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Through an analysis of corporate sustainable development reporting, this paper seeks to examine critically language use and other visual (re)presentations of sustainable development within the business context. It aims to provide a framework to interpret and tease out business representations of sustainable development. Such representations are argued to be constitutive of the way that business has come to “know” and “do” sustainable development and, therefore, to constrain and enable particular actions and developments.

The study uses a mix of synthesis, interpretive and discourse analysis to locate, interpret and critically analyse a corpus of written and presentational texts produced by a New Zealand business association and eight of its founding members' early triple bottom line reports.

The business association and its members' reports are shown to present a pragmatic and middle‐way discourse on business and the environment. Through the use of rhetorical claims to pragmatism and action, this discourse suggests that businesses are “doing” sustainability. But critical analysis and interpretation within a wider framework reveal a narrow, largely economic and instrumental approach to the natural environment.

This paper offers a diagrammatic synthesis of the contested “middle ground” of the sustainable development debate, and thereby provides a frame of reference for further interpretational work on organisations and sustainable development.

A model is developed which allows an organization to assess its environmental perception and how that perception may impact its response to stakeholders. The model differentiates an organization’s socioecological responsibility across four dimensions for placement on Colby’s five‐paradigm continuum, which ranges between the frontier economic paradigm and new ecological paradigm. This article provides a useful means of assessing the ecological paradigm utilized by firms and offers criteria that may assist the organization in developing a competitively valuable environmental stance.

The significance of ecological citizenship for the sustainable urbanism discourse has been highly recognised in recent years. Targeting to adopt ecological citizenship as a lifestyle among urban residents appears potentially significant and urgent for the city of Famagusta, North Cyprus. As a result of unsustainable urban development, Famagusta dictates a new way of living to its inhabitants that is not familiar to them in terms of local sociocultural characteristics and environmental values. Therefore, a user survey was carried out among local people, within a random sample of 165 residents, in order to obtain scientific data that may be used for the needed planning policies. Within the survey, environmental attitudes of the residents were measured with the help of Dunlop and Van Liere’s New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) scale. The aim was to understand the level of their existing environmental worldview, one of the basic aspects of ecological citizenship. The results of the survey reveal that Famagusta residents’ existing environmental attitudes cannot achieve an adequate level in order to be one of the dynamics shaping their lifestyles. However, residents have slightly more than a medium level of environmental worldview.

The authors do not claim that the following represents the views of any one tribe but instead the culmination of the academic literature written on the topic. Marketing’s current Western dominant social paradigm (DSP) is said to perpetuate “green”, yet unsustainable practices. The DSP does not support strictly pro-environmental practices and its proposed alternative, the new environmental paradigm (NEP), lacks in-depth conceptualisation, especially concerning business and marketing activities. However, the two paradigms contrast so much that a shift from one to the other is vehemently argued against and conceptually rife with problems. This paper aims to expand upon the merits of the NEP using indigenous people’s environmental philosophies [1] – as examples of historically supported and successful sustainable philosophies. It conceptualises a Relational view to provide a more practical alternative to the DSP and includes propositions for marketing implementation of this perspective.

By explicating both the DSP and NEP and reflecting on each through an indigenous Māori view, this paper provides propositions for a broadened paradigm that supports sustainability and its application for sustainable marketing.

The implications of this research are in the area of paradigm development and in providing an alternative paradigm to that of the DSP. This paper is the first to fully explicate parts of the NEP and considers a solution to the problems of changing the current DSP so drastically by broadening the NEP using a Relational worldview.

The propositions and examples provided in this work give practical application of the newly presented paradigm for marketers influenced by indigenous belief systems.

This paper is the first to explicate parts of the NEP and broaden its reach by integrating a Relational worldview as an alternative to drastically changing the current DSP. It does so by proposing that marketers embrace a middle ground that is influenced by indigenous belief systems.

During the great post–World War II economic expansion, modernization theorists held that the new American capitalism balanced mass production and mass consumption, meshed profitability with labor's interests, and ended class conflict. They thought that Keynesian policies insured a near full-employment, low-inflation, continuous growth economy. They viewed the United States as the “new lead society,” eliminating industrial capitalism's backward features and progressing toward modernity's penultimate “postindustrial” stage.⁷ Many Americans believed that the ideal of “consumer freedom,” forged early in the century, had been widely realized and epitomized American democracy's superiority to communism.⁸ However, critics held that the new capitalism did not solve all of classical capitalism's problems (e.g., poverty) and that much increased consumption generated new types of cultural and political problems. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that mainstream economists assumed that human nature dictates an unlimited “urgency of wants,” naturalizing ever increasing production and consumption and precluding the distinction of goods required to meet basic needs from those that stoke wasteful, destructive appetites. In his view, mainstream economists’ individualistic, acquisitive presuppositions crown consumers sovereign and obscure cultural forces, especially advertising, that generate and channel desire and elevate possessions and consumption into the prime measures of self-worth. Galbraith held that production's “paramount position” and related “imperatives of consumer demand” create dependence on economic growth and generate new imbalances and insecurities.⁹ Harsher critics held that the consumer culture blinded middle-class Americans to injustice, despotic bureaucracy, and drudge work (e.g., Mills, 1961; Marcuse, 1964). But even these radical critics implied that postwar capitalism unlocked the secret of sustained economic growth.

Environmental awareness became a crucial agenda for both academicians and practitioners. Effect of the individual’s value, belief and norm on their environmentally significant behaviour is vital on subsequent purchase decision of the consumers. Considering this, the present study aims to examine the relationships among value orientations, New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), and pro-environmental personal norm. Moreover, this research intends to investigate the mediating role of New Ecological Paradigm between value orientations and pro-environmental personal norm.

This study has utilized questionnaire survey among 277 paddy farmers at the Muda Agricultural Development Authority (MADA) area in Malaysia. Data was analyzed using Partial Least Squares technique in order to test study hypotheses. Partial Least Square technique was utilized to analyze the data to test the study hypotheses.

Results reveal that biospheric value, altruistic value and egoistic value positively and significantly affect NEP. It is also found that NEP positively and significantly affect pro-environmental personal norm. Data also supports the links between altruistic value and pro-environmental personal norm (PPN). However, the relationship between other two value-orientations (biospheric value and egoistic value) and PPN is not supported by the data. Additionally, NEP mediates the relationship between biospheric value and PPN as well as between egoistic value and PPN. Contrary to this, NEP does not mediate the relationship between altruistic value and PPN.

The findings of this study will guide the agrochemical industry to understand how to enhance consumers’ behavioural aspect towards the environmental welfare. As handling of agrochemical is hazardous to health and environment, the knowledge on the effect of value orientation, belief and norm holds the key to inculcate good agricultural practice.

The present study is among the pioneers to consider NEP as the mediator between three types of value orientation and personal norm. Additionally, this study examined the relationship between NEP and PPN as well as between value orientations and PPN which are comparatively new to the existing body of literature. Nevertheless, this study considers NEP as a multidimensional constructs which is relatively new. Last, but not the least, the findings elaborate the existing knowledge of individual’s environmental concern in the context of agrochemical purchase.

Epidemiology is often described as “the basic science of public health” (Savitz, Poole & Miller, 1999; Syme & Yen, 2000). This description suggests both a close association with public health practice, and the separation of “pure” scientific knowledge from its application in the messy social world. Although the attainability of absolute objectivity is rarely claimed, epidemiologists are routinely encouraged to “persist in their efforts to substitute evidence for faith in scientific reasoning” (Stolley, 1985, p. 38) and reminded that “public health decision makers gain little from impassioned scholars who go beyond advancing and explaining the science to promoting a specific public health agenda” (Savitz et al., 1999, p. 1160). Epidemiology produces authoritative data that are transformed into evidence which informs public health. Those data are authoritative because epidemiology is regarded as a neutral scientific enterprise. Because its claims are grounded in science, epidemiological knowledge is deemed to have “a special technical status and hence is not contestable in the same way as are say, religion or ethics” (Lock, 1988, p. 6). Despite the veneer of universality afforded by its scientific pedigree, epidemiology is not a static or monolithic discipline. Epidemiological truth claims are embodied in several shifting paradigms that span the life of the discipline. Public health knowledges and practices, competing claims internal and external to epidemiology, and structural conditions (such as current political economies, material technologies, and institutions) provide important contexts in which certain kinds of epidemiological knowledge are more likely to emerge.

Although several researchers have statistically analyzed references associated with education for sustainable development based on the co-citation frequency, evolutionary analysis based on high-citation references omits literature with low citation frequency, which has a significant impact on the evolution of a discipline. The purpose of this study is to understand and explore the historical processes and roots of the field of education for sustainable development and to understand the theoretical grounding of the field.

Based on education for sustainable development publications in the science citation index expanded and social sciences citation index databases from 1992 to August 2020, a new bibliometric method, reference publication year spectroscopy, was adopted to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the 58,588 cited references in 1,778 publications.

The earliest reference in the field of education for sustainable development traces back to 1732. There were 21 peaks in this field between 1732 and August 2020. Dewey’s “new three-center theory”; Bloom’s “taxonomy”; Freire’s “conscientization theory”; the “theory of planned behavior”; Kolb’s “experiential learning theory”; Wittgenstein’s theoretical concepts of “language-games,” “forms of life” and “rule-following” and Leopold’s “land ethics” laid an early theoretical grounding of educational philosophy and environmental ethics for research into education for sustainable development. The new environmental paradigm and the new ecological paradigm have become the most widely used methodological tools for understanding the values and attitudes of people toward the natural environment. Among the 50 most cited references, Lozano and Wals have published the most publications, contributing to promoting the development of research into education for sustainable development. The Journal of Cleaner Production, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education and Environmental Education Research have published the most publications related to the field of education for sustainable development.

The findings of this study are helpful for scholars and practitioners to understand the academic ideological roots, theoretical grounding and important influential literature in the field of education for sustainable development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the dimensionality of the environmental concern scale (NEP) and to understand the environmental worldviews of Malaysian project managers.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted among developer organisations registered with Real Estate and Housing Developers’ Association Malaysia in Klang Valley. Response was obtained from project managers and the final sample collected was 87 cases, representing a response rate of 24.5 per cent. Principal component analysis with varimax rotation was conducted to investigate the underlying structure of the NEP items while frequency distribution for the data set was used to gauge the environmental worldviews of the respondents. In addition, face-to-face interviews were carried out to gather more information to complements the findings of quantitative analyses.

Five factors were extracted but due to heavy cross-loadings, two items from the original scale were dropped, reducing it to be a 13-item scale. The four factors retained explained 61.6 per cent of the variance and were duly named Human over nature, ecocrisis, rights of nature and limits of growth. High scores on both pro-NEP and pro-dominant social paradigm items revealed the co-existence of both ecological and utilitarian view of the environment among project managers. Similar outcome was obtained from interviews with project managers where they indicated efforts in finding compatibility between protecting the environment and exploiting natural resources for development.

The sample was restricted to housing developers in Klang Valley, thus the findings cannot be generalised to all developer organisations or other construction occupational groups.

This research supported the multidimensionality claim of the environmental scale (NEP) where four distinctive dimensions were identified. The usage of individual subscales in understanding environmental beliefs may reveal interesting patterns in that each dimension could have positive and negative connotations on human behaviours. In addition, the co-existence of both an ecological and a utilitarian view of the environment revealed that these worldviews align well with sustainable development principles.

This study is one of the few local studies that attempt to understand the environmental worldviews of project managers.