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Consumer Behavior.

This case is suitable to be used in advanced undergraduate and MBA/MSc level.

This case illustrates an animal shelter’s challenge pertaining to lack of awareness among individuals with regard to animal adoption and proper treatment toward animals. Brian Teoh, the founder of a local animal shelter “We Care For You (WCFY),” was really worried by observing the situation of the animals’ vulnerability as well as pet owners’ irresponsible behavior. Overpopulation in animal shelters is a common problem. The space of the shelter is limited and not enough to take more animals to take care unless existing animals are being adopted by the pet owners. Adoption is a way to give room for other animals to be taken by animal shelters. However, most of the individuals prefer to buy rather to adopt. Moreover, potential adopters are usually selective of the animal they intend to adopt by having criteria preferences for adoption. Brian was thinking how to make people aware about the animal right and proper treatment with animals and also how to make individuals aware about the necessity to adopt rather than purchasing them. He was drowned in deep thought. Although the situation seemed not so promising, he felt determined to work on this awareness-building issue.

This objective of this case is to:

• highlight the challenges faced by the animal shelters in order to make individuals aware of the importance of adopting animals rather than purchasing them from shops;

• emphasize the importance of using social media in disseminating information nationwide; and

• the necessity to educate people about the right treatment toward animals.

highlight the challenges faced by the animal shelters in order to make individuals aware of the importance of adopting animals rather than purchasing them from shops;

emphasize the importance of using social media in disseminating information nationwide; and

the necessity to educate people about the right treatment toward animals.

Three questions are explored regarding ethnozoology’s place in sociology. First, why has sociology been slow to explore this subject or to give it much credibility? Resistance by sociologists to ethnozoology is strikingly ironic, given the discipline’s willingness in recent years to consider the plight of virtually every human minority. Although androcentric and conservative biases no doubt are part of this resistance, it is suggested that significant resistance comes from sociologists involved in the study of various oppressed groups. Second, what has sociology done to study ethnozoology so far? Acritique is made of prior attempts to categorize research in this area along topical lines. Instead, the value of theoretically organizing this literature is advocated. Finally, how should sociology proceed with ethnozoological research? An argument is made for increasing applied research. Two exemplars are provided, including the trend by police to racially profile urban pit‐bull owners and the growth of uneasiness among veterinary students who resist the traditional use of animals as educational tools.

This research aims to determine the relationship between the consumption of animal products and attitudes towards animals among university students in Eurasia.

A survey was conducted with collaborators in each country who supervised volunteers to personally invite 16,777 students to take part. The sample was composed of 3,433 students from 103 universities in 11 Eurasian countries. ANOVA was used to compare the responses. All analyses were conducted using the statistical packages Minitab 15 and SPSS 15.

A total of 47 per cent of university students avoided some meat products, 4 per cent were vegetarians and 0.4 per cent vegans. Students avoiding some meat did so principally for environmental and health reasons, and beef and lamb were the meats most likely to be avoided. Vegetarians avoided meat mainly for health reasons. Vegans had greater concern about humans using animals than vegetarians, who in turn had greater concerns than those avoiding some meat.

Avoidance of animal products was related to an increased level of concern for animal rights, animal experimentation and wildlife, with vegans demonstrating the greatest concern. This implied that students' attitudes to animal welfare and rights can affect animal product‐eating behaviours.

This study conflicts with previous studies by demonstrating that health rather than environment was a major reason for vegetarianism. The study highlights the importance of environmental, health and welfare concerns but not religion in avoidance of animal products.

The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to, and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to nontheorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy – that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume – and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of “vitacide,” designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered society – concepts that served as foils for delineating the kind of theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.

This paper aims to provide guidance on how midstream social marketing can be used to understand and address wicked problems through adopting a collaborative systems integration approach conceptualised from a macromarketing perspective.

Rothschild’s motivation, opportunity and ability (MOA) framework is applied in this study to understand veterinarians as midstream microactors in the macrosystem of wicked animal welfare issues. Focus group and individual interview data from veterinarians were analysed through the lens of the MOA framework to understand veterinarians’ as midstream microactors within a systems continuum.

The MOA of veterinarians to engage downstream targets – cat owners – in behaviour change are identified. Fresh insights reveal the challenges and barriers to simply focusing on veterinarians as the key microactor required to address the wicked problem of cat overpopulation. Challenges identified include the cost of sterilisation to both owners and veterinary practices, alongside vying beliefs about the capacity of individual veterinarians to persuade owners about the benefits of sterilisation to improve animal welfare. Additionally, insight into veterinarians’ perceptions of upstream strategies to address the problem – in terms of marketing, education and law – expose further complications on where regulation and law enforcement can be integrated in future social marketing strategies to address the cat overpopulation problem.

The application of the MOA framework improves understanding of the concept and practice of midstream social marketing. It provides a practical and strategic tool that social marketers can apply when approaching behaviour change that leverages midstream actors as part of the social change solution.

Research and theorisation in this paper demonstrates an alternative pathway to address wicked problems via a collaborative systems integration approach conceptualised from a macromarketing perspective. Effective long-term change relies on understanding and coordinating a broad macrosystem of interconnected actors along a downstream, midstream and upstream continuum. This starts by understanding the microactions of individual actors within the macrosystem.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and classify sources, manifestations and implications of environmental degradation.

First, the typological analysis is used to conceptualize environmental degradation and its components. Then, the concepts are disaggregated into some dimensions organized in row-and-column variables and a cross-tabulated matrix is constructed. Finally, different types of environmental degradation are identified, labeled and discussed.

The study distinguishes between two types of degradation as pollution and deterioration and accordingly identifies ten types (five pairs) of environmental degradation. Furthermore, the paper presents a conceptual framework and offers insights into the dynamic interchange between the causes and effects of environmental degradation.

The originality/value of this study resides in reducing the ambiguities associated with the concept of environmental degradation and offering a multidimensional framework that can be used in empirical research to organize propositions, test hypotheses, analyze data and construct indexes.

This paper aims to consider few cognitive and conceptual obstacles to engagement with global catastrophic risks (GCRs).

The paper starts by considering cognitive biases that affect general thinking about GCRs, before questioning whether existential risks really are dramatically more pressing than other GCRs. It then sets out a novel typology of GCRs – sexy vs unsexy risks – before considering a particularly unsexy risk, overpopulation.

It is proposed that many risks commonly regarded as existential are “sexy” risks, while certain other GCRs are comparatively “unsexy.” In addition, it is suggested that a combination of complexity, cognitive biases and a hubris-laden failure of imagination leads us to neglect the most unsexy and pervasive of all GCRs: human overpopulation. The paper concludes with a tentative conceptualisation of overpopulation as a pattern of risking.

The paper proposes and conceptualises two new concepts, sexy and unsexy catastrophic risks, as well as a new conceptualisation of overpopulation as a pattern of risking.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss emotions within a highly emotive organizational setting through the use of crystallization. The authors contend that the expression of a researcher's positionality as a presence within their research is crucial in contexts where conventional research approaches are unable to capture the depth of the phenomenon under study. The paper argues that the presentation of research findings from highly emotional organizational context will benefit from a challenge to traditional ways of representing and communicating the researcher's experience. As an example of this, in this paper the authors examine the emotions involved in experiencing animal euthanasia in a work context.

The paper draws ethnographic methods of fieldwork in an Australian animal shelter. The paper uses autoethnography and interview data.

Euthanasia is one of the most tolling experiences for animal shelter workers. This paper reveals that through a creative representation this experience may come induce understanding of the emotive context. Furthermore, the employees adapt one or more story-lines to deal with the conflict of euthanasia.

The strength of this paper is that it uses a novel approach to present findings in the form of crystallization. It also furthers insight on how organizational members explain their involvement in emotive work-tasks.

This paper compares the contexts of the writing of T. R. Malthus’s first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); its reception by William Godwin, to whom the Essay was addressed; its interpretation by naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace; and its interpretation by modern commentators Kenneth Boulding and A. M. C. Waterman. The analysis helps explain how an essay that was written to defend social and economic institutions from critiques in utopian visions associated with the French Revolution came to be regarded as a model predicting overpopulation and exhaustion of natural resources.

The paper will first discuss certain sociocultural trends such as population growth, increased life expectancy, the labour force and education, and look at how these are affecting society as a whole. Such trends are linked with the global economy and the industrial sector as well as the environment. The consequences of such trends are a number of problems which face the world in the future, particularly in developing countries. These problems include overpopulation, levelling off of food supplies, diseases, natural resources depletion, and conflicts and clashes in areas where immigration and cultural differences exist. Such problems are discussed together with their implications. Some ideas are then given on how these future difficulties might be overcome; and it is clear that information will have an enormous role to play in this respect. Topics covered comprise global awareness (for example of the environment, birth control, women's rights, healthcare) through education and information; frontierless transactions; global information access, dissemination, communication and transfer of knowledge; knowledge build‐up and transfer through CDROM archiving of latent skills and know‐how; and the like.