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It is not in doubt that pollution prevention and resource efficiency projects can sometimes make good business sense for an individual enterprise. For organizations that have previously done little to address their environmental impacts, some opportunity frequently exists to lessen those impacts while raising production efficiency and keeping their basic approach to business intact. This was the experience of many businesses during the 1980s and the origins of the suggestion that the environment was a “win-win” issue for business (Walley & Whitehead, 1996). Simply updating production equipment can offer a double dividend, which is partly why so many businesses are able to claim they are getting greener while aggregate environmental conditions deteriorate (McDonough & Braungart, 2002). The unresolved issue is whether an ongoing commitment to improve environmental performance is reflected in ongoing gains in business performance. As expressed by one advocate of eco-industrial development, the issue is not about doing the same with less but rather about doing far more with far less (Cohen-Rosenthal, 2003, p. 22).

This chapter looks at how sensitivity to event design and the creative process for an arts event also can have an impact on its ongoing management and tourist experience, by applying a new assessment tool, sustainable creative advantage (SCA), to gauge its performance.

A case study approach was used to assess SCA for the Sculpture by Sea, Bondi, Sydney 2015, in order to discuss how its management enables satisfying arts leisure experiences. Two key activities in the research were (1) in-depth interviews with organizers, full and volunteer staff, artists, gallery owners, and participants and (2) participant observation of touristic performances and other forms of engagement with the sculptures.

In its 19th edition, the event could still be considered a fresh and inspiring experience for tourists. However, crowding on weekends can affect the experience for all participants. Tactile tours are a unique feature of the event and could be promoted more to tourists, particularly the disabled.

Applying SCA needs careful timing, in order to collect information when interviewees are available and the event itself is running. Approaches should be made to organizers before, during, and after the event for information.

Event organizers could use SCA to understand more about controlling tourist experiences and how creative management and marketing of an event can have an impact on overall participant satisfaction.

Could also offer insights to academics studying glocality and events, the relationship of curatorial power to content/experience, or how such events can add to the study of leisurescapes in cultural tourism.

Green intentional communities are easily dismissed as irrelevant to wider academic and political debates. In the first instance, they comprise small vanguards, fringes or minority groups. Surely then they interest only the readers of rarefied anthropological journals or viewers of voyeuristic television shows?¹ Secondly, they are part of the green movement, itself often cast (derogatorily,² positively,³ or otherwise⁴ as ‘utopian’). Are they not excessively idealist and romantic: wishful day-dreamers? Drawing on the literal meaning of the word utopia, which combines eu (good), ou (non) and topos (place), this chapter explores the idea that green intentional communities are indeed utopias, whereas challenging two common interpretations of that term. The first views it negatively (as unrealistic, unrealisable, excessively wishful thinking) and can be found on the pages of English Dictionaries and in colloquial parlance. The second views utopias as perfectionist: seeking to provide perfect blueprints that map the road to the good life. I shall explore some of the key ways in which these groups perform key utopian functions, suggesting that they are indeed utopian but that their utopianism is deeply imperfect and pragmatic, rooted in the real concerns and material limitations of the now.

The stable and predictable agricultural, infrastructure, manufacturing, and energy economies of hard products have been followed by economies that offer softer products such as services, information, knowledge, health care, digitization, networking, globalization, entertainment, sustainability, and currently, well-being and happiness. Such soft market products are loaded with buyer–seller information asymmetries (BSIA) that create market risk, market uncertainty, market chaos, and ambiguity – all of which are specific types of market turbulence. In this context, this chapter investigates the phenomena of turbulence, specifically environmental turbulence whose major subsets are technological turbulence and market turbulence. We cite several recent geopolitical variables and events that have aggravated market turbulence such as Chinese economic invasion of global markets, global climate change, Brexit, international asylum-seeking migrations, artificial intelligence, and demonetization. We also define market turbulence as varied forms of BSIA for which both marketers and consumers must have appropriate joint responsibility. In addition, we focus on ethical and moral marketing responsibilities for reducing BSIA under each type of turbulence.

Despite recent advances, neither organizational studies nor the scholarship on economic resilience has systematically addressed how the ecologies of organizations that populate local economies can serve as infrastructures for responding proactively to economic shocks. Using county-level data, this study analyzes relationships between the prevalence of organizational alternatives to shareholder value-oriented (SVO) corporations within a particular locality and its unemployment levels during and after the Great Recession. The results support the hypothesis that the presence of such alternative organizations can enhance the capacities of local economies to resist and recover from recession shocks. Cooperative, municipal, and community-based enterprises, research universities, and nonprofits more generally were associated with greater resistance to the recession shock and stronger recoveries – specifically, lower surges in unemployment rates from 2007 to 2010 and greater reductions in unemployment rates from 2010 to 2016. By contrast, SVO corporations were associated with greater surges in unemployment and perhaps weaker recoveries. Providing a proof of concept, this study opens up new lines of inquiry for organizational studies by linking organizational ecologies to the promotion of collective efficacy and a more broadly shared prosperity in economic life.

On November 4, 2015, the Fundão Dam in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais suffered a catastrophic failure and released 60 million cubic meters of toxic, iron-laden mud into the Rio Doce – a major river system that serves 3.6 million people in the Southeast. Owned by Samarco, a joint venture between Brazil’s Companhia do Vale do Rio Doce (CRVD) and Australia’s BHP Billiton Industries, the Fundão Dam was one of the largest mining-oriented water reservoirs in the country. This disaster was identified by IBAMA, the country’s environmental protection agency, as the worst environmental event in Brazil’s industrial history. The disaster’s ramifications continue to unfold, affecting people, wildlife, and ecosystems along the river’s 530-kilometer route through Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo to the Atlantic Ocean. This paper contextualizes the Samarco disaster and its socioecological consequences in a political ecology framework. Specifically, this theoretical research is poised within a politics of scale paradigm. Theory is used to explain the long-standing contradictions between capital and nature through an examination of the Samarco disaster. Specifically, scalar theory explains how capital–nature contradictions facilitated the disaster and Brazil’s on-going struggle to respond to environmental justice at local scales.

The siting of new waste incinerators has often stimulated vigorous opposition. U.S. research concludes that successful campaigns depend upon the discourse and tactics employed by campaigners and the skills and ingenuity of campaigners rather than the static characteristics of local communities. Evidence from recent anti-incinerator campaigns in England suggests otherwise. In England, community characteristics differentiate, but campaigners’ discourse matters less than political opportunities determined by the structure of local political systems, the urgency of local waste authorities’ concerns to find solutions to problems of waste disposal, the sequence of relevant planning decisions, and changes in the national policy context.

This chapter will examine ideological debates currently taking place in academics. Anthropologists – and all academic workers – are at a crossroads. They must determine what it means to “green the academy” in an era of permanent war, “green capitalism,” and the neoliberal university (Sullivan, 2010). As Victor Wallis makes clear, “no serious observer now denies the severity of the environmental crisis, but it is still not widely recognized as a capitalist crisis, that is, as a crisis arising from and perpetuated by the rule of capital, and hence incapable of resolution within the capitalist framework.”

The chapter deals with a service-learning course based in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa. It provides a backdrop for the case study, describing the context in which the course is based and kind of intervention that it aims to make into this context. It then maps out the theoretical framework that informs the course, explaining how this is informed by the available spectrum of approaches to service-learning. It demonstrates how the course draws on the concept of a ‘communicative ecology’, to provide itself with a language in which to reflect on the social significance of communication. The chapter then reviews the first cycle of the course which took place in 2019, drawing on insights from participants (teachers, students and community partners). It deals, firstly, with the participants’ engagement with the concept of service-learning. Secondly, it describes their experience of service-learning as a communicative process. Finally, it describes their evaluation of this process as an intervention into the local communicative ecology. It is demonstrated that service-learning enables the school to respond strategically to the need for innovative communicative practices both in their immediate environment and within the broader South African context.