Drawing on ecological economics, post-development studies, and political ecology, this paper argues that sustainable development notions have run their course within sustainability marketing debates and proposes degrowth as an alternative framework to steer disciplinary debates in new directions. We chart unexplored territory, offering sustainability marketing scholars tools to navigate degrowth-minded policies, transformative frameworks, and business models. In doing so, our work contributes to existing sustainability marketing debates in three ways: first, we respond to the paucity of studies engaging with the political economy of sustain-ability marketing. Second, we make visible the tensions and contra-dictions that arise as marketers seek to reconcile imperatives of economic growth and sustainability. Finally, we foreground degrowth as an emerging sustainability proposition, with potential for inspiring the radical set of transformations required to avert catastrophic climate change and keep global temperatures well below +2°C (relative to pre-industrial levels), as pledged in the Paris Agreement.
Drawing on institutional theory and discursive psychology, this article elucidates how actors use emotion discourse to undermine the legitimacy of consumer practices. Based on an empirical investigation of the bullfighting controversy in Spain, our work shows how activists engage in the production and circulation of compelling emotional prototypes of their adversaries. Such emotional prototypes constitute the discursive foundations of a pathic stigma, which, once established, taints the identity of the social groups associated with the practice. Our work frames the centrality of pathic stigmatization as a cultural mechanism mediating the relationship between emotion discourse and the subsequent delegitimization of consumer practices. We make three key contributions to the literature: we advance a rhetorical perspective on emotions and their role in deinstitutionalization processes; we further develop the theory of marketplace sentiments by showing how sentiments operate downstream; and we provide evidence of the sociocultural mechanisms underpinning the emotional vilification, stereotyping and stigmatization of consumer collectives.
While degrowth debates typically encompass abstract ecological and economic arguments against growth, our study considers how degrowth-minded activism becomes interwoven with the production and consumption of space and place. Drawing illustrative insights from an ethnographic study in the city of Seville, our findings reveal a configuration of practices (accessibility, self-organisation, reproduction and conviviality) through which degrowthminded activism infuses urban life with non-capitalist processes and logics. Consequently, our work contributes to a paucity of studies theorizing the production/consumption of space in relation to broader processes of capitalist development. In doing so, we also promote a more humane consideration of the spatial dimensions through which more equitable ways of living are constituted.
Fragmented marketing debates concerning the role of alternative economies are attributable to the lack of a meaningful macromarketing dimension to which alternative economic practices can be anchored. The research frames an evaluation of existing macromarketing developments aimed at reformulating the mindless fetish for economic growth. Raising concerns with the treadmill dynamics of marketing systems, three different approaches-green growth, a-growth and degrowth-are critically evaluated to: (a) introduce degrowth as a widely overlooked concept in the macromarketing literature; (b) expose how each perspective entails a specific organization of provisioning activities; and (c) foreground the role of alternative economic practices beyond the growth paradigm. The article concludes by arguing that socially sustainable degrowth is central to elucidating current marketing debates concerning the future direction of alternative economic practices.
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