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Seeking ways towards a sustainable future is the most dominant socio-political challenge of our time. Marketing should have a crucial role to play in leading research and impact in sustainability, yet it is limited by relying on cognitive behavioural theories rooted in the 1970s, which have proved to have little bearing on actual behaviour. This paper aims to interrogate why marketing is failing to address the challenge of sustainability and identify alternative approaches.

The constraint in theoretical development contextualises the problem, followed by a focus on four key themes to promote theory development: developing sustainable people; models of alternative consumption; building towards sustainable marketplaces; and theoretical domains for the future. These themes were developed and refined during the 2018 Academy of Marketing workshop on seeking sustainable futures. MacInnis’s (2011) framework for conceptual contributions in marketing provides the narrative thread and structure.

The current state of play is explicated, combining the four themes and MacInnis’s framework to identify the failures and gaps in extant approaches to the field.

This paper sets a new research agenda for the marketing discipline in quest for sustainable futures in marketing and consumer research.

Approaches are proposed which will allow the transformation of the dominant socio-economic systems towards a model capable of promoting a sustainable future.

The paper provides thought leadership in marketing and sustainability as befits the special issue, by moving beyond the description of the problem to making a conceptual contribution and setting a research agenda for the future.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which academic researchers frame and conduct sustainability research and to ask to what extent we are limited by these frames.

Our approach is based on an epistemological critique. We begin with a discussion of the ways in which sustainable consumption has been conceptualised within marketing; we question the influence of positivist social science research traditions and examine how research on sustainability is impacted by the structure of academia.

Our critical reflection leads us to suggest three ways in which sustainability research might be re-framed: a reconsideration of language, a shift in the locus of responsibility and the adoption of a holistic approach.

We propose that in order to make progress in sustainability research, alternative frames, terms, units of analysis, method(ologies) and research ambitions are needed.

By making visible our collective, unexamined assumptions, we can now move forward with new questions and agendas for sustainability research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide some context for the special issue and to introduce the collection of invited commentaries and research papers that follow. It also sets out to clarify the contribution that shadowing methods can make to the study of organizations.

This is done by briefly outlining the ways in which shadowing methods have developed in parallel within a number of disciplines. In order to tackle the question of why this has happened, a grounded approach is taken which centres on data excerpts generated by a shadowing method and three of its closest methodological neighbours: interviews, observation and participant observation. The paper further develops this analysis through the presentation of a set of illustrative analogies which use the idea of the researcher's gaze as a beam of light.

Similarities and differences between shadowing, interviews, observation and participant observation are identified, which support the articulation of shadowing as a family of following methods.

Taken together, the contributions from the invited commentaries and research papers, suggest a number of ways in which the debate surrounding shadowing research in organizations needs to be developed going forward.

The reflexive, comparative methodological approach taken here provides for the first time a systematic comparison of shadowing in relation to other common qualitative data elicitation methods. Further, the development of a critique of the extant literature on shadowing provides a basis on which to progress the field, both in terms of shadowing practices themselves and writing about them within disciplines and across the research methods literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore ethical issues associated with using the shadowing method.

Ethical issues that arose during a 12-week shadowing study that examined the work activities and practices of Canadian healthcare CEOs are discussed.

Dividing the ethics process into two phases – those addressed by ethics committees (procedural ethics) and those that revealed themselves in the field (ethics in practice) – issues and relating to sampling, informed consent, researcher roles, objectivity, participant discomforts, the impact of research on participants, confidentiality, and anonymity are investigated. This paper illustrates that while useful, procedural ethics committees are unable to establish ethical practice in and of themselves. In response, it suggests that the concept of reflexivity be applied to ethics to help researchers consider the implications of using the shadowing method, and develop a contingency for possible challenges, before they enter the field.

This paper provides researchers considering using the shadowing method with critical insights into some of the ethical issues associated with the method. A number of questions are posed and a number of suggestions offered as to how ethical practice can be attained in the field. Given practice-based similarities between shadowing and other qualitative methodologies such as participant observation and ethnography, many of the lessons derived from this case study are also pertinent to researchers using other techniques to examine organizational and management phenomenon.

Building on the formal and critical discussion about the shadowing method ignited by McDonald (2005), this paper identifies and discusses ethical issues associated with the shadowing method that have not been examined in either ethics or research methods literature.

The purpose of this paper is to provide practical recommendations for shadowing as a method of organizational study with a focus on the situated processes and practices of shadowing fieldwork.

This paper reflects on the shadowing experiences of three researchers – in a hospital emergency department, nuclear power plants, and entrepreneur workspaces – to generate recommendations by identifying and synthesizing solutions that emerged during the encounters with the challenges and opportunities in shadowing.

Considering shadowing as an ongoing and emergent research process can be helpful to prepare for particular aspects of shadowing fieldwork. Shadowing presents research challenges that may emerge in the practice of fieldwork, including how to negotiate awkward conversations with participants, what to bring and wear, and how to take notes.

Though the recommendations for shadowing are based on particular experiences and may not generalize to all shadowing engagements, they offer concrete, practical recommendations useful across experience levels. The recommendations should sensitize researchers to the intimate and situational character of shadowing, and offer strategies for coping with the distinctive requirements of shadowing.

By looking across diverse experiences of shadowing, the paper generated guidelines that help to make sense of shadowing processes, manage uncertainty in the field, and build on the emerging work on shadowing. The ten recommendations provide insight into shadowing that are of particular value to graduate students, junior researchers, and those new to shadowing. Moreover, the experienced shadower may find value in the camaraderie of shared experience, the concrete ideas about another's experience of shadowing, and insight in recommendations that capture aspects of fieldwork that they are also exploring.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the origins of the term “shadow.”

This piece takes the form of a viewpoint.

Harry Wolcott reflects on how the term “shadow” was coined by colleagues of the school principal he was following.

This piece is believed to be Harry Wolcott's final contribution to the field of shadowing before he sadly passed away on 31 October 2012.

The purpose of this paper is to share two researcher's experience about the challenges associated with shadowing within the health care context.

Institutional ethnography and shadowing.

Shadowing is increasingly being used as a data collection method, however, before proceeding to use this approach in today's health care environment, the researcher must give thoughtful consideration to the context.

This paper provides a reflexive elaboration of the differences between the insider and outsider perspective when using the shadowing data collection method within health care organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the value of shadowing managers, in relation to other methods for studying managerial work, such as interviews and surveys.

The paper reflects upon (empirical) studies of managers and managerial work, research and bodies of knowledge, and puts available insights into perspective.

Shadowing managers enables researchers to cope with the paradoxical situation that arises when managerial work is studied. Managerial work must be understood in as unbiased a way as possible; managers themselves are unable to understand their own work and the texts they use to capture their work and behavior are either superficial or “manipulative.” At the same time, managerial work cannot be understood without (theoretical) bias; researchers need a priori assumptions when they study real-life work, especially about the institutional settings in which work streams are embedded. The paper concludes that “theoretical shadowing” is relevant.

The paper brings together different bodies of knowledge that have evolved over time and shows that observing managers can never be done openly, despite remarks made by earlier students of managerial work.

Much of what the author want to say in this paper had to do with “control” “exactness,” “precision” and their declination in both: shadowing and Consensus Building Approach. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues.

This paper upholds two things: first, that shadowing is a field technique particularly attuned to action research as defined by Chris Argyris: “I would summarize [action-research and action-science] by saying that Kurt Lewin did three things: he was committed to understanding reality as the participants understood it, he used a combination of so-called ‘normal’ science with a narrative-integrative approach, and he tested his ideas by trying to change the things that he was studying.”

Second, that the results of such a research are best understood by the organization's management when the interpretation and decision process follow an approach based on active listening and an inclusive participatory methodology such as Consensus Building.

When this does not happen, the shadowing methodology allows a very rich research experience with no real impact on the organization's life.