Marketing and Sustainability: Business as Usual or Changing Worldviews?
How can we reconcile the industrial worldview believing in unlimited economic growth, free markets, and the value of continually increasing consumption of products and services with sustainability goals? This article focuses on business schools and marketing academics and the related perpetuation of overconsumption that works against sustainability.
What are the institutional challenges in changing worldviews and values in the production-consumption system? How can we transform social paradigms and worldviews to meet dematerialization goals?
Abstract
Marketing, and the business schools within which most marketing academics and researchers work, have a fraught relationship with sustainability. Marketing is typically regarded as encouraging overconsumption and contributing to global change yet, simultaneously, it is also promoted as a means to enable sustainable consumption. Based on a critical review of the literature, the paper responds to the need to better understand the underpinnings of marketing worldviews with respect to sustainability. The paper discusses the concept of worldviews and their transformation, sustainability's articulation in marketing and business schools, and the implications of the market logic dominance in faculty mind-sets. This is timely given that business schools are increasingly positioning themselves as a positive contributor to sustainability. Institutional barriers, specifically within universities, business schools, and the marketing discipline, are identified as affecting the ability to effect 'bottom-up' change. It is concluded that if institutions, including disciplines and business schools, remain wedded to assumptions regarding the compatibility between the environment and economic growth and acceptance of market forces then the development of alternative perspectives on sustainability remains highly problematic.
Source: Joya A. Kemper, C. Michael Hall, and Paul W. Ballantine, https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/3/780/htm
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