Sustainability, Epistemology, Ecocentric Business, and Marketing Strategy: Ideology, Reality, and Vision

This conceptual article examines the relationship between marketing and sustainability through the dual lenses of anthropocentric and ecocentric epistemology. Using the current anthropocentric epistemology and its associated dominant social paradigm, corporate ecological sustainability in commercial practice and business school research and teaching is difficult to achieve. However, adopting an ecocentric epistemology enables the development of an alternative business and marketing approach that places equal importance on nature, the planet, and ecological sustainability as the source of human and other species’ well-being, as well as the source of all products and services. This article examines ecocentric, transformational business, and marketing strategies epistemologically, conceptually and practically and thereby proposes six ecocentric, transformational, strategic marketing universal premises as part of a vision of and solution to current global un-sustainability. Finally, this article outlines several opportunities for management practice and further research.     

Rethinking managership,leadership, followership,and partnership

Organizations underperform, or fail, when members avoid partnering with managers—whether through subtle resistance, disagreement, protest, or walkout—to achieve common purpose. Managers should boost partnering not by affecting a pretense of leadership but through a nuanced balance of managerial authority and understanding of members’ points of view. The objective of this article is to sharpen attention on the concept of partnership with organization members and how it relates to some of the important previous literature. We also argue that some of the previous scholarly work contributes to misconceptions related to these concepts. Our work is forward-looking in that it is motivated by the dangerous societal and cultural differences evident in the world, differences that surround management’s decisions and that may induce an overuse of authority to quash disquiet. Using our experiences in both industry and academia, we argue that the crucial link between managers and members is leadership—not leadership thought of as directional and inspirational, but leadership as building a relationship toward common purpose through partnership. “Lead” and “leader” are sorely misused terms, and worse, substituting “leader” for “manager” is just plain wrong. We believe that managers become leaders only when followers agree to follow, not when the managers simply step forward energetically with direction. Managers are cheated by mistaken definitions. Reviewing past perspectives about what makes good leaders and managers, we rethink ways to enhance organizational harmony through a clearer understanding of managership, leadership, followership, and partnership. Only by thinking and acting as partners in common purpose can managers and members form the core of success in organizational endeavors.     

Trust,terrorism, and technology

The development of civilization implies an evolution of complex trust mechanisms which integrate the social system and form bonds which allow individuals to interact, even if they are strangers. Key elements of trust are predictability of consequences and an evaluation of consequences in terms of self-interest or values. Values, ethics, and norms enhance predictability. The terrorist introduces an unpredictable event which has negative consequences, thus destroying trust. However, terrorist-like situations occur in day-to-day activities. Technology itself makes the world more interdependent and less predictable. Furthermore, technological accidents and disasters, which are also unpredictable and negative, may prompt individuals to perceive technology as if it were a terrorist. Louis H. Bluhm is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Mississippi State University. He has written several articles which have been published in Rural Sociology, and with P. M. Shingi he has written a chapter in a book.     

Networks,firms, and trade

Fixed costs associated with learning about demand and setting up distribution networks are expected to be lower when there are more potential contacts in the destination market, suggesting a greater probability of market entry and larger export revenues. We match historically-determined emigration stocks with detailed firm-level data from Portugal to examine the effect of migrant networks on these export outcomes. We find that larger stocks of emigrants in a given destination increase export participation and intensity. In addition, we show that the former of these effects tends to be more pronounced among firms that are more likely to have close ties with the emigrants. These results are consistent with a multiple-destination version of the Melitz (2003) model featuring market-specific entry costs and idiosyncratic firm-destination demand shocks.     

Exit,voice, and ethics

Hirschman's (1970) exit, voice, and loyalty framework draws attention to both economic and political behavior as instruments for organizational change. The framework is simple but powerful; it has stimulated much cross-disciplinary analysis and debate. This paper extends this analysis by examining normative implications of Hirschman's basic premise: that exit and voice are primarily mechanisms for enhancing organizational (vs. individual) well-being. Michael Keeley is Professor of Management and Director of the Graduate School of Business at Loyola University of Chicago. His research interests involve normative organization theory, especially effectiveness theory. Major publications include A Social Contract Theory of Organizations.Jill W. Graham is an Assistant Professor of Management at Loyola University of Chicago. Her areas of research interest include principled organizational dissent, organizational citizenship behavior from a political perspective, organizational loyalty, and servant-leadership.     

Women, Ethics, and MBAs

We argue that the declining female enrollment in graduate business schools is a manifestation of gender bias in business education. The extant conceptual foundation of business education is one which views business activity in terms of a game with fixed and wholly material objectives. This concept betrays an underlying value system that reflects a male orientation. Business education is not merely amoral, therefore, but is gender biased. We suggest that business educators adopt a broadened behavioral rubric. Virtue-ethics theory provides such a rubric.     

Devaluation,Innovation, and Prices

We investigate the effects of exchange rate changes on innovation by a multinational corporation. The firm enjoys a monopoly in the home market but engages in Cournot competition with a domestic firm in the foreign market. Changes in currency values affect the multinational firm’s profits in domestic currency units, and thus influence the optimal level of process innovation as well as output and prices in the two markets. We find that a devaluation of the home currency will lead the home firm to increase its output in both the home and foreign markets, and increase its spending on R&D. We also find that currency devaluation in the home market leads to lower prices in both markets.     

Fairness,trade, and inequality

We develop a model of international trade between two symmetric countries that features inter-group inequality between managers and workers, and also intra-group inequality within each of those two groups. Individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their managerial ability, and firms run by more able managers have a higher productivity level and make higher profits. There is rent sharing at the firm level due to fair wage preferences of workers, and hence firms with higher profits pay higher wages in equilibrium in order to elicit their workers' full effort. We show that in this framework international trade leads to a self-selection of the best firms into export status, with exporting firms having to pay a wage premium. Aggregate welfare increases, but there is also larger inequality along multiple dimensions: Involuntary unemployment and income inequality between managers and workers increase, and so does inequality within these two subgroups of individuals, as measured by the respective Gini coefficients.     

Islam,entrepreneurship, and embeddedness

This study centers on the premise that entrepreneurship is an embedded process. Although “the entrepreneur” is inherently an “individual,” entrepreneurship can never be fully disembedded from the more general social settings within which any business venture is situated. An Islamic‐based economic discursive framework should be cognizant of the different forms of sociality, spatiality, and community as well as the various norms, codes, and symbols that define society more generally. The work of Karl Polanyi on embeddedness is engaged and juxtaposed with Islam's understanding of the ideal mode of economic discursive practices. Islamic economic models and Polanyi are both critical of the corrosive effects of unbridled capitalism and individualism that ultimately lead to reification and exploitation. The conclusion recommends more small‐N case studies by researchers and entrepreneurial educational materials that emphasize the importance of networks and local embeddedness.     

Ideation,entrepreneurship, and innovation

In this his paper I discuss the origins of ideas starting with Locke. I do this to motivate the question: Why do scholars of entrepreneurship, innovation, and enterprise dynamics need to know about the sources of ideas that lead to new technology and innovation. I suggest and illustrate an answer to this question as well: One might want to think about the source of ideas if one seeks a perspective, theoretical or empirical, about covariates with successful R&D-based activities.     

Trade, turnover, and tithing

This paper examines the hypothesis that turnover affects trade preferences. High turnover industries are similar to the Stolper-Samuelson assumption of perfect factor mobility, so factor of production drives trade preferences. Among low turnover industries, as in the specific factors model, net export position determines trade preferences. We show that PAC contribution patterns are consistent with this hypothesis. In high turnover industries, capital groups give significantly larger shares of their campaign contributions to free trade supporters than labor groups do. Among low turnover industries, on the other hand, exporting and import-competing groups differ significantly in their financial support for free traders.