Marketing and Sustainability: Business as Usual or Changing Worldviews?

4. Sustainability Worldview

One of the major contemporary challenges facing business schools is how they respond to the complex and interrelated issues of global change, including climate and environmental change, land and water degradation, social issues, disparities in wealth, weakened democratic institutions, war, and religious conflict. Many authors and reports together with media commentary have identified that we are in, or currently on the very brink of, an existential crisis for humanity and biodiversity on this planet as a whole. As such, the subject matter of sustainable development, or sustainability, ranges from solving ecological problems (e.g., climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss) to social and economic issues (e.g., inequality, human rights, and poverty). However, the diverse and, at times, contested conceptualisations of sustainability has led to a wide range and often competing ideas about how to implement public and business policies, such as those related to natural resource conservation, production, and consumption, and the adoption of communication and technological innovations.

A wide range of frameworks and models have emerged that seek to capture the various conceptualisations of sustainability. In the 1980s and early 1990s, environmental typologies were created recognising differing perspectives and approaches to institutional change. McManus criticized such works as focusing too much on the economic aspects, excluding the cultural bases for sustainability. He identified nine different approaches to sustainability, which included free-market environmentalism, market interventionism, steady-state theory, smaller-scale advocacy, eco-feminism, eco-Marxism, 'mirror nature', and the constant natural capital stocks criterion. Providing such a comprehensive typology, his conceptualizations are seen throughout later works. Such frameworks include the conceptualisations of weak and strong sustainability which explores the substitutability paradigm of natural resources, and ecocentric and anthropocentric epistemology focusing on the value placed upon nature based on either intrinsic or extrinsic value. These worldviews, although seemingly dichotomous, are best understood as being the extremes of a continuum of approaches to sustainability.

Hopwood et al. and Davidson focus on the political aspects of sustainability, with the former creating a mapping approach based on three differing approaches to business, economic and political reform, while the latter proposes a typology of ideologies of political actors resulting in six approaches to addressing sustainability. Hopwood et al. divides the three perspective into status quo, reform and transform; as the names suggest, the status quo focuses on minor, incremental changes in market structure, while reform focuses on decreasing the sustainability knowledge gap, favoring lifestyle change but not economic or social transformation which the transform perspective wishes to see. Similarly, Davidson offers that neoliberal and liberalism perspectives rely on current capitalist systems, with liberalism more open to market intervention, social democratic ideologies believe in smaller scale communities and ecological economics (economic growth within the earths limits) and radical perspectives take variants of eco-feminism and eco-Marxism addressing redistribution of resources and inequities in power. Some researchers have also proposed typologies for how businesses adopt sustainability. While others address how sustainability should be taught in education. However, more recent work by Hedlund-de Witt's relates to the various dimensions of worldviews which previous works have failed to elaborate on and is the one of the few to conduct empirical research of sustainability worldviews.

Hedlund-de Witt demonstrates that worldviews have implications on individual behaviors, especially in the sustainability realm. Her research addresses the fundamental principles of worldviews and demonstrates that our conceptions of the world, going beyond individual beliefs, values and attitudes, impact upon our behaviors and sustainability views. Specifically, Hedlund-de Witt highlights four differing sustainable development worldviews: traditional, modern, postmodern, and integrative. The Integrative Worldview Framework, as previously discussed, is composed of five fundamental beliefs related to ontology, epistemology, axiology, anthropology, and societal vision. The fundamental beliefs related to ontology, epistemology and axiology do not specifically relate to the environment and sustainability dimensions (i.e., belief in God, means of self-expression and individuality, and means to acquire knowledge), while anthropology and societal vision beliefs are related to sustainability and the environment. Table 1 displays the variation in sustainability typologies based on the work of Hedlund-de Witt as well as its overlaps.

Table 1. Sustainability typologies.

Research in the U.S. and the Netherlands found more concern about climate change, more political support for addressing climate change, consumption of less meat, and an increased willingness to save more energy among 'Postmoderns' and 'Integratives', compared with 'Moderns' and 'Traditionals'. However, the various worldviews may differ between samples. For example, other research has shown five worldviews through factor analysis: 'Inner growth' (inner growth as the primary focus in life), 'Contemporary spirituality' (spiritual connection), 'Traditional god' (religious belief and focus), 'Focus on money' (focus on axiology, in terms of money), and 'Secular materialism' (rejection of meaning, individualistic liberalism, and belief in science). The latter two worldviews make significantly less sustainable food choices compared to the former two worldviews but correlations were small. Considering the different worldview classifications, more research is needed to examine the generalisability of these worldviews across samples as well as cultures. As such, research is ripe for further empirical investigation into worldviews, especially in regards to their support for policies, initiatives, and overall environmental concern. Such research is especially needed in business disciplines which grapple with ideological, historical, and epistemological issues when integrating sustainability, and the effect this can have on education and research.