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To combat climate change, protect biodiversity, maintain water quality, facilitate a just transition for workers and engage citizens and communities, a diversity of stakeholders across multiple levels work together and collaborate to co-create mutually beneficial solutions. This paper aims to illustrate how a 7.5-year collaboration between local communities, researchers, academics, companies, state agencies and policymakers is contributing to the reframing of industrial harvested peatlands to regenerative ecosystems and carbon sinks with impacts on ecological, economic, social and cultural systems.

The European Union LIFE Integrated Project, Peatlands and People, responding to Ireland’s Climate Action Plan, represents Europe’s largest rehabilitation of industrially harvested peatlands. It makes extensive use of marketing research for reframing strategies and actions by partners, collaborators and communities in the evolving context of a just transition to a carbon-neutral future.

The results highlight the ecological, economic, social and cultural reframing of peatlands from fossil fuel and waste lands to regenerative ecosystems bursting with biodiversity and climate solution opportunities. Reframing impacts requires muddling through the ebbs and flows of planned, possible and unanticipated change that can deliver benefits for peatlands and people over time.

At 3 of 7.5 years into a project, the authors are muddling through how ecological reframing impacts economic and social/cultural reframing. Further impacts, planned and unplanned, can be expected.

This paper shows how an impact planning canvas tool and impact taxonomy can be applied for social and systems change. The tools can be used throughout a project to understand, respond to and manage for unplanned events. There is constant learning, constantly going back to the impact planning canvas and checking where we are, what is needed. There is action and reaction to each other and to the diversity of stakeholders affected and being affected by the reframing work.

This paper considers how systemic change through ecological, economic, social and cultural reframing is a perfectly imperfect process of muddling through which holds the promise of environmental, economic, technological, political, social and educational impacts to benefit nature, individuals, communities, organisations and society.

The purpose of this chapter was to explore how the values of higher education institutions, and ultimately society, are conveyed through the curriculum of an institution. The arguments for focusing on a liberal education grounded in critical thinking are highlighted and then compared to the growing trend of occupational education being the central focus of a college education. The need to understand populist thinking in particular is aligned with the social responsibility that educational institutions carry in their charters. This means that the students and parents who pay tuition for their education want something to show for their investment, namely a level of compensation and employment that is perceived to be correlated with the expense of the degree. The competing views of education and training are then considered in a global context, noting the interconnectedness of the intellectual and business community around the globe. This chapter concludes by highlighting the importance of education and its impact on cultural understanding and engagement as a value, especially calling upon public policymakers to keep higher education leaders in check as they develop plans and expectations for their institutions.

This study examines how informal business networks achieve marketing goals in socially uncertain contexts. Drawing from multiple historical sources, Shangbangs, a type of business network that thrived in pre-1949 China, are analyzed.

The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) undergirds a study of Shangbangs’ historicity (i.e. their socio-historically embedded multiplicity, including organizational forms, activities and connotations.

As informal regional, professional, project-based, special-product-based or mixed marketing networks, Shangbangs relied on “flexible specialization” and coupled multiple business needs to market goods and services, business organizations, specific social values and, when necessary, to debrand business rivals.

This analysis extends theories about marketing networks by probing their subtypes, diverse marketing activities, multipronged channels and relationship building with social entities (including underground societies, business associations and guilds) in response to pre-1949 China’s market uncertainties. Substantiating an alternative approach to “flexible specialization” and marketing innovations within the pre-1949 Chinese economy shows how a parallel theoretical framework can complement western-based marketing theories.

This first comprehensive analysis of Shangbangs, an innovative historical Chinese marketing network outside the conventional market-corporate dichotomy, can inform theory building for marketing strategy-making and management conditioned by social contexts.

The nonmaterial dimension of reality is contrasted with the material, observable and empirically verifiable dimension that rose to dominance with the Enlightenment. The nonmaterial dimension includes orientation, memes, tacit knowledge and spirituality. The orientation of an individual, group, or institution can be towards violence – getting ahead at the expense of the other – or blessing – working in such a way that there is mutual benefit. Orientations can be expressed through memes, cultural or behavioural patterns that are mimetically transmitted broadly within a society and diachronically through generations. If they catch on within a group, they can determine the institutional or group culture. Spirituality can be a source of change of orientation from violence to blessing and of growth in creativity, resilience and empowerment. David Peat and David Bohm posit an implicate order in the universe, thought as a system (in the context of dialogue), and gentle action. Neil Douglas-Klotz points out that the Aramaic words malkuta d'bwashmaya (kingdom of heaven) used by Jesus constituted a nonmaterial reality containing vision, norms and empowerment that exists within and among us – like the implicate order – and is accessed by those who truly wish to ‘see’ it. The emerging spirituality coming out of this engagement has a capacity to replace memes like those of empire, self-interest and grandiose leaders with memes that channel passions and energy towards bio-interest, transnational interest, transpersonal interest, empathy and widespread empowerment. And this could make all the difference in effecting truly sustainable development.

This study aims to examine the applicability of Hartmann et al.’s (2018) service ecosystem framework to the day-to-day management of the modern sales force. The authors provide a review of the framework, acknowledging its strengths, while also indicating areas for advancement. The authors conclude with recommendations to the framework and indicate opportunities where future research could advance sales theory.

A review of the theoretical underpinnings of the service ecosystem framework is weighed against the established roles and responsibilities of the modern sales force in the literature.

The ability of the framework to capture the multi-level, multi-actor and dynamic aspects of sales represents an improvement in the conceptualization of selling is critical. Suggestions around the refinement for meso-level sales interactions and a more pliant application of service dominant-logic are offered.

The suggested extensions of the framework continue the advancement of novel theorization for the field of sales. Priorities for future research include consideration of ethical implications of the framework and formulations of new management strategies reflective of the broad and dynamic properties of the ecosystem conceptualization.

This paper provides managerial guidelines and implications tied specifically to the thick and thin crossing points and how they may impact employee decision-making.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to pointedly examine the service ecosystem framework with respect to established principles of managing a modern sales force.

The growing number of Muslim consumers pursuing a lifestyle of health and sustainability (LOHAS) under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic is interesting to assess; however, existing research focusing on this topic remains scarce. This study aims to address the research gaps and add to the body of knowledge from previous literature related to Islamic religiosity, environmental knowledge, LOHAS and Muslim customer well-being.

The sample used in this study is Muslim customers, including university students in a medical department and medical workers in Indonesia, using proportional random sampling methods with a total sample of 308 respondents.

The results demonstrate that Islamic religiosity positively and significantly impacts environmental knowledge, LOHAS and Muslim customer well-being. Similarly, environmental knowledge positively and significantly influences LOHAS, and subsequently, LOHAS fruitfully impacts Muslim customer well-being.

The results can assist managers of eco-friendly and healthy products or services and public policymakers in their effort to enhance LOHAS, particularly for Indonesian Muslim consumers to accomplish well-being considering their Islamic religiosity.

The results of this study help society protect a sustainable environment by increasing their environmental knowledge and LOHAS. Based on Islamic religion, society recognize how important environmental issues are to keep the environment safe in the future and build the culture of LOHAS to achieve their well-being.

This study contributes to the body of marketing literature for Muslim green consumer behaviour in particular and the LOHAS of the Muslim customer segment based on Islamic religiosity.

This research aims to investigate the impact of the collaborative governance mechanism on the implementation of rural governance information systems in developing countries. By integrating institutional logic theory, affordance theory and social identity theory, the authors propose modeling grassroots officials' affordance perception process and exploring the importance of multi-identities’ information technology (IT) goals in affordance perception.

Through an exploratory case study, the authors identified three affordances of rural governance information systems and investigated the mechanisms influencing the perception of these affordances among grassroots officials. Next, the authors established a research model and collected 490 valid questionnaires from grassroots officials in China and analyzed the data using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The authors' study challenges previous assumptions by integrating institutional logic, affordance and social identity theories. The authors establish a perceived affordance path for rural governance information systems, recognize substitute effects among technological affordances and extend the theory to explain social factors influencing IT perception. The authors' findings suggest providing technical training for grassroots officials to enhance IT capabilities, and governments should prioritize essential functionalities in rural governance information systems to optimize resources. Training on collaborative governance mechanisms can improve IT affordance perception, enhancing digital platform utilization in governance processes.

The study was conducted mainly in China, and therefore, the findings may not be universal to other developing countries. Researchers are therefore encouraged to test the proposal in locations with different rural cultures.

The paper includes implications for the development of IT perception in rural governance, the development of affordance perception theory and studying the relationship between IT goals and affordance perception.

Overall, this paper addresses the need to understand how grassroots officials perceive IT affordances in rural governance and study the relationship between multi-identities’ goals and affordance perception.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming consumers' experiences and how firms identify, create, nurture and manage interactive marketing relationships. However, most marketers do not have a clear understanding of what AI is and how it may mutually benefit consumers and firms. In this paper, the authors conduct an extensive review of the marketing literature, develop an AI framework for understanding value co-creation in interactive buyer–seller marketing relationships, identify research gaps and offer a future research agenda.

The authors first conduct an extensive literature review in 16 top marketing journals on AI. Based on this review, an AI framework for understanding value co-creation in interactive buyer–seller marketing relationships was conceptualized.

The literature review led to a number of key research findings and summary areas: (1) an historical perspective, (2) definitions and boundaries of AI, (3) AI and interactive marketing, (4) relevant theories in the domain of interactive marketing and (5) synthesizing AI research based on antecedents to AI usage, interactive AI usage contexts and AI-enabled value co-creation outcomes.

This is one of the most extensive reviews of AI literature in marketing, including an evaluation of in excess or 300 conceptual and empirical research. Based on the findings, the authors offer a future research agenda, including a visual titled “What is AI in Interactive Marketing? AI design factors, AI core elements & interactive marketing AI usage contexts.”