1. Introduction

For many people who work in the field of sustainability, along with many consumers, the field of marketing is often equated as being antithetical to sustainable development because of how it is integral to the encouragement of consumption and serves corporate interests. Where even the promotion of sustainability or environmental and social causes becomes a form of 'woke washing' - where businesses and corporations adopt the veneer of progressive values for profit. Nevertheless, the expansion of the marketing concept has reached a stage where there is much interest, especially in the sub-fields of macromarketing, transformative and social marketing, in ensuring that marketing is a force for good. Undoubtedly, there has been a substantial growth in "green", "environmental", and "sustainable" marketing, much of which has been focussed on promoting "green" products, understanding market segments and consumer's preferences for environmentally friendly products, and the role of the environment in branding. However, the extent to which the growth of apparent interest in the environment and sustainability among marketing researchers has either transformed the field of marketing, or actually contributed to improved sustainability at the global scale appears highly debatable. "Ecological awareness has been treated, like most virtues in the capitalist marketplace, as an individual taste rather than a social necessity". For example, in examining the contribution of marketing to research on climate change, including mitigation and adaptation, Hall searched 53,685 documents in 89 marketing serials with respect to the occurrence of "climate change" or "global warming" and found that only 349 (0.65%) had either climate change or global warming mentioned in their text and the terms being used as a keyword in only 16 documents (0.03%). Yet marketing, especially as a method, is widely recognised as being able to make a substantial contribution to climate change research and policymaking, although the vast majority of research on the relationship between climate change and marketing occurs outside of the marketing field and that the research that is conducted "within" marketing tends to be focussed around social marketing approaches to behavioral change.

Despite criticism of the embeddedness of marketing in contemporary neoliberal capitalism and its contribution to the marketisation and commoditization of the environment, Achrol and Kotler argued that in the third millennium, the super phenomena of marketing will be characterized by sustainable marketing. Sustainable marketing is broadly characterized by a number of elements including: the recognition of resource limits of growth, sustainable consumption, a transition from an anthropocentric to a biocentric paradigm, and the development of sustainable product life cycles. However, despite awareness of the significance of sustainability issues in marketing there are a wide range of interpretations of how this may be achieved. In recognition of some of these issues, Achrol and Kotler noted, "marketing scholars are cognizant of the imperative for a new and probably radical reformulation of its fundamental philosophy, its operational premises and the heuristics that are used to make marketing decisions. But what are the conceptual underpinnings of such a worldview?" For Achrol and Kotler the conceptual underpinnings lie in the development of new patterns of consumption and production. The present paper responds to the call to better understand the underpinnings of marketing worldviews with respect to sustainability and suggests that the transformation of marketing requires an understanding of worldviews and its ability to transition, and how change may be brought about by institutional and individual actors. This is also particularly timely given the growing positioning of business schools, within which the majority of academics reside, as a positive contributor to sustainability.