Dear Colleagues,

Continuous economic growth has led to environmental degradation as we are witnessing it now, far from a sustainable outlook, and therefore economic systems need to be changed (Meadows et al. 1972; Martínez-Alier et al. 2010; van den Bergh and Kallis, 2012). Moreover, overconsumption and overdevelopment are being acknowledged as problems by an increasing portion of the world’s population, and new voices for “prosperity without growth” have strengthened  (Kallis et al. 2012; Demaria et al. 2013; Akbulut et al. 2019; Drews et al. 2019; Liegey et al. 2020).

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 12 call to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”. Academia has been quick to follow suit researching the area of sustainability, with human-caused contemporary climate change exceeding 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature (Lynas et al. 2021). However, even with clear national and global guidelines and a plethora of research, still today there is no strong understanding of the economic response towards current resources’ depletion. Chan et al. (2018) concluded that research specifically needs to better understand consumption and consumers’ needs, sustainable consumption choices, collaborative consumption and sustainable consumption policy focus. Existing research shows that up to 90% of consumers are impulsive purchasers (Khan et al. 2015), and up to 80% of all consumption is based on impulsive buying behavior (Husnain et al. 2019; Miao et al. 2020; Li et al. 2022), which is heavily stimulated by businesses. There is a concern that corporate social responsibility is nothing more than “greenwashing”, a practice as old as the “green movement” itself (Haider et al. 2022). However, without organisations’ concrete responses, unresolved economic level dispute, political policies’ inabilities for a change of an economic growth and uncertainty in population behaviour, business modeling concerning sustainable consumption is impossible.

Planning departments’ specialists and entrepreneurs are struggling without a conceptual framework that can be implemented at a practical level. If growth is impossible, how can organisations target sales? If business maximization is considered as an aggressive appetitive behaviour of capitalists, which model should be implemented? If resources are limited, what level of buying is considered permissable? Who controls this level, and who has this responsibility? Sustainable development was proposed to be seen as a “triple bottom line” at the business planning level (Elkington, 1998). However, does this triple bottom line work at all? The findings reveal that triple bottom-line models alone do not comprehensively address sustainability issues, and economic prosperity remains a dominant consideration (Asif et al. 2011). Some businesses implement circular economy principles such as re-use, re-new and re-store practices, some targeted waste management, while others do nothing at all. This could be considered as a level of chaos and turbulence perfect enough for new ways of thinking to emerge where understanding what is sustainable consumption and how businesses could use data for planning and modelling with an understanding of proposed business growth and its consequences.

It has been stated that businesses need to reorient towards consumption sustainability, where social and sustainability marketing and transformative consumer marketing have to take a central stage inside the marketing paradigm and dominate marketing thinking using the knowledge  accumulated in the past 100 years of demand creation toward demand redirection, by connecting individualism to collective well-being, replacing material goods with human connections, and converting mindlessness to mindfulness for qualitative consumption (Iyer et al. 2020).

With this Special Issue, we are calling for multidisciplinary approach contributors  intending to bridge the gap between the economic and business understanding of sustainability exploring sustainable consumption and data needed for the development of Sustainable Business Models, ultimately aiming towards the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.

References:

1. Akbulut, B.; Demaria, F.; Gerber, J.F.; Martínez-Alier, J. Who promotes sustainability? Five theses on the relationships between the degrowth and the environmental justice movements. Ecol. Econ. 2019, 165, 106418.
2. Chan, S.; Weitz, N.; Persson, Å.; Trimmer, C. SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. A Review of Research Needs. Technical Annex to the Formas Report Forskning för Agenda, 2030; Stockholm Environment Institute: Stockholm, Sweden, 2018.
3. Demaria, F.; Schneider, F.; Sekulova, F.; Martinez-Alier, J. What is degrowth? From an activist slogan to a social movement. Environ. Values 2013, 22, 191–215.
4. Drews, S.; Savin, I.; van den Bergh, J.C. Opinion clusters in academic and public debates on growth-vs-environment. Ecol. Econ. 2019, 157, 141–155.
5. Haider, M.; Shannon, R.; Moschis, G.P. Sustainable consumption research and the role of marketing: A review of the literature (1976–2021). Sustainability 2022, 14, 3999.
6. Husnain, M.; Rehman, B.; Syed, F.; Akhtar, M.W. Personal and in-store factors influencing impulse buying behavior among generation Y consumers of small cities. Bus. Perspect. Res. 2019, 7, 92–107.
7. Iyer, G.R.; Blut, M.; Xiao, S.H.; Grewal, D. Impulse buying: A meta-analytic review. J. Acad. Mark. Sci. 2020, 48, 384–404.
8. Kallis, G.; Kerschner, C.; Martinez-Alier, J. The economics of degrowth. Ecol. Econ. 2012, 84, 172–180.
9. Khan, M.T.; Humayun, A.A.; Sajjad, M. FactorsAffecting Impulse Buying and Percentage of Impulse Buying in Total Purchasing. Int. J. Inf. Bus. Manag. 2015, 7, 254.
10. Khan, M.T.; Humayun, A.A.; Sajjad, M. Factors Affecting Impulse Buying and Percentage of Impulse Buying in Total Purchasing. Int. J. Inf. Bus. Manag. 2015, 7, 254.
11. Li, Y.; Wang, J.; Chen, R.; Wang, E.; Wang, B.; Yu, Q.; Pan, X. Climate-smart planting for potato to balance economic return and environmental impact across China. Sci. Total Environ. 2022, 850, 158013.
12. Liegey, V.; Nelson, A.; Hickel, J. Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide; Pluto Press: London, UK, 2020, p. 7.
13. Lynas, M.; Houlton, B.Z.; Perry, S. Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Environ. Res. Lett. 2021, 16, 114005.
14. Martínez-Alier, J.; Pascual, U.; Vivien, F.D.; Zaccai, E. Sustainable de-growth: Mapping the context, criticisms and future prospects of an emergent paradigm. Ecol. Econ. 2010, 69, 1741–1747.
15. De Rome, C.; Meadows, D.H.; Randers, J.; Behren, W.W., III. The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome; Universe Books: New York, NY, USA, 1972; Volume 91, p. 2.
16. Miao, M.; Jalees, T.; Qabool, S.; Zaman, S.I. The effects of personality, culture and store stimuli on impulsive buying behavior: Evidence from emerging market of Pakistan. Asia Pac. J. Mark. Logist. 2019, 32, 188–204.
17. Van den Bergh, J.C.; Kallis, G. Growth, a-growth or degrowth to stay within planetary boundaries? J. Econ. Issues 2012, 46, 909–920.

Dr. Yioula Melanthiou
Dr. Laura Castaldi
Dr. Alessandro Augurio
Guest Editors

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• sustainability
• weak sustainable consumption
• strong sustainable consumption
• consumer buying behavior
• social corporate responsibility
• data-driven business models
• knowledge
• innovation management