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The purpose of this chapter is fivefold. First, it highlights that, despite apparent progress, business in general, and marketing in particular, has made little impact upon environmental sustainability. Second, it offers four explanations for the persistent challenges that contribute to this lack of meaningful progress. Third, it presents two theoretical lenses (i.e., assemblage theory and socio-ecological systems theory) for viewing environmental sustainability from new perspectives. Fourth, it offers a mid-range theory, biomimicry, to bridge the gap between these higher-level theories and managerial decisions on the ground. Finally, it offers implications and ideas for future research based on these persistent challenges and new perspectives.

Our paper is theoretical in focus. We offer a conceptual analysis of persistent challenges facing business efforts in environmental sustainability and suggest useful lenses to integrate marketing decisions more closely with our natural environment.

We present biomimicry as an actionable framework that seeks inspiration from nature and also explicitly grounds marketing decisions in the natural world.

Our paper draws attention to the challenges facing firms seeking to achieve better performance in environmental sustainability. In addition, it offers a set of fresh theoretical perspectives as well as future issues for scholarly research in this domain.

Our work is designed to be provocative; it articulates reasons why business efforts in environmental sustainability do not scale to meaningful impact upon our planet and explores theoretical lenses by which those efforts could be more impactful.

This chapter forwards a justification, an explanation, and numerous examples related to an emerging integrated sustainability management theory and its connections to other management theories and key-related concepts including systems and immersion. An integrated approach to sustainability solutions presents several implications for educators, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, including the need to consider urgent and immediate responses that address sustainability crises at multiple levels and in multiple systems. This chapter is intended to promote reflection, dialogue, and a collective call to action to secure a sustainable world for present and future generations.

This paper aims to contribute to contemporary debates about interdisciplinarity and social marketing by presenting the critical reflections of a social marketer, a human geographer and an engineer on working across disciplines in an Australian community energy efficiency intervention – Energy + Illawarra. The paper also aims to identify challenges, practicalities and learning that emerge from collaborating on interdisciplinary projects. It also aims to provide some suggestions and guidelines for researchers in the interdisciplinary space.

The paper uses a case study approach and presents the critical reflections of a social marketer, a human geographer and an engineer on working together on the Energy + Illawarra project – a community energy efficiency social marketing intervention.

Challenges in interdisciplinary projects that are presented by differences in ontology, methodology, language and discourse are identified. The importance of being critically reflexive and openness to alternative perspectives are examined. Concerns over publishing interdisciplinary research are considered. The value of experimenting and developing partnerships through pilot projects is discussed. The potential of leveraging existing synergies and the opportunity to learn from clashes in ontology are also highlighted.

This paper contributes to the discussion about being interdisciplinary in social marketing by identifying subjectivities, practicalities and opportunities from collaborating on cross-disciplinary projects. Guidance for researchers on working on interdisciplinary projects offers value for social marketers working in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to present the gap between conceptualizations of social injustices and the desired social transformation that addresses multiple social subsystems and levels on one hand, and social justice leadership that addresses intra-school efforts on the other. The paper aims to expand the conceptualization of social justice leadership and tie it together with concepts of activism and social change.

The paper adopts a socio-ecological perspective. It reviews works about social justice leadership in education, activism, and social change to present the notion that in light of existing social justice barriers educational leaders should serve as activists in schools and in the community and policy areas.

The paper presents a macro framework, focussing on individual leaders in the field and on the consolidation of intentions, actions, and outcomes in a manner necessary for using social justice as an effective socio-political agenda in a socio-ecological system.

The paper presents a conceptual framework which can enable practitioners and researchers to better understand social justice efforts.

This paper aims to argue that resilience – and its underlying socio-ecological perspective – is a critical concept that could serve to integrate different views on, and approaches to, social marketing. The aim is to inspire social marketers to move away from narrow, issue-based interventions targeting individual behaviours and to consider the impact of social ecologies, particularly the contribution resilience research can make to behaviour change.

This is a conceptual paper; socio-ecological models and the resilience concept are discussed and applied to a current “wicked problem” – obesity.

From a socio-ecological perspective, research findings highlight the impact macro, meso and micro forces have on behaviour and the importance of a child’s micro-system and the influence it has on development and life outcomes. Building resilience requires a relationship-building, person-centred, holistic and long-term developmental approach to behaviour change.

This is a conceptual paper that introduces new concepts to the social marketing field. Future research should focus on understanding how to implement a resilience-building approach in practice – including the interrelationships and interactions between individual, family and community resilience – and how resilience can be integrated within systematic, socio-ecological thinking when addressing “wicked problems”.

Rather than blaming and targeting individuals, the goal should be to create an environment that supports parents, families and communities to build resilience at the micro, meso and macro levels. The findings support the argument that social marketers should adopt an upstream approach to develop interventions that make the environment the primary focus. Social marketers should collaborate with, and learn from, social workers, psychologists and educationalist to further their understanding of resilience. This would have a positive, sustainable impact on a whole range of social and health issues, ultimately helping to address the overarching issue of social inequality.

Building resilience amongst individuals, families and communities offer a means to achieve fundamental positive social change and to reduce social, economic and health inequality.

The paper offers a unique perspective on how and why resilience – and its underlying socio-ecological framework – should be applied within the social marketing field.

This study aims to explore the legacy potential of the FIFA Women’s World Cup (FWWC) 2015, for the host communities across Canada.

The mixed-methods study included a link to an online anonymous survey being sent to all volunteers at the FWWC that explored their prior volunteering experience, motivations for volunteering, perceived skill development and future volunteering intentions. Documents were reviewed, and key stakeholders were interviewed.

The results support previous research that mega-sport event (MSE) volunteers are typically older females with prior volunteering experience. Those most likely to indicate they wanted to volunteer more are younger volunteers without prior volunteering experience. While legacy was discussed as a desired outcome, this was not operationalised through strategic human resource strategies such as being imbedded in the position descriptions for the volunteer managers.

As this study was conducted in the real-world context of a sport event, the timing of the survey was determined by the organising committee.

Mega sport events typically draw upon existing host-city social and human capital. For future event organising committees planning for and delivering a volunteer legacy may require better strategic planning and leveraging relationships with existing host-city volunteer networks. In the context of a single sport, women’s MSE, multi-venue, multi-province event, greater connection was required to proactively connect younger women for volunteers to their geographic sport and event volunteering infrastructure.

This is the first research of volunteers for the largest women’s mega single-sport event. There are three theoretical contributions of the paper to: the socio-ecological lens, motivational theory of single event MSE and the contribution of social and human capital to understandings of legacy.

The purpose of this study was to explore the concept of distrust of traditional banking institutions as a factor that can explain the choice to remain unbanked in a marketplace that is designed to be financially inclusive.

Earning, spending, saving and borrowing data collected between May 2021 and February 2022 from 17,819 consumers living in the United States were used to examine the factors associated with distrust of banks. Using a conceptual framework borrowed from the health services profession, the study was conducted in two stages. At the first stage, distrust among the unbanked and banked was estimated using a Boruta-random forest algorithm. At the second stage of the analysis, a logit regression model was estimated to validate the variables identified in the Boruta-random forest analysis.

Results from the analyses show that distrust of banks is multi-layered where being older, believing the country is heading in the wrong direction and being less confident in one's ability to obtain a personal loan in the amount of $1 to $999 are important factors related to distrust of banks among the unbanked.

This study shows how an ensemble machine learning technique based on a decision-tree methodology can be used to obtain unique insights into complicated data and large datasets within the bank marketing field.

The paper provides a discussion about ways domains of trust and specific variables can be utilized to address the persistent problem of financial exclusion in the United States. Implications for bankers, researchers, educators and policymakers are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the literature on whole school approaches to increasing resilience in pupils. This is pertinent with the increase in children and young people’s mental health needs creating extra pressure on schools to foster young people’s ability to withstand stress and adversity. Whilst previous research works have considered the ways in which schools support their pupils, the extent to which resilience has been reliably measured has varied. Recently, several validated resilience measures have been developed which allows for potentially more robust research to take place. This systematic review therefore summarises and critiques the literature exploring whole school approaches to resilience development only where a validated measure has been used. In total, 11 studies were reviewed and demonstrate that there is a trend between school factors and pupil resilience. The importance of supportive relationships with both peers and staff in school is highlighted in several studies as well as the positive effect of including a robust health promoting school’s agenda situated within local communities. However, the number of limitations identified within the current literature suggests that this review is not able to offer clear recommendations to schools. This review will, however, be helpful to schools, local authorities and the government in allowing them to take more of a critical stance in understanding resilience within a school context.

A total of 11 critically evaluated studies were reviewed and demonstrate that there is a trend between school factors and pupil resilience.

The importance of supportive relationships with both peers and staff in school is highlighted in several studies as well as the positive effect of including a robust health promoting school’s agenda situated within local communities.

However, the number of limitations identified within the current literature suggests that this review is not able to offer clear recommendations to schools. There are no studies in the UK using validated resiliency questionnaires as part of their evaluation and this is a limitation to the literature.

This review will, however, be helpful to schools, local authorities and the government in allowing them to take more of a critical stance in understanding resilience within a school context. This is particularly relevant when considering the needs of evaluation before the implementation of new school programmes.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a case study from the master program management in nonprofit organizations at the University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück, Germany and show how this case of innovative teaching helps to educate responsible managers for the world of tomorrow.

The authors developed a model of a think tank to create a surrounding for students to learn about models and theories such as systems thinking and social innovations and work with practical instruments like the business canvas and design thinking. The objective was for the students to work on solutions for societal challenges.

The main findings were twofold: First, it is clear that the objective of the case was met. The evaluation at the end of both iterations made it clear, that the result is important for the students and something that they can embrace as their own. Second, the students show intense problems with the freedom that they get. It is very interesting how students are primed to perform in the regulation given by professors. Once these frameworks are loosened, they seem lost.

The value lies in the creation of a model that can be used by multiple professors in very different management studies. Through the model students can be taught to solve societal problems.