoretical and conceptual efforts to define corporate social responsibility (CSR)/corporate sustainability (CS) and guidance towards a responsible business decision-making framework; to more empirical studies of stakeholder (management) challenges and supply chain issues and policies-mostly illustrated along apparent CSR and sustainability vanguards. Arguably, the dawn of this millennium was the start for public, private and also academic actors and coalitions of interest in order to influence the rhetoric and reality of the 'modern' CSR and sustainability sphere, including discursive dynamics about prioritising CSR and CS as organisational aims. With interest and enthusiasm we have seen an ever growing and diversifying academic and practical interest in the concepts and management of CSR and CS, seemingly giving ongoing support to Lockett, Moon and Visser's (2006) early claim of 'CSR being in a continuing state of emergence'. Energy has gone into investigating and developing strategies, tools, business cases for sustainability and related concepts. Although today, sustainability can be considered a management practice with in parts codified understandings, a 'one solution fits all' approach is questionable (Breitbarth, Walzel, Anagnostopoulos & van Eekeren 2015; Schaltegger, Hörisch & Freeman 2017; Schaltegger & Burritt 2018). The variety of perspectives reflects the plurality of awareness, ambition and development levels of different industries, organisations and stakeholders represent. In this context, companies are still challenged to develop their CS-/CSR-related management activities in the light of competing stakeholder interpretations and to secure legitimacy and successful business operations. This special issue of Journal of Public Affairs focuses on the construction and manifestation of CS and CSR as a persuasive and convincing (or distracting) and effective (or opportunistic) organisational management idea and operation. It combines historical-, contextual-, processual and communication-oriented work across the fields of marketing and branding, reputation and stakeholder management, public affairs and lobbying, organisational management and communication. Combined, it leads to a better understanding and conceptualisation of how in a pluralistic stakeholder environment interested actors from within and outside organisations as well as relevant business-and-society issues have impacted on the acceptance, design and application of CS and CSR. Special Issue papers Special issue guest editors Tim Breitbarth, Stefan Schaltegger and John Mahon start this special issue with a retrospect of the construction of the 'business case' for CSR and corporate sustainability in the paper " The business case for sustainability in retrospect: A Scandinavian institutionalism perspective on the role of expert conferences in shaping the emerging 'CSR and corporate sustainability space' ". In particular, this paper is concerned with the rise and, in hindsight, successful...
Sustainable Marketing: Market-Driving, Not Market-Driven
Journal of Macromarketing, 2020
Sustainability has emerged as a critical macromarketing perspective over the last five decades. Starting with the early concerns in the 1960s about the world’s finite resources that would limit economic growth, sustainability thinking has expanded to encompass societal issues and ecological and environmental considerations in economic and governance activities. Governments and businesses need to act in tandem to address myriad world problems associated with climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, depleting resources, and the socio-economic disparities that characterize persistent world hunger and poverty. A vital aspect of this challenge is to stop or reverse unsustainable production and consumption that have hitherto been pursued as part of market-driven business activity. Marketing, through its market-driven consumption-oriented practices, may have knowingly or unknowingly promoted these unsustainable production-consumption practices. Therefore, it needs to change it...
Mark Peterson, Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach (2013)
Markets, Globalization & Development Review, 2017
Professor Madran has multiple awards from Scientific Writing Contests and has various publications in national and international journals. She speaks English and German. She gives training and seminars on corporate social responsibility, sustainable marketing, sustainability in Higher Education in many public and private sector organizations. Her research focuses on Sustainable Business Education and Businesses Sustainability.
Toward the Institutionalization of Macromarketing
Journal of Macromarketing, 2012
Major events in the institutionalization of macromarketing include (1) the series of macromarketing conferences that began at the University of Colorado in 1976, (2) the founding of the Journal of Macromarketing in 1981, and (3) the establishment of the Macromarketing Society in 2004. This article focuses on the continuing institutionalization of macromarketing by providing a commentary on Mark Peterson’s new textbook, Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach. The commentary is structured around seven questions: (1) What is Peterson’s “sustainable enterprise”? (2) What is a macromarketing approach? (3) What is the “stability illusion” and how does Peterson dispel it with resource-advantage (R-A) theory? (4) How does R-A theory relate to sustainable marketing? (5) Does the text contribute to institutionalization or reinstitutionalization? (6) Was the financial crisis a “failure of laissez-faire”? (7) Where is the discussion of the “welfare-state, Ponzi illusion,” and the sus...
Sustainability as a marketing tool: To be or to appear to be?
Business Horizons, 2016
The interconnection between sustainability and marketing is closer than it appears. According to one school of thought, the two concepts are incompatible because sustainability is attainable through the reduction of consumption while the objective of marketing is to increase it (Jones, Clarke-Hill, Comfort, & Hillier, 2008). However, this incompatibility is not entirely correct because sustainability has emerged as a new marketing paradigm in the last few decades (Kumar, Rahman, Kazmi, & Goyal, 2012). If a company conducts itself well, what are the effects from a marketing perspective? What if the conduct is poor? The real-life example of the Volkswagen automobile company may help to explain this relationship. The company was recently overwhelmed by an emissions scandal (Barrett et al., 2015) raised by the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA has accused Volkswagen of having installed a defeat device to falsify pollution emissions tests in a large number of its light-duty diesel vehicles in order to conceal a negative impact on the environment. The Business Horizons (2016) xxx, xxx-xxx