Marketing and Sustainability: Business as Usual or Changing Worldviews?

7. Conclusions

Business schools and the mainstream marketing discipline adhere to an economic or industrial worldview believing in unlimited economic growth, free markets, the value of increasing consumption of products and services, and technological solutions to environmental problems. With their current educational experience, business school graduates, including many of those that go on to teaching and research positions, act as the foot soldiers of the industrial worldview and contemporary neoliberal capitalism. The position and role of business education in influencing marketing practice and thinking is substantial and many commentators believe that a change in thinking in business education and research, away from a neo-classical economic worldview, must occur if we want to transition to a more sustainable society and planet.

Given business schools' current positioning, many questions still exist about how sustainability can be taught and integrated into theory and practice in the marketing discipline. Questions also remain about what is taught about sustainability, as responding to environmental change is often framed in terms of 'working better' and improving per unit output efficiency by maintaining levels of consumption and accelerating innovation in order to reduce the materials and energy inputs employed in designing, making, distributing and selling products and services. Which is the approach that, in great part, has got humankind into its present environmental predicament in the first place.

Institutional barriers, specifically within universities, business schools, and the marketing discipline, also affect the ability to effect 'bottom-up' change. If institutions, including disciplines and business schools, remain wedded to assumptions based on the compatibility between the environment and economic growth and acceptance of market forces then the development of alternative perspectives on sustainability remains highly problematic. As Bernstein observes, "the institutions that have developed in response to global environmental problems support particular kinds of values and goals, with important implications for the constraints and opportunities to combat the world's most serious environmental problems". In business schools and marketing departments, the strength of the dominant paradigm is such that, "the scope of relevant social science is typically restricted to that which is theoretically consistent" with the dominant worldview (our emphasis). This means that policymakers, research agencies, universities and the private sector, fund and legitimize lines of enquiry that generate results that they can accept and manage, even if they do not necessarily provide the "solution" to the sustainability problem, with the same approach also often extending into educational and research practices. The result is a self-fulfilling cycle of credibility in which evidence of relevance and value to policymakers and research funders helps in securing additional resources for approaches that fulfill the dominant paradigm and not others.

If sustainability is to be achieved, then worldview change is something that will be required at all scales from the individual through to the global. However, in order to achieve change the norms that are central to institutions need to undergo a substantial shift. Arguably, far too much attention has been given to the assumption that a well-designed institution is "good" because it facilitates cooperation and development rather than actually focus on its norms and institutionalization as first and necessary steps in the assessment of what kind of worldviews institutions - including disciplines and business schools - are promoting and their potential outcomes. Such an approach has only served to reinforce first- and second-order change rather than paradigm shifts. The consequence of this situation is that liberal environmentalism and the dominant paradigm in which it is embedded "has resulted in enabling certain kinds of responses to global environmental problems consistent with it, such as possibilities for the privatization of environmental governance in some areas or the increasing use of market mechanisms. But at the same time it has made trade-offs much more difficult because it denies that they may be necessary among values of efficiency, economic growth, corporate freedom, and environmental protection". Nevertheless, it is the growing awareness of the contradictions in, and policy and management failure of, the dominant paradigm that may also offer an opportunity for third-order change.