Sustainability Scholarship Research Articles

Understanding and Enhancing Food Conservation Behaviors and Operations

This study explores the dynamics of food conservation behaviors and operations, shifting the lens from the prevalent narrative of food waste reduction to a marketing perspective that emphasizes consumer engagement in sustainable operations. Amidst the rapid urban transformation and economic progress of many countries, this research examines factors influencing individual behaviors toward responsible food operations. It aims to delineate the motivational drivers and deterrents affecting residents’ engagement in food conservation and operations, utilizing an adapted framework based on the theory of planned behavior. We employ partial least squares structural equation modeling to analyze responses from 390 residents. We find that perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, and attitudes significantly enhance intentions to conserve food. Moreover, environmental concerns amplify both attitudes and perceived behavioral control, while green marketing communications and knowledge elevate attitudes, environmental mindfulness, and conservation actions. A connection to nature is substantiated as a reinforcing factor for pro-environmental attitudes and operations. Notably, attitudes are identified as a critical mediator among the examined constructs. This investigation enriches sustainability scholarship by introducing a positive behavior-focused approach, advancing the discourse on sustainable operations. It offers actionable insights for market-driven interventions, policy-making (such as China’s lastest national policies on food security and rural region revitalization in 2024), and educational endeavors to mitigate food wastage and reinforce food supply chain resilience globally.

Directing personal sustainability science toward subjective experience: conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry into inner worlds

Despite the rapid expansion of sustainability science in recent decades, sustainability crises have continued to grow. Sustainability researchers argue that this is partly the result of neglecting people’s inner worlds and call for a stronger consideration of inner states and processes in sustainability scholarship. We argue that the advancement of personal sustainability science, i.e., the systematic inquiry of inner worlds in relation to sustainability, is currently impeded by at least two unresolved issues. First, attitudes, emotions, values, and the like have frequently been the object of sustainability-related research. It thus remains unclear to what exactly researchers should more closely look at when inquiring into people’s inner worlds. Second, the epistemological and methodological foundations for conducting research on inner worlds remain underdeveloped. We illustrate that current research activities usually remain at a phenomenologically shallow level. In response to these issues, we provide conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry within personal sustainability science, allowing for an in-depth understanding and potentially even a transformation of people’s inner worlds with regard to sustainability. Overall, we suggest redirecting personal sustainability science more strongly toward the inquiry into people’s subjective (i.e., first-person) experiences of inner states and processes unfolding in relation to sustainability.

Farm households and the elusiveness of social sustainability: Contrasting the emotional registers of organic and conventional producers

In sustainability scholarship broadly and sustainable agriculture research specifically, the ‘social’ facets of a system have long been considered the least well understood and most difficult to operationalize. Efforts to compare organic and conventional agricultural production have often left the social dimensions of these systems unexplored. This article presents results from a 2020 statewide survey of farmers in Ohio, USA. Rooted in both classic agri-family theories of family farm change and contemporary theoretical calls to attend to the affective dimensions of agriculture, the paper analyzes farmers' socio-emotional responses to the 2019 growing season, a particularly stressful agricultural year. It uses bivariate analyses to compare organic and conventional producers' experiences of stressors and compare their reported levels of satisfaction, optimism, and stress. Although organic producers experienced significantly more stressful events, they also reported feeling more optimistic, more satisfied, and less stressed. These findings suggest that farm studies focused exclusively on financial, production, or attitudinal variables may miss key facets that differentiate organic from conventional production. Considering the structural and demographic conditions of the eastern Corn Belt, the article discusses how social sustainability relates to regionally specific processes of conventionalization and may illuminate feedback loops between farm households' emotional experiences and organic sector growth.

‘You have to keep it going’: Relational values and social sustainability in upland agriculture

AbstractA transition to a more sustainable food production system in Europe has significant implications for the social constitution of rural spaces. Moreover, research has highlighted that engagement with sustainability initiatives can be affected by people's desire to maintain aspects of their current social realities pertaining to occupations, traditions and lifestyles. Farmers are central to a sustainable agricultural transition, yet are also socially embedded in the spaces that are targeted for transformation. This article engages with this dilemma through an exploration of farmer values in an upland farming area in Ireland. Specifically, we draw on qualitative case‐study data to explore how farmers value their occupation, lifestyles and social structures in terms of the relationships in which they operate. We highlight a range of dimensions through which case‐study farmers value farming—especially as autonomous, outdoor work—in terms of tacit skills and knowledge, familial legacies and certain forms of social organisation. Conceptually, this article builds on calls from within social sustainability scholarship to engage with social aspects of sustainable development. We develop and deploy a relational values analytic framework, which offers a simple yet effective lens for exploring farmer values in terms of the relationships through which they are generated and articulated. Through this framework, we explore how different individuals value their farming occupations and lifestyles. Moreover, by focusing on the relational dimension, we tease out the multiple and sometimes conflicting values that individuals navigate in relation to their farming occupations. We conclude that this kind of approach could enhance understanding of farmer engagement with (or resistance to) sustainable agriculture initiatives.

Smart manufacturing and sustainability: a bibliometric analysis

PurposeDuring the past decade, the necessity to integrate manufacturing and sustainability has increased mainly to reduce the adverse effect on the manufacturing industry, transforming traditional manufacturing into smart manufacturing by adopting the latest manufacturing technology as part of the Industry 4.0 revolution. Smart manufacturing has piqued the interest of both academics and industry. Manufacturing is a foundation of products and services required for human health, safety, and well-being in modern society and from an organizational standpoint. This paper uses bibliometric analysis better to understand the relationship between smart manufacturing and sustainability scholarship and provide an up-to-date account of current industry practices.Design/methodology/approachThis paper used the bibliometric analysis method to analyze and draw conclusions from 839 articles retrieved from the Scopus database from 1994 to February 2022. The methodology is divided into four steps: data collection, analysis, visualization, and interpretation. The current study aims to comprehend smart manufacturing and sustainability scholarship using the bibliometric R-package and VOSviewer software.FindingsThe study provides fascinating insights that may assist scholars, industry professionals, and top management in conceptualizing smart manufacturing and sustainability in their organizations. The results show that the number of publications has significantly increased from 2015 onwards, reaching a maximum of 317 journals in 2021 with an increasing publication annual growth rate of 21.9%. The United Kingdom, India, the United States of America, Italy, France, Brazil and China were the most productive countries in terms of the total number of publications. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Cleaner Production, International Journal of Production Research, Production Planning and Control, Business Strategy and the Environment Technology in Society, and Benchmarking: An International Journal emerged as the top outlets.Research limitations/implicationsThe research in the area of smart manufacturing and sustainability is underpinned by this study, which aims to understand the trends in this field over the last two decades in terms of prolific authors, most influential journals, key themes, and the field's intellectual and social structure. However, according to the research, this field is still in its early stages of development. As a result, a more in-depth analysis is required to aid in the development of a better understanding of this new field.Originality/valueThe paper focuses on integrating smart manufacturing and sustainability through increased interest from 2015 onwards through the literature review. Specific policies should be formulated to improve the manufacturing sector's competence. Furthermore, these findings can guide researchers who want to delve deeper into smart manufacturing and sustainability.

The algebra of the protagonist: sustainability, normativity and storytelling

As advances in scientific, technological, economic and policy dimensions of sustainability challenges fail to produce widespread transformative change, an awareness of their ultimate insufficiency grows. In response, sustainability scholarship and activism are increasingly focused on sustainability’s normative dimensions, identity, belief, meaning, purpose, etc. With this recognition comes a growing turn towards narrative as the expressive vehicles of our normativity. In this paper, we aim to build on (Fløttum and Gjerstand. 2017. ‘Narratives in Climate Change Discourse.’ WIREs climate change. 8.) efforts to develop more precise and structured relationships between sustainability and narratives by looking at what the field can learn from storytelling more specifically. We explore this first by exploring story structure as our society’s ubiquitous theory of change; and second, how the story constructs its protagonist to activate the transformative dynamics inherent in story structure. We then conclude by exploring the implications these observations have for sustainability research more broadly.

Toward a digital transformation of the theory of the firm: Emergence as framework for organizational sustainability

AbstractEmbracing methodological individualism, the mainstream economic theory of the firm has little to say about the precarious nature of the firm's embeddedness in encompassing socioecological systems. The digital transformation of the theory of the firm can address this gap by deconstructing the standpoint of methodological individualism. In transaction cost economics, this standpoint is manifest in two assumptions about human nature, namely bounded rationality and opportunism. Drawing on Chester Barnard's insights on the firm, the present paper seeks to construct a view of organizations as emergent systems irreducible to the activities of participating individuals. By inverting the assumptions of bounded rationality and opportunism, the paper differentiates between two varieties of the emergent nature of the firm, cognitive and moral. The ideas of the cognitive and moral emergence of the firm expand the pallet of options for the firm to adapt to socioecological systems and illuminate the notion of sustainability transitions. This way, the digitally enhanced understanding of the firm offers hope for a better dialogue between the economic theory of the firm, sustainability scholarship, and business ethics.

Bringing the Environment Back In: Overcoming the Tragedy of the Diffusion of the Commons Metaphor

Contrary to calls for increased relevance, the discipline of political science has had lasting impacts in shaping environmental policy analysis. The ideas and approach advocated by former APSA president Elinor Ostrom, most comprehensively articulated inGoverning the Commons, have diffused to shape or reinforce generations of sustainability scholarship. We identify four “ideal type” problem conceptions that are distinguished based on their consistency or inconsistency with Ostrom’s inductive approach to problem structure and economic welfare emphasis, and four corresponding schools that reinforce each: commons (Type 1), economic optimization (Type 2), compromise (Type 3), and prioritization (Type 4). Whereas the prioritization school seeks to understand and identify lessons for minimizing the impact of human activity on the natural environment, the diffusion of the commons’ metaphor has led political scientists to champion frameworks that bias Type 3, 2, and 1 orientations. The latter all rest on moral underpinnings that promote human material interests as their goal, rather than recognizing them as also a primary cause of environmental degradation. A fundamental conceptual reorientation is required if social scientists in general, and political scientists in particular, are to generate an understanding of and identify tools for ameliorating rather than exacerbating today’s Type 4 climate change and species extinction crises.

Quality of Life and the Carbon Footprint: A Zip-Code Level Study Across the United States

Much sustainability scholarship has examined the environmental dimensions of subjective and objective well-being. As an alternative measure of human well-being, we consider the notion of quality of life and draw on a framework from the sustainability literature to study its association with ecological impact, specifically the carbon footprint. We conduct a quantitative analysis, combining zip-code level data on quality of life and the carbon footprint per household for the year 2012 across the continental United States ( n=29,953). Findings consistently show a significant, negative association between quality of life and the carbon footprint. Our findings point to the potential advantages of utilizing robust objective measures of quality of life that extends beyond economic well-being and life expectancy alone. Furthermore, our findings question the conventional wisdom that sustainability requires sacrifices, while suggesting opportunities for how increased levels of sustainability may be achieved while retaining high levels of quality of life.

Introduction to the special issue on sustainability and digital transformation

This piece introduces the special issue of First Monday focused on the topic of Sustainability and Digital Transformation. This collection is a forum for that conversation to develop as a venue in which social scientists, STS scholars, and other digital scholars explore the concept of digital sustainability. This special issue emerges in the context of two notable social trends. First, there is a push for global sustainable development, and second, all sectors of human endeavor are migrating into the digital sphere. These two trends combine into a single, nascent theme of digital sustainability, which is the topic of this collection of articles in First Monday. The focus is upon the role(s) of digital technologies in establishing a sustainable world. The collection includes seven papers, which make a modest contribution to the growing discourse about the sociological aspects of all things digital in sustainability practices. The aim is to establish a research agenda focusing on digital technologies' current and potential role (but also limitations). The articles pay special attention to the intricate interplay of technology, social dynamics of media, sustainability practices, and information change. The contributors have provided individual works that contribute to the digital sustainability scholarship, some conceptual and others analytical. The collection invites the reader to consider sustainability and the ever-expanding integration of digital technologies in various aspects of social life

Experiencing the Macromarketing Dimensions of Sustainability: Lessons Learned From Field Trips to the Ultra Novel

This paper seeks to determine the value of field trips that help establish macromarketing and sustainability scholarship in mainstream business/marketing education. It explores the experiences of postgraduate marketing and business strategy students undertaking a field trip to the “World’s Greenest Football Club,” Forest Green Rovers. It responds to the call to establish the macromarketing viewpoint within business and management education and provides contemporary insight into the hitherto unexplored use of field trips for postgraduate students. Through student focus groups, the study identifies the importance of selecting field trip locations where the complex and interwoven interplay of meso, micro, and macro activities can be critically evaluated through multiple stakeholder interactions. In addition, it points to the value of students experiencing “ultra-novel” organizations and situations to motivate learning, stimulate critical debate, and thereby facilitate cognition of macromarketing systems and sustainability.

Integration of food waste composting and vegetable gardens in a university campus

Local composting (household, community and small scale applications) is considered a sustainable option for bio-waste recovery and is receiving increasing demand from society. Higher education institutions are no exception, but detailed and comprehensive long-term studies on composting programs on university campuses are lacking. The local composting program of the University of A Coruña (UDC) offers a decentralized service for the treatment of food waste from 11 university canteens using static and dynamic composters located in 9 different composting areas. Considering the three pillars of sustainability, this work describes the characteristics of the different composting technologies used and their investment and operational costs, the routine monitoring process and product quality, the integration of the composting systems as living labs for biotechnology and environmental engineering courses, and the use of compost in the university vegetable gardens. The agents involved in the project are the canteen staff, the university gardening company, external composting operators, university researchers and teachers, sustainability scholarship students and volunteer people. Organic waste is usually delivered directly by canteen staff to composters. The gardening service provides green waste from UDC campus (crushed pruning) that is used as bulking material. The monitoring and maintenance of the composting areas is currently in charge of external staff provided by a local NGO dedicated to cooperation and job reintegration of the unemployed. The service also allows the incorporation of volunteers and scholarship students as operators and process monitoring supervisors. The main result of this project was the prevention of a large amount of waste that did not require collection and transportation, or disposal or incineration. This is being done in an economically sustainable way, as decentralized composting costs have been lower than the average costs of municipal solid waste treatment in the region. The lower investment costs of static composters largely offset the higher labour costs and result in lower overall costs than those of the dynamic composter. The dissemination of composting practice to society was another important outcome of the project.

How to serve sustainability performance in businesses? An appetizing recipe to link practices to performance in business sustainability research

AbstractRecent critiques claim that business sustainability scholarship offers little evidence on how to effectively address business unsustainability. In this article, we demonstrate why this problem exists. Specifically, we argue that the literatures on internal practices of business sustainability, and on the sustainability performance of businesses, do not speak to each other and that explanatory models also fail to bridge a corresponding gap in the field. We argue for the development of a subfield of sustainability performance in businesses and explain the types of inquiries that should be developed. Finally, we suggest how scholars in the business sustainability field could contribute to the development of better understanding of sustainability performance in businesses.

What Will a PhD Look Like in the Future? Perspectives on Emerging Trends in Sustainability Doctoral Programs in a Time of Disruption

In this perspective paper, we aim to provide insights that can help academic institutions and transdisciplinary doctoral programs position themselves within a changing research landscape and prepare for future disruption. We are a group of eight first-year, transdisciplinary doctoral students at the University of Waterloo, representing diverse disciplinary perspectives and gender and cultural experiences. In the process of orienting ourselves as sustainability researchers, we conducted collaborative workshops to critically examine our intellectual and disciplinary positionality by reflecting on the question: What will a PhD look like in the future? Amid this process, the coronavirus pandemic happened, causing a major disruption to our research activity and personal lives. What began as a reflective process on doctoral research shifted toward a more substantive and far reaching discussion about disruption and academia. Through our workshops we identified four emerging trends in the domain of sustainability scholarship that are shaping the future of the academic experience: shifts from disciplinarity to transdisciplinarity; researchers as knowledge holders to knowledge brokers; researcher competencies as bounded to boundary-less; and metrics of success as citation impact to societal impact. We also identified three broad trends in the context of academia that were accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic and may be exacerbated by future disruptions: (1) increasing virtualization of research and teaching; (2) increasing need for flexibility of academic structures and processes; and (3) growing economic and socio-political uncertainty. We offer concrete recommendations that encourage doctoral students and programs to play a more fundamental role in solving complex challenges in a disrupted academic and social landscape. We conclude with our vision of the PhD student of the future as one who thrives in transdisciplinary settings, links society and science through knowledge brokering, spans boundaries between multiple epistemologies to communicate and collaborate through uncertainty, and prioritizes societal impact.

Perspectives of scholars on the nature of sustainability: a survey study

Purpose This paper aims to investigate different ways in which faculty members of sustainability-related departments in universities across the world perceive, understand and define sustainability and how these definitions are linked to their demographics and epistemological beliefs. Design/methodology/approach Scholars from different disciplines investigate the sustainability of social-ecological systems from different perspectives. Such differences in the understanding of, and approaches to, sustainability have created ambiguity within the field and may weaken its effectiveness, impact and reputation as a field of research. To contribute to the discussion about sustainability definition, a survey was conducted involving university faculty members working in sustainability-related academic departments around the world. Participants’ responses were analyzed using SPSS 24.0 involving descriptive and inferential statistics and principle component analysis. Additionally, responses to open-ended questions were qualitatively analyzed. Findings Factor analysis on sustainability definition items reveal four emergent universal definitions of sustainability, labeled as Environmentalism concerns, Common understanding, neo-Malthusian environmentalism and Sustainability as well-being. Statistical analyses indicate that individuals from developed countries are more likely to define sustainability as Environmentalism and Common understanding; however, individuals from developing countries tend to define sustainability as well-being. Also, more heavily engaged scholars in interdisciplinary research of sustainability are more likely to perceive sustainability as Common understanding. Logistic Regression models demonstrate a connection between epistemological perspectives of researchers and sustainability definitions. Qualitative content analysis indicates that interdisciplinarity and collaboration are the most common challenges to sustainability research. Originality/value The findings of this study demonstrate disconnects between scholars from developing and developed countries in understanding and defining sustainability, and these disconnects may present further challenges for global sustainability scholarship.

Science Mapping of the Global Knowledge Base on Microfinance: Influential Authors and Documents, 1989–2019

The use of microfinance in poverty alleviation and, by extension, as an instrument for sustainable social and economic development, represents a novel idea in sustainable finance. This study employed science mapping to examine 4049 Scopus-indexed documents explicitly concerned with microfinance. The goals of the review were to document the distribution of microfinance literature by type, volume, time, and geography, and to identify influential authors, articles, and a potential intellectual structure of this knowledge base. The first microfinance research was conducted in 1989, but the field attracted increased attention only after 2006, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus. This study does not find any single dominant school of thought in the field of microfinance, but rather identified three thematic research clusters: (1) a concentration on institutional aspects of microfinance, (2) scholars who used sophisticated research methods to evaluate the impact of microfinance, and (3) groundbreaking microfinance literature related to social justice more generally. As the first-ever, comprehensive bibliometric review of research on microfinance, this study provides benchmarks against which to assess the future evolution of this literature, a reference for scholars entering this domain, and targets for future development of this field of sustainability scholarship.

Influence of sustainability scholarship on competencies – an empirical evidence

Purpose Curricula is developing from a pure knowledge-based outcome to a more skill-based outcome, with the objective of creating and advancing competencies that meet employer expectations. While the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) demand organisations to change practices and adapt to sustainable goals, there is a lack of understanding in how competencies can enhance these goals. The purpose of this paper is twofold: Study 1 explores competencies related to sustainability required in a work force and examines employer perceptions on the existing literature for competencies. Study 2 empirically tests the influence of sustainability scholarship on non-technical competencies in the work force. Design/methodology/approach A mixed method approach was undertaken. A sample of managers from 39 large Australian organisations participated in the scoping study. This was followed by further interviewing executives from 12 multinational corporations in China to assess the validity of competencies and provide deeper understanding of the issues at hand. The quantitative study analysed a sample of executive responses from 229 multinationals in China using factor and regression analysis to test for the effects of mediation. Findings The research highlights that the underlying competencies regarding sustainability influences the bigger picture within firms for attaining sustainability. The affective and cognitive growth of sustainability scholarship is governed mainly by a firm’s sustainable values. Core organisational values facilitate the development of non-technical competencies. These relationships and their cumulative effect on competencies provide a theoretical framework for acquiring sustainability within organisations. Employees need sustainability scholarship for enhancing sustainability. Sustainability scholarship reflects high-level learning obtained through universities or training. The research found that non-technical competencies such as professional ethical responsibility mediate between core business competencies and sustainability scholarship. Originality/value By exploring employer’s perception of competencies, the study first makes an important contribution in addressing the need to support SDGs by bridging organisational-level competencies and sustainability literacy, which hold significant benefits for practitioners, academia and organisations at large. Second, the theoretical findings strengthen the need for embedding competencies in the curriculum. It conveys the need for sustainability literacy/scholarship to align with organisational training and learning pedagogies, in order to effectively meet industry needs. Third, it provides useful insights on employers’ estimation about workplace competencies and broadens our understanding on the contribution that competencies within organisations make to this end.

Geographic perspectives on urban sustainability: past, current, and future research trajectories

ABSTRACTThe 21st century has been called the “century of the city” and compounded concerns that current development pathways were not sustainable. Calls for scholarship on urban sustainability among geographers cites strengths in the human-environment and urban subfields that positioned the discipline to make unique contributions to critical research needs. This special issue reflects on the contributions that geographers have made to urban sustainability scholarship. We observe that that integration across human-environment and urban subfields reflects broader bifurcations between social theory and spatial science traditions in geography. Piggy-backing on the rise of sustainability science, the emergence of urbanization science compels geographers to reflect upon the ways in which we are positioned to make unique contributions to those fields. We argue that those contributions should embrace systems thinking, empirically connect social constructs to biophysical patterns and processes, and use the city as a laboratory to generate new theories.

Critical sustainable consumption: a research agenda

Sustainability scholarship is increasingly focused on individual behavior change and sustainable consumption as crucial components of engendering more sustainable societies. Practices like bicycling to work, recycling and reusing goods, and eating organic food are heralded as both integral to and generative of larger societal transformations. Scholars have begun to identify the individual and societal conditions that can help enable such practices while also examining social, cultural, and systemic dynamics driving over-consumption, particularly in the developed world. Additionally, questions of social and cultural identity have been interrogated, as the cultural politics of sustainable consumption emerges as a key sub-field in its own right. While more recent work has begun to focus on linking individual environmentalisms with the collective processes of changing social systems, sustainable consumption as an analytical concept has largely lacked any deep engagement with questions of power or politics. Questions of power, legitimacy, authority, and consequently justice remain largely unexamined in this field of research. In this paper, I draw on research examining sustainable consumption in India to present an argument for a new direction in sustainable consumption research that prioritizes a critical perspective and is grounded in critical social theory. I argue that sustainable consumption researchers need to look at relational and structural power within sustainable consumption efforts to see how these efforts challenge or reinforce existing patterns of oppression and marginalization and outline a “critical sustainable consumption” disposition to permeate sustainable consumption study and practice.

Environmental sustainability scholarship and the efforts of the sport sector: A rapid review of literature

The sport sector has witnessed a shift where organizations at all levels have begun to place considerable importance on becoming more environmentally conscientious. Simultaneously a growing body of...