Competition and Sustainability: The Impact of Consumer Awareness

Sustainability, a broad concept that includes numerous environmental and social dimensions, has emerged as an important product evaluation criterion for consumers. We suggest the impact of sustainability on consumer behavior depends on two factors—each individual consumer's unique level of concern about sustainability, and the general level of awareness regarding the sustainability of competing products—that together determine the level of heterogeneity among consumer attitudes toward sustainability. We incorporate sustainability concern and awareness into a model of horizontal competition in a duopoly, where one firm's product is more sustainable than the other's. Our results suggest that marginal increases in awareness can benefit all firms, including the less sustainable one, when awareness is sufficiently high (the explicit goal of recent sustainability labeling initiatives). In several model extensions, we provide additional insights for the following cases: the sustainable firm controls the extent of its sustainability advantage, the sustainable firm can directly influence the general level of awareness, and the distribution of sustainability concern across consumers is nonuniform. Our results enable us to suggest several new insights for managers, both those whose products enjoy a sustainability advantage and those whose products do not.     

农业法的全球性挑战与回应

农业面临着全球化不断推进、粮食安全和食品质量保证、世界人口增加、全球环境问题四方面的挑战.农业法有必要对此予以回应,为可持续农业发展创建具有强制力和可靠性的法律框架,支持和保障农民务农知识的提高和农业科技的发展,对第三次农业革命进行法律调整,解决全球农业法支离破碎的问题.由于农业全球化,硬法和软法在多层次的农业法体系中作用重要,食品安全不仅需要国内法规范,还需要构建国际规范.行之有效的全球食品安全法律体系尚未形成,应该建立对全球粮食安全具有约束力的目标和原则.对中德法律制度进行比较研究,不仅有利于这一法律体系的构建,还有助于克服全球农业法的支离破碎.     

Sustainable lifestyles for all? Disability equality,sustainability and the limitations of current UK policy

In recent years, various environmental threats have been highlighted in relation to disability. Growing knowledge of the effects of climate change and particular impacts on disabled people have been highlighted by a number of authors, including a recent critique of disabled people’s ‘vulnerability’ with respect to environmental hazard. This article focuses on the issue of citizen involvement with climate change mitigation – and more broadly individual and household-level efforts to reduce our impact on the environment. These more mundane aspects of climate change mitigation, for example through transitions to more sustainable lifestyles, also have significant implications for disabled people. The article argues that disability equality is a key component of sustainability. Limitations are demonstrated in policy designed to address these issues using the example of current UK policy, and it is suggested that policy approaches to sustainability should also be a concern of disability studies.     

Competitive renaissance through digital transformation

Dramatic health, environmental, and social-related challenges put pressure on firms to rethink their strategies and growth paths. Is a digital-enabled transformation able to help firms cope with these challenges and drive a competitive renaissance of our economic system? Are extant theories and concepts able to interpret the digital transformation? This management focus section aims to advance a relevant and impactful research agenda in the area of “business strategy and digitalization” through 4 contributions – both conceptual and empirical – that contribute to the understanding of the so-called “digital transformation” and its implications for both scholars and practitioners.     

Humanizing strategy

In this article, we apply our latest thinking on knowledge to provide insights on how to reconceptualize strategy to cope with a VUCA world, epitomized recently by COVID-19. We demonstrate that business leaders must draw on phronesis, or practical wisdom, for strategy to become more future-oriented, society-focused, dynamic, and human-centric. Using in-depth case studies, we show how companies will survive in the long run if they start with a moral purpose, and end by offering value to customers, contributing to society, living in harmony with nature, and creating a new and better future. We came up with six practices that enable business leaders to create new and better futures, citing evidences from neuroscience. We conclude that humans should be at the center of strategy, driving future-making with the help of digital-led automation. Reconceptualizing strategy based on this “inside-out” approach, the reward to the company is resilience, longevity, and sustainability.     

A systematic approach to an organization’s sustainability

This article integrates the concepts of sustainability and quality improvement into a systematic approach to an organization’s sustainability. The article: (a) presents a literature-based model that incorporates the factors that drive an organization’s sustainability; (b) describes how sustainability is operationalized through a systematic approach to quality improvement; (c) discusses the advantages of a systematic approach to sustainability; and (d) shares with the reader literature and experientially-based lessons learned about the approach.     

Seeking urban sustainability on the world stage

Nearly any introduction to the ideas and actions of sustainable development includes a mention of the role played in launching the global movement by the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. International forums have been a major vehicle for the pursuit of sustainability subsequent to 1992, as well, but little attention has been paid to the contribution that these global gatherings have made to the advancement of sustainability goals. This article takes up this question, with a focus on the role that major global gatherings may be playing in the pursuit of urban sustainability, specifically. To this end, we examine outcomes from the United Nations Habitat II Forum (1996, Istanbul), the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002, Johannesburg), the World Social Forum (2001–present, Porto Alegre), and the World Urban Forum 3 (2006, Vancouver), based on reports in the scholarly literature and, in the latter case, based on our own experience as urbanists in the host city of the World Urban Forum 3. For comparative purposes, we include in our review reflections on the contribution made by a United Nations effort towards sustainability, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), made without an accompanying major global gathering. While we do not find evidence of ‘Rio-scale’ success among either the forums or in the case of the MDGs, we report on process and structural innovations made with each forum as well as common critiques of all of them. A primary contribution that all the forums have made to the advancement of urban sustainability has been more clearly differentiating among sustainability's very different types of proponents and charting the landscape of barriers and opportunities for paradigm change towards sustainable urban futures.     

Geographical indications, terroir, and socioeconomic and ecological sustainability: The case of tequila

In this paper, we use the case of tequila to examine the potential for geographical indications (GIs) to contribute to socioeconomic and environmental sustainability. GIs are place-based names (e.g., Champagne, Roquefort) that convey the geographical origin, as well as the cultural and historical identity, of agricultural products. The GI for tequila was established by the Mexican government in 1974, making it the oldest GI, and one of the best-recognized, outside of Europe. Here, we examine the social, economic, and ecological impacts that the agave–tequila industry has had on one community in tequila's region of origin, the town of Amatitán. We show that persistent cycles of surplus and shortage of agave and changing production relations in the agave–tequila industry have led to: (1) economic insecurity among farm households; (2) increased use of chemical inputs, at the expense of more labor-intensive cultivation practices; and (3) overall declines in fertilizer application, especially during periods in which there is a surplus of agave. We argue that the negative effects of the agave–tequila industry on the local economy and environment are due to the failure of the GI for tequila to value the ways in which the terroir of tequila's region of origin have contributed to its specific properties. We conclude by using this case to discuss more generally the relationship between the protection of place-based products (known collectively as geographical indications) and social and environmental sustainability.     

Municipal Budget Management and the Generation of Urban Sprawl. A Case Study of the Lombardy Region (Italy)

ABSTRACT

The paper describes one of the Italian sprawl drivers: the circle triggered by the use of urban charges to solve budget problems. From 2005 to 2018, Italian municipalities could use urban charges to solve normal budget problems: they could plan new urban areas to provide new urban charges, new building and services, and they could manage old and new services at the expense of normal budget. The planning of unnecessary urban areas was effectively influenced by budget problems. The paper illustrates this issue during a period without open data sources in order to improve land management and environmental sustainability.     

The Uplands after neoliberalism? – The role of the small farm in rural sustainability

The modernist project foresaw no role for small farms, but this can no longer be regarded as axiomatic as neoliberalism enters what Peck et al. call its “zombie phase”. This paper asks what contribution small farms in the uplands can make to societies’ goals, what role they might play in the sustainability of rural communities in such regions, and how this contribution might be supported by state policies. In Scotland and in Norway these questions have recently been the subject of policy debates which appear to offer exceptions or alternatives to neoliberal universalism, and these are considered specifically in this paper. In each case support for small farms is seen as necessary to maintain ‘lights in the windows’ of remoter rural areas. Moreover, each highlights the vital role of the state in offering not only financial support but also in regulating land transfers and occupancy. It is argued that the dismantling of such regulatory powers depletes the state’s ability to manage the tensions between continuity and change which are at the heart of sustainable rural development. The paper concludes that small farms can persist and can contribute to rural sustainability in ways that have been infrequently recognised under neoliberalism.