Earth Day 2013: The Present and Future of CSR Research

In anticipation of Earth Day tomorrow, we are pleased to highlight an article in Business & Society on the impact of Newsweek magazine’s 2009 Greenest Companies ratings on financial market outcomes. This large-scale environmental assessment evaluates the impact of sustainability ratings on 500 of the largest U.S. companies. Read “Environmental Disclosure: Evidence from Newsweek’s Green Companies Rankings,’” published by Thomas P. Lyon of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Jay P. Shimshack of Tulane University in Business & Society OnlineFirst, publish ahead of print, August 13, 2012.

In the journal Organization, a special issue on the current trajectory of Corporate Social Responsibility in both scholarly inquiry and business practice asks “Is there anything substantively useful in the area of CSR research when it comes to providing some ethical guidelines for the way business is done today, or should it be abandoned as just another piece of capitalist ideology? If there is an overriding feeling that we have all been some­how ‘duped’ by the premises and solutions of CSR, what might be the best way forward when its presence is more widespread now than ever?” Read “In Search of Corporate Social Responsibility: Introduction to Special Issue” published by Peter Fleming of Queen Mary College, UK, John Roberts, Sydney Business School, Australia and Christina Garsten of University of Stockholm, Sweden and the rest of the special issue in the Organization May 2013 issue.

Read This Article, but Don’t Print It

Eric Lamm, Jennifer Tosti-Kharas, and Eric G. Williams, all of San Francisco State University, published “Read This Article, but Don’t Print It: Organizational Citizenship Behavior Toward the Environment” on January 28, 2013 in Group & Organization Management. The abstract:

This article contributes to the growing research interest on sustainability-directed citizenship behaviors by helping to develop the construct of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) toward the environment, defined as voluntary behavior not specified in official job descriptions that, through the combined efforts of individual employees, help to make the organization and/or society more sustainable. Hypotheses predict the extent to which employees’ beliefs about their organization and about sustainability in general will be associated with OCBs toward the environment. The hypotheses are tested via a field survey of 733 employees working in a variety of occupations. Regression results indicated that OCBs toward the environment were related to, yet distinct from, OCBs in general, perceived organizational support (POS), affective commitment (AC), and beliefs that sustainability is important both in general and for one’s current organization. The article concludes with theoretical implications for research on sustainability and extra-role behaviors as well as the practical implications for managers wishing to foster sustainability in their organization.

Click here to learn more about Group & Organization Management and here if you’d like to receive e-alerts to stay on top of the latest findings from the journal.

Call for Papers: Sustainability and Simulation/Gaming

Call for Papers
Sustainability and simulation/gaming
Special issue of
Simulation & Gaming:
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theory, Practice and Research
http://sg.sagepub.com/  http://www.unice.fr/sg/

Guest Editors:

Levent Yilmaz, Auburn University, USA
Tuncer Ören, University of Ottawa, Canada

As the challenges involving the achievement of a sustainable society become truly global involving interdependencies among social, political, and technical dimensions that collectively influence risk, simulation gaming with complex system models is becoming a highly effective strategy to study them. In today’s challenging policy environment, government officials and other decision-makers are confronting difficult sustainability problems whose common feature is their complexity.

Even under optimistic conditions, unexpected disasters and crises will increase severity of conditions for immediate disaster relief and the need to assist large number of refugees. Also, human actions contribute to environmental disasters such as oil spills. These emerging challenges suggest development of adaptive and resilient plans that can be revised under conditions of deep uncertainty. Development of simulation-based predictive displays for a control system or predictive displays based on multisimulation to evaluate several futures and decisions based on the outcomes of several futures will be critical enablers to deal with uncertainty that is pervasive in complex interconnected systems that need to be properly managed. Better data can also drive simulation games, which can help predicting important trends, assessing how well proposed policies and strategies would meet desired system-level objectives, and determining the optimal levels of resource use. Examples include growth, development, and evolution of urban areas, management of critical infrastructures during crisis and disaster, and management of natural environments such as forests or rivers as well as policies for governance such as fiscal and economic policies to assure sustainability and definitely to avoid disasters. However, effectiveness and relevance of simulation games to decision-making require careful consideration of the integration of the simulation gaming solutions with deliberation and political process. Hence, the issues pertaining to transparency, legitimacy, and participation are critical pillars of an integrated strategy.

With this special issue, we aim to provide the opportunity for authors to contribute original and unpublished articles that present the use of Simulation & Gaming for exploring social, economic, and environmental sustainability of human and natural systems. Simulation gaming can serve as a proactive anticipatory system to examine possibly unintended consequences of course of actions, as
their impacts are amplified and are often unforeseeable due to complex interactions and emergence that permeate through the components of a complex interconnected system of systems. Multidisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome to address the problem of complex system sustainability.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Integrated economic, social, and environmental simulation games for sustainability
• Models of human factors and social dynamics in relation to human and organizational enterprises
• Simulation games for decision support under uncertainty and long-term policy analysis
• Metrics for proactive anticipation of unsustainable conditions and their solution
• Tools and techniques for assessing adaptability, resilience, and emergent behavior in complex adaptive human and social systems
• Simulation gaming for disaster management and recovery
• Advanced methods and tools for testing of the resilience of proposed financial regulations
• New ways of thinking for policy makers for predictability, control, and explanation of complex adaptive phenomena
• New resource management paradigms investigated by M&S
• Data needs and validation of sustainability models and simulation games
• Synergy of software agents and simulation games, including agent-monitored simulation games

Instructions for Submission: Before submitting a manuscript, please consult the Guide for S&G Authors, available at http://www.unice.fr/sg/. The first step involves sending an abstract and keywords to the guest editors. After the approval of your abstract by the guest editors, you can submit your full manuscript.

Levent Yilmaz yilmaz |@| auburn.edu
Tuncer Ören oren |@| eecs.uOttawa.ca
S&G at Sage http://sg.sagepub.com/
S&G Author Guide http://www.unice.fr/sg/
Editor: David Crookall simulation.gaming |@| gmail.com
yilmaz |@| auburn.edu
oren |@| eecs.uOttawa.ca

Schedule

• Receipt of proposals: by end of January 2013.
• Response to proposals: in a month.
• Submission of manuscripts: by May 15, 2013
• First review: to be submitted by July 15, 2013.
• Revision (maybe 2nd review), editing, proofing,
• in a month
• On line publication: as articles are accepted.
• Publication of special issue: 2013

Philip Kotler on Marketing With a Conscience

kellogg.northwestern.edu

In the latest edition of the American Marketing Association’s Marketing News, Philip Kotler, the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, explains why “marketing needs a conscience”:

​In the 1960s, during the heyday of tobacco advertising, one of the tobacco companies wanted to hire me as a consultant. I declined and told them that I would rather promote anti-smoking than smoking. I am sure that the company concluded that I was anti-business. The real answer is that I had a conscience, something that most companies at the time didn’t think should play a role in marketing.

My conscience was formed by the writings of early critics of marketing, including John Kenneth Galbraith (The Affluent Society), Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring). They wrote about marketers neglecting citizens’ needs in the public sector, about the manipulative power of advertising and how pesticides were poisoning our water supply.

You can read the complete article at marketingpower.com (registration required). Then, head over to Social Marketing Quarterly for the latest articles on marketing with a conscience, including “The Science of Goal Setting: A Practitioner’s Guide to Goal Setting in the Social Marketing of Conservation,” published on December 27 by Daniel Hayden and Fangzhou Deng, both of the Rare conservation group in Arlington, VA:

Goal setting within social marketing campaigns is art and science. An analysis of Rare Pride conservation campaigns shows the quantitative, replicable relationship among the impact of these conservation campaigns with diffusion of innovation theory, and collective behavior theory that can guide marketers to set better goals. Rare is an environmental conservation organization that focuses on reducing community-based threats to biodiversity through a social marketing campaign called Pride. Pride campaigns work by removing barriers to change (whether they are technical, social, and political or something else) and inspiring people to make change happen. Based on the analysis of historical Pride campaign survey data, we found that the starting percentage of engagement has a great influence on the percentage change at the end of the campaign: The higher the initial adoption level of knowledge, attitude, and behavior change, the easier these measures are to improve. The result also suggests a difference in the potential of change with different audience segments: It is easiest to change influencer, then general public, and finally resource user who are the target of the social marketing campaign. In this article, we will analyze how to use diffusion of innovation and collective behavior theories to explain the impact of campaigns, as well as how to set more attainable goals. This article is consistent with similar research in the field of public health, which should help marketers set goals more tightly, allocate resources more effectively, and better manage donor expectations.

Click here to read the article and here to sign up for e-alerts so you don’t miss upcoming research from Social Marketing Quarterly.

Is Bottled Water a Breakable Habit?

Mr. T in DC (cc)

Today, about half of all Americans drink bottled water. That number is steadily rising, and so are the environmental and social impacts. According to a recent article in the Miami Herald:

Americans spent $10.6 billion on bottled water in 2009 — a phenomenal outlay for something that is freely available. The energy used to produce and transport plastic water bottles in 2007 would fuel 1.5 million cars for a year. And about 75 percent of empty plastic water bottles end up in landfills, lakes, streams and oceans.

What’s worse, studies have proven that bottled water isn’t necessarily any safer or cleaner than tap. So how can we stop this destructive and wasteful habit? In a study published this month in Social Marketing Quarterly, authors Cecilia O’Donnell of San Jose State University and Ronald E. Rice of UC Santa Barbara explored bottled-water usage on college campuses, arguing that “[u]nderstanding why people engage in the unnecessary and wasteful behavior of drinking bottled water is the first step to stopping it”:

Survey results show that those who drank more bottled water included non-Whites, those who trusted traditional organizations more and environmental organizations and scientists less, those who read the campus newspaper, and those who valued water safety, taste, and convenience more. Significant bivariate influences on more frequent bottled water drinking that did not persist in the hierarchical regression included conservatism, religiosity, Christian religion, nonindividualism, less interpersonal communication about environmental issues, less civic involvement, younger age, and fewer environmental behaviors. Groups working to reduce bottled water consumption on campuses should provide access to filtered water and emphasize the connection between bottled water and environmental issues, rather than health issues.

Click here to read the complete article, “A Communication Approach to Campus Bottled Water Campaigns,” in Social Marketing Quarterly.

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The CSR Agenda: Part 5 of 5

Keoni Cabral (CC BY 2.0)

As we conclude this week’s series on corporate social responsibility, we bring you thought-provoking reflections from global business leaders and management scholars on motivation, obstacles, and what is needed to initiate change, along with a field study on CSR and leadership and further articles that provide clarity as the business world moves toward a more sustainable society. Stay tuned for more upcoming series on management topics, and let us know what issues you’d like to see covered on Management INK.

Part Five: CSR – An agenda for the future

Nancy B. Kurland and Deone Zell, both of Franklin & Marshall College, published “The Green in Entertainment: A conversation,” a ‘chat’ with five sustainability leaders in the entertainment industry, in the September 2010 issue of the Journal of Management Inquiry (JMI); Aarti Sharma of Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and Min-Dong Paul Lee of the University of South Florida published “Sustainable Global Enterprise: Perspectives of Stuart Hart, Ans Kolk, Sanjay Sharma, and Sandra Waddock” in the April 2010 issue of JMI.

Thomas N. Garavan of the University of Limerick and David McGuire of Queen Margaret University published “Human Resource Development and Society: Human Resource Development’s Role in Embedding Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability, and Ethics in Organizations” in the October 2012 issue of Advances in Developing Human Resources.

Kevin S. Groves and Michael A. LaRocca, both of Pepperdine University, published “Does Transformational Leadership Facilitate Follower Beliefs in Corporate Social Responsibility? A Field Study of Leader Personal Values and Follower Outcomes” in the May 2012 issue of the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies.

Marc H. Lavine of the University of Massachusetts Boston and Christopher J. Roussin of Suffolk University published “From Idea to Action: Promoting Responsible Management Education Through a Semester-Long Academic Integrity Learning Project” in the June 2012 issue of the Journal of Management Education.

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Educating Our Future Business Leaders

target=”blank”>The Cleveland Kid (CC BY 2.0)

Do you have a paper to submit? The Journal of Marketing Education is now accepting research on ethics, corporate social responsibility, sustainability and numerous other topics, welcoming cross-functional submissions about educating our future business leaders.

About the Journal

The Journal of Marketing Education (JME) is the leading international scholarly journal devoted to contemporary issues in marketing education. Its mission is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, information, and experiences related to the process of educating students in marketing and its subfields. Its audience is largely composed of marketing faculty members at institutions of higher education where teaching is an integral component of their overall responsibilities.

The main function of the Journal of Marketing Education is to publish articles focusing on the latest teaching/learning strategies and tactics in marketing education. JME also publishes articles that address various professional issues of importance to marketing faculty members. The journal’s readership is international in scope with significant representation in university libraries.

Submit Papers in these Areas

JME is accepting bylined articles from experts and practitioners on a wide range of topics related to marketing education, including:

• Evaluating teaching effectiveness
• Experiential exercises
• Marketing in developing economies
• Ethics
• Student team projects

JME also plans to publish a special issue on ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability in marketing education, with guest editors Victoria Crittenden and Linda Ferrell. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2012. Please visit jmd.sagepub.com to view the special issue call for papers.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to the Editor, Donald R. Bacon, at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmed. Authors are expected to review and conform with manuscript submission guidelines prior to making a submission. Questions about the submission process should be forwarded to the Editor at dbacon@du.edu. For more information, please visit jmd.sagepub.com and click “Manuscript Submission.”

Organization & Environment Turns a New Leaf

epSos.de (CC BY 2.0)

Organization & Environment invites you to submit articles, essays, reviews and more for a “re-booted” issue on Sustainability and Organizations: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going.

Sustainability opportunities and challenges appear to be increasing in frequency and intensity in this second decade of the 21st Century. Advancing the capability of individual, organizational, and societal efforts to achieve and maintain long-term quality of life values (our short-hand definition of sustainability), such as addressing global climate disruption, ever-increasing population and economic activity, massive extinctions of biodiversity-critical species and toxification of nearly two-thirds of the planet’s ecosystems, and the crushing scourges of poverty, enslavement, and exploitation, all present sustainability scholars (and practitioners) with positive chances for a better world and negative threats of “sustain-ocide”.

As Organization & Environment reorganizes itself to help sustainability researchers better address these environmental and socio-economic opportunities and challenges, the incoming O&E co-editors thought that a thorough assessment of our past and present collective sustainability milieu and suggestions on how we can best address these in our scholarship (and, perhaps, even in our practice) would be an appropriate theme for our first “re-oriented” issue.

To this end, we are encouraging all sustainability management, policy, and related social science researchers to develop and submit articles, essays, reviews, and other intellectual efforts to focus on where we have been (our individual/organizational/societal past and present research efforts to improve on that condition) and we are going and suggested ways forward in the future, both conceptually and practically. Our main intent is to explore the connections between the management of organizations and any of the dimensions of sustainability.

Some of the questions we are asking contributors to consider, whether through our double-blind peer review process or our co-editor invitations include (but are not limited to):

• How have researchers in sustainability helped advance sustainability at one or more levels of human organization?
• What have been the observed or hypothesized impacts of environmental and/or socio-economic sustainability research on those studied phenomena (that is, does it look like our research has made a difference so far)?
• Which sustainability issues have not been adequately addressed by sustainability researchers in the past, why do these gaps exist, and how can these issues be addressed in future sustainability research?
• Which sustainability issue or issues (environmental and/or socio-economic) will become significantly more salient in the decade(s) immediately ahead, and how should sustainability researchers approach these for maximum impact?
• Since most of us have either family members or friends who are in one or more “future generations”, how can and should these personal connections to the future influence our research to help contribute to their welfare long after we move to the next stages of our careers and lives?
• How can we collaborate with colleagues in related sustainability fields to join us in researching salient sustainability issues, providing broader (and perhaps deeper and more effective) perspectives on how sustainability opportunities and challenges can be be approached jointly? Particularly, how can multiple social sciences collaborate /have collaborated with the analysis of sustainability management in organizations?
• How might technology, whether classified as hardware, software, or “warmware”, be used by either us or by others in society (such as practitioners and our other stakeholders) to leverage sustainability opportunities and tackle sustainability challenges with positive sustainability results?
• Whatever your current level and status in sustainability academia, what kind of sustainability legacy would you like to eventually develop that you think would be seen as having a positive sustainability impact?
• How can social and environmental sustainability management phenomena be integrated for “total” or “holistic” sustainability approaches, whether through integrated sustainability indicators, approaches, policies, values, strategies, programs, or results?
• Speaking of integration of sustainability phenomena, how can academic and practitioner sustainability management efforts and achievements be better connected to one another in the future, perhaps learning from the “non-successes” of these efforts in the past?
• What are the antecedents and outcomes of organizational and inter-organizational sustainability capability generation at regional, national, and global levels?
• What academic theories have contributed to practical sustainability results, are new sustainability theories needed if these results have not been sufficient, and how might academics best communicate these theories and their actual or potential impacts to their multiple sustainability-oriented stakeholders for maximum impact toward sustainability solutions?

These and many other related past, present, and future sustainability phenomena are appropriate and welcomed for this “re-booted” O&E journal issue. We encourage sustainability scholars from multiple disciplines to contact either of the co-editors about their “sustainability-in-transition” ideas and to think, feel, and write “outside the box”. In addition, please also feel free to consult with the co-editors to discuss how their potential submissions can help redirect and take the journal to the next level of quality and impact.

For paper submission, authors will be required to set up an online account on the SAGETrack system hosted by ScholarOne. All manuscripts should be submitted via http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/oe.

Your suggestions for future issues are also welcomed, so please contact either Mark Starik (mark.starik@gmail.com) or Alberto Aragon-Correa (jaragon@ugr.es) to develop new, interesting, and impactful ideas for this and future O&E issues. A new O&E Editorial Board will be forming with the goal of increasing the quality and readership of the journal by becoming both more rigorous and relevant in addressing the sustainability issues of our time.

Let’s make future generations of sustainability scholars proud of our achievements and our efforts to provide the foundations for truly sustainable human organizations, including the individuals within them and the societies of which they are key elements!

To learn more about Organization & Environment, please click here.

Call For Papers: Eco-Innovation in Hospitality and Tourism

epSos.de (CC BY 2.0)

Do you have a sound, useful, and practical message about innovative and sustainable practices of interest to managers in the hospitality industry? Submit your research to the upcoming special issue of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly: Sustainable and Eco-Innovative Practices in Hospitality and Tourism.

Special Issue:

Hospitality companies are cognizant of the importance of innovation and a proactive environmental approach to successful operation. Consequently, hospitality and tourism organizations are striving to be eco-friendly while maintaining their competitive edge financially. In support of this effort, we are seeking research that helps hospitality organizations create sustainable solutions that make best use of core resources and improve organizational efficiencies while reducing our collective carbon foot print. Research that helps hospitality and tourism organizations become operationally productive, socially responsible and proactively ‘eco-innovative’ citizens of the society is highly encouraged.

Submit Papers in these Areas:

Areas of inquiry may include but are not limited to:

• New models, frameworks, and explanations for the hospitality and tourism fields with a
• focus on sustainability
• Economics of sustainable decisions – qualitative and quantitative approaches
• Best eco-innovative practices in travel, tourism & hospitality organizations
• Defining sustainability – a critical review of current literature and suggestions for future
• ISO 400, Nordic Swan Green Palms – comparative analysis of Green tools and measures
• Scale development for measuring Green firms of tomorrow
• Case studies of champions of sustainability, social responsibility, eco-innovation and
• Green practices from hospitality and tourism
• ‘Going Green’ from an interdisciplinary perspective

Deadlines:

Abstracts Submissions – October 15th , 2012
Abstract Decisions – Nov. 15th, 2012
FULL Paper Submission – January 15th 2013
Full Paper Decisions – March 15th 2013
Submission of Revisions – April 15th 2013
Revision Decisions – May 15th, 2013

How To Submit:

Prospective authors are strongly encouraged to contact the special issue editors regarding potential topics of interest or any questions / suggestions regarding the special issue. Click here for contact information. All manuscripts should be submitted online via
mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cq only.

Please click here for more information and complete submission guidelines.

A Just Cup of Coffee: From Fair Trade to Human Happiness

Photo used in the Journal of Macromarketing with permission of TransFair USA.

As public awareness and advertising have increased, fair trade coffee has gathered mainstream appeal, but what are its real-life impacts on the economy, sustainability, and human well-being?

For today’s post, we’ve compiled an assortment of articles that study coffee and community from a marketing and political economy perspective. The Review of Radical Political Economics takes us to Uganda’s Mirembe Kawomera (“Delicious Peace”) cooperative, arguing for the economic rationality of promoting community rather than consumerism; the Journal of Macromarketing looks at the fair trade coffee movement’s effects on quality of life for participants in Nicaragua, Peru, and Guatemala; and The Journal of Environment & Development examines the global coffee sector as a venue for social and environmental certification initiatives.

We hope you find this selection insightful and thought-provoking.

Nancy Neiman Auerbach of Scripps College

“Delicious Peace Coffee: Marketing Community in Uganda”

Review of Radical Political Economics (April 4, 2012)

 
 

Stephanie Geiger-Oneto and Eric J. Arnould, both of the University of Wyoming

“Alternative Trade Organization and Subjective Quality of Life : The Case of Latin American Coffee Producers”

Journal of Macromarketing (April 19, 2011)

 
 

Graeme Auld of Carleton University

“Assessing Certification as Governance: Effects and Broader Consequences for Coffee”

The Journal of Environment & Development (June 2010)

 
 

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