Search results

This study explores the social conditions for sustainability practices, addressing the processes whereby associational gardening practices in a highly segregated context may or may not create connections and capacities across urban social divides.

Based on organizational ethnographic fieldwork, the article explores urban gardens as potential meeting places in a segregated city, Gothenburg, focusing on collectively organized gardening projects in different socioeconomic and socio-spatial settings.

The study identifies the unintentional encounters embedded in the immaterial act of gardening, that is, digging, planting and actual gardening practices regardless of the harvest. Such practices were found to be important for social sustainability practices beyond the continuous reproduction of silos, at least in multicultural settings. Nevertheless, many urban gardeners create a green living room for themselves and their neighbours, and engagement with those outside their silos often becomes more of a symbolic act of global solidarity, especially in more culturally homogeneous areas.

The article fills a gap in the research by focusing on the social conditions for sustainability practices in urban segregated areas. By showing how gardening practices often reproduce cultural similarity, the study highlights the importance of revealing practices and places that facilitate unintentional social “bonus” interactions that nonetheless occur in two of the gardening environments studied. Unintentional encounters are identified as important dimensions of social sustainability practices.

This study conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) on social inclusion within upstream supply chains, targeting a notable literature gap in modern SCM discourse. By delving into this critical, yet underexamined, domain, this study spotlights the pressing need to incorporate social inclusion practices, particularly as global supply chains face increased scrutiny over their social ramifications. It examines social inclusion’s intricacies, offering practical insights for industry professionals to adopt, so that trustworthy social inclusion practices can proliferate across their upstream supply chains, thereby making a substantial contribution to both theoretical understanding and practical application.

Employing five search queries across two leading academic databases, this investigation reviewed 86 articles that examined social issues related to social inclusion in the upstream supply chain. Via content analysis, this study aims to answer essential research questions and employs statistical bibliometric analyses to investigate the collected data further.

This study’s findings establish a definition of social inclusion within the upstream supply chain and present a conceptual framework delineating levers and indicators for evaluating such practices. Through rigorous analysis, it becomes apparent that mechanisms such as supplier compliance, collaboration and development are crucial for promoting social inclusion; however, their importance differs at various levels of suppliers in multi-tiered supply chains. Furthermore, a methodological matrix is introduced for assessing social inclusion practices’ efficacy, equipping practitioners with a roadmap for developing and executing strategies that extend social inclusion efforts throughout the supply chain, as well as emphasising these levers through monitoring, assessment and application of six specified indicators.

This study contributes to the dialogue surrounding upstream supply chain management by spotlighting social inclusion practices, addressing the literature gap in comprehending how social inclusion dynamics operate within upstream supply chains and outlining a distinct direction for forthcoming research. By highlighting the pressing importance of enhancing social inclusion practices, this study not only enriches the theoretical landscape but also lays the groundwork for subsequent empirical studies aimed at deciphering the complexities and practical hurdles associated with the efficient execution of these practices.

Social and environmental accounting research manifests varying levels of awareness of critical global problems and the need to develop alternative approaches to dealing with economy and society. This paper explores Buddhist thought and, specifically, Buddhist economics as a means to informing this debate. We draw on and expand Schumacher's ideas about ‘Buddhist economics’, first articulated in the 1960s. Our analysis centres on Buddhism's Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path and associated Buddhist teachings. The examination includes assumptions, means and ends of Buddhist approaches to economics; these are compared and contrasted with conventional economics.To consider how thought and practice may be bridged, we examine a practical application of Buddhism's Middle Way, in the form of Thailand's current work with ‘Sufficiency Economy’.Throughout the paper, we explore the implications for the development of social accounting, looking for mutual interactions between Buddhism and social accounting thought and practice.

Purpose – The aim is to introduce a sociological perspective on resource integration and value co-creation into service research using a service systems approach.

Methodology/approach – Conceptual and a case study of the service system a Telecom Equipment and Service Provider is embedded in is reported.

Findings – The service practice of the service system is framed by social structures of signification, legitimation, and domination. However, the practice is also independent of the structures since it is embedded in and shapes the structural realm.

Research implications and limitations – Drawing on structuration and practice theory, the chapter offers a new framework describing how social and service structures and practices can inform and reveal mechanisms of service system dynamics. Based on the framework, three propositions are developed focusing on the mechanisms of resource integration and value co-creation. The implications need to be generalized in future research by studying other empirical contexts.

Practical implications – The chapter provides some tentative guidelines on how organizations can design service systems that enable and support customers and other actors in their resource integration and value co-creation processes by paying attention to social structures and forces and not only resources as such.

Originality – The chapter explicates how social structures have implications for value co-creation and resource integration in service system. It makes systematic use of structuration and practice theory to understand the social dimensions of service systems. A distinction between intended and realized resource integration is made.

The study aims to understand the meaning of event-based and place-based community practices, as well as the resulting social impacts.

An ethnomethodological approach was followed (participant observation and interviews were supplemented by secondary data), with the analysis being exploratory and interpretative.

The festival and the place reinforce the community’s social practices, which have impacts beyond the festival, benefiting individuals, the community and the place, becoming a means for valorisation and diffusion of the rural way of life, and placemaking.

In this study the authors focus on social practices in the context of an event and of a place (the village where the event occurs). The authors connect to theories of practice, which they apply in the analysis. The value of the study lies on the underlying mechanisms (how communities exercise social practices in the context of festivals, and what social impacts may lead to) rather than its context-dependent specific results.

National and regional authorities can play a role in providing local communities with adequate tools to overcome the challenges they encounter. This can be done by issuing appropriate (events) plans and policies while giving room for the locals to voice their opinions.

Community-based festivals are key social practices that can strategically impact placemaking, strengthening community bonding, forging connections with outsiders and promoting well-being practices that discourage rural depopulation.

There is a scarcity of research that deepens the understanding of the role of festivals in placemaking and their social impacts, particularly in the rural context. This study contributes to closing this gap by focussing on the social practices of a community-based festival in a village in the interior of Portugal.

This article studies the role played by sustainability operations management (OM) practices in the relationship between governance and environmental and social performance adopting the lenses of the upper echelons theory and the resource-based view. In particular, the authors study three main relationships: (1) the impact of governance on the implementation of sustainability OM practices, (2) the impact of sustainability OM practices on sustainability performance and (3) the mediating role of sustainability OM practices in the relationship between governance and sustainability performance.

To test this study’s research model, the authors retrieved secondary data of 430 firms from the United Stated (US) and Europe and analyzed it using partial least squares (PLS)-based structural equation modeling (SEM).

This study’s results suggest that sustainability OM practices are needed to achieve higher social and environmental performance outcomes from governance, highlighting the key role of the OM department in the achievement of a sustainability strategy.

This paper adopts the environmental, social, governance (ESG) neglected focus and aims to provide a better understanding of and reveal the interrelationship between governance and sustainability OM practices (i.e. environmental and social).

Lean implementation has become popular over the past three decades in the industry and is becoming more prevalent in, service organizations. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of social and technical Lean practices on sustainable performance (i.e. economic, environmental and social) in service organizations.

The methodology includes the analysis of global results obtained from 139 managers from the service sector.

The results demonstrate that Lean practices have a positive effect on the three perspectives of sustainable performance, regardless of the company size and duration of Lean implementation. Furthermore, both social and technical Lean practices have a similar impact on environmental and economic performance, but their impact on social performance differs, since social Lean practices have a stronger impact on social performance.

This study has a significant contribution to Lean practitioners in service sectors, as it demonstrates that efforts to apply Lean practices can benefit economic results as well as environmental and social performance.

Majority of existing studies focused on the isolated impact of Lean on one of the triple bottom line performance aspects and with a scarcity of studies within the context of services. The intersection of these three strategic areas – Lean, sustainability and services – has not been extensively addressed. There is also a lack of studies that observe sustainability in environmental, social and economic performance, mainly in the service sector.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the adoption of sustainability practices by small and medium‐sized manufacturing (SMM) firms, the ways these firms work with their stakeholders for social and environmental purposes, and the relationships between the adoption of sustainability practices, stakeholder interaction, and product and process innovation.

This paper uses data from telephone interviews with 296 companies, a sustainability typology, and descriptive and statistical regression analysis.

The majority of the firms are adopting sustainability practices at least to some degree, stakeholders such as community advocacy groups, employees, suppliers, customers, and the local media are influencing the adoption of sustainability practices, and firms with high adoption rates of environmental practices are more successful in product and process innovation.

The results of this research can help firms and stakeholder groups with their joint efforts to develop sustainability strategies. Community advocacy groups, employees, suppliers, customers, and the local media are capable of motivating firms to give something back to the communities in which they conduct their business.

This paper contributes new understanding of the adoption of sustainability practices by SMM firms, the ways these firms work with their stakeholders for social and environmental purposes, and the relationships between the adoption of sustainability practices, stakeholder interaction, and product and process innovation.

Although the generation of social value is the focus of social entrepreneurship, little research attention is paid on how social value and transformation can be created. By adopting a market approach, this study aims to develop a framework showing how social enterprises in tourism/hospitality can generate social value and transformation.

A thorough literature review revealed that a market approach is an appropriate lens for understanding social entrepreneurship. Consequently, a framework based on “learning with the market” is proposed as a useful tool for identifying, managing and also creating (new) opportunities for social ventures. The justification and the theoretical underpinnings of the market-based framework are further supported by discussing various other theories and concepts.

The framework identifies three capabilities that social entrepreneurs need to develop for generating social value and transformation: network structure, market practices and market pictures. Several examples from tourism and hospitality social enterprises are analyzed for showing the applicability and usefulness of the framework.

The paper proposes a conceptual framework as well as several research directions for further testing, refining and expanding it.

By applying the framework on several tourism and hospitality social enterprises, the paper provides practical implications about the capabilities that social enterprises should develop for engaging with other market actors to identify and exploit (new) market opportunities for social value co-creation, and influence market plasticity for forming new markets and driving social change.

The suggested framework identifies the capabilities and the ways in which (tourism/hospitality) social enterprises can engage with and form markets for co-creating social value and escalating their social impacts through social transformation.

The paper provides a new marketing approach (that overcomes the limitations of traditional economic theories) for understanding how social enterprises can shape, manage and engage with social markets for generating social value.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new analytical framework in examining corruption from the social ontology perspective by using the Schatzkian practice theory to assess the interconnectedness among social practices constituting the social reality.

This exploratory paper is part of the author’s study to assess the complex corruption phenomenon in Indonesia from multiple perspectives to gain a better understanding of its nature and dynamics. By drawing from the existing literature on the Schatzkian practice theory, the COVID-19 pandemic and the corruption phenomenon, this study investigates the potential changes of the new constellation of practice-arrangement bundles within the social reality and how such changes may alter corruption practices in the future. Furthermore, this study also uses publicly available reports from several national and international agencies to explore possible future scenarios from the interconnectedness of corruption, anti-corruption and pandemic practices. This paper constructs a new analytical framework for assessing the corruption phenomenon and designing the most appropriate anti-corruption strategy from such an exploration. The framework also serves as a reference for future anti-corruption research.

The author establishes that all social phenomena are constructed by an interconnected, dynamic and ever-changing constellation of practice-arrangement bundles within the social reality. As a largely social phenomenon (at least in Indonesia), corruption is also constructed by webs of practice-arrangement bundles. For decades, corruption practices in Indonesia have always been interconnected with anti-corruption practices in ways that changes in one group of practices will drive changes in the others. With the adoption of the pandemic practices centered around social distancing, social restriction and social safety net, corruption practices appear to transform to adapt to the new environment. Therefore, future anti-corruption research should aim to examine the structure and dynamics of corruption, anti-corruption and pandemic practices to highlight changes or potential changes within the three groups of practices to determine the most appropriate intervention measures and anti-corruption strategy.

This exploratory study is self-funded and relies primarily on documentary analysis to explore the corruption phenomenon in Indonesia. Future studies will benefit from in-depth interviews with former corruption offenders and corruption investigators.

This exploratory paper contributes to developing a sound corruption prevention strategy by proposing a new analytical framework for assessing various social practices, particularly those associated with corruption and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper highlights the importance of understanding the structure, interconnectedness and dynamics of social practices, particularly associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, to better understand the corruption phenomenon.