Businesses want to be sustainable but how can they promote sufficiency? Sufficiency-oriented business models focus on creating sustainable value, promoting a sufficiency-oriented lifestyle and adjusting production volumes to planetary boundaries. The contributors to this volume present practical examples of sufficiency-oriented companies across industries. Experts share their insights on sufficiency strategies in business and their effectiveness for behavioural change. They address the far-reaching changes in practices and behaviour required for this paradigm shift in business logic and suggests future research directions.
Businesses want to be sustainable but how can they promote sufficiency? Sufficiency-oriented business models focus on creating sustainable value, promoting reduced resource consumption and adjusting production volumes to planetary boundaries. The contributors to this volume present real-life examples of sufficiency-oriented companies across diverse industries. These experts share their insights on sufficiency strategies in business, barriers and opportunities discovered, and the impact on customer behavioural change. They address the far-reaching changes in business, society, and policy required for this paradigm shift and suggest future research directions.
Can innovations in business change society? Can innovations in society change business? These two questions have become critically urgent in recent years, but are rarely considered together. ‘Business Models for Sustainability Transitions’ therefore asks, can contemplating both concepts together result in a flourishing, sustainable future? Technology alone cannot save us. We cannot consciously consume our way out of trouble. This book represents a start at bridging the dynamic world of business model innovation with the constant and unprecedented transitions underway in the world around us. For researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, the coupling of the two questions has the potential to unlock answers to our grand global challenges with responses that are at the same time rapid and enduring. This work offers unique and considered glimpses into what it may take to harness wide-ranging innovations for the collective good.
The book investigates the role of law and legal experts in the organisational dynamics of a population, demonstrating that law is a stable practice among those who (in virtue of the special knowledge they master) are called upon to select the ‘normative facts’ of a population, i.e. the interactional standards that are proclaimed as binding for the entire population by the publicly recognised legal experts (whose peremptory judgments can be only revised by peers). It proposes an integration of the recent research outcomes achieved in three different areas of study: legal positivism, legal institutionalism and legal pluralism and examines the notions of rule, coercion, institution, practice elaborated by significant theorists in the mentioned areas and illumine both their merits and flaws. Furthermore it advances a notion of law and a description of the legal field which are able to account for the nature of the legal filed as the cradle of the social order. new back cover copy: In an era characterized by a streaking global pluralism, the collapse of many state agencies, the emergence of multiple sources of law, and the rise of informal justice, the idea of a unitary and homogenous legal system seems old-fashioned. But philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists still hold many debates on the nature of law and its function, which is that law represents an institution that characterizes any orderly social context of human beings, and this book plunges into the center of those debates. Self-sufficiency of Law: A Critical-institutional Theory of Social Order investigates the role of law and legal experts in the organizational dynamics of a population. It demonstrates that law is a stable practice among those who are called upon to select the “normative facts” of a population, that is, the interactional standards that are proclaimed as binding for the entire population by the publicly recognized legal experts. To do this, the author proposes an integration of the recent research outcomes achieved in three different areas of study—legal positivism, legal institutionalism and legal pluralism. He examines the notions of rule, coercion, institution and practice elaborated on by significant theorists in these fields, highlighting both the merits and flaws and ultimately advancing a notion of law and a description of the legal field which are able to account for the nature of the legal field as the cradle of social order. This text covers key guidelines for empirical research and political activities in Western and non-Western countries.
Master the fundamentals, hone your business instincts, and save a fortune in tuition. The consensus is clear: MBA programs are a waste of time and money. Even the elite schools offer outdated assembly-line educations about profit-and-loss statements and PowerPoint presentations. After two years poring over sanitized case studies, students are shuffled off into middle management to find out how business really works. Josh Kaufman has made a business out of distilling the core principles of business and delivering them quickly and concisely to people at all stages of their careers. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. In The Personal MBA, he shares the essentials of sales, marketing, negotiation, strategy, and much more. True leaders aren't made by business schools-they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to succeed. Read this book and in one week you will learn the principles it takes most people a lifetime to master.
Business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce transactions, including social commerce, are rapidly expanding, although e-commerce is still small when compared to traditional business transactions. As the familiarity of making purchases using smart devices continues to expand, many global and regional investors hope to target the ASEAN region to tap into the rising digital market in this region. The Handbook of Research on Innovation and Development of E-Commerce and E-Business in ASEAN is an essential reference source that discusses economics, marketing strategies, and mobile payment systems, as well as digital marketplaces, communication technologies, and social technologies utilized for business purposes. Featuring research on topics such as business culture, mobile technology, and consumer satisfaction, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, financial managers, business professionals, academicians, students, and researchers.
That the notion of “sufficiency” is essential for a good life is an idea that enjoys support across many ethical, philosophical, religious and cultural persuasions. This notion reasserted itself in the study of sustainability once modern society reluctantly took cognizance of the limited low entropy energy and matter available for human appropriation. There is today therefore a general recognition of (i.e. not necessarily wide agreement on the merits of or needs for) notions of sufficiency as a species of environmentalism within secular communities. In this context, a critical question that invites our attention is how to effect sufficiency, and in particular of dealing with the daunting challenge of injustice as well as questions of distribution within and between countries that it brings to attention. Given sufficiency’s original home, as it were, in tradition, the modern world has tended to dismiss it or to plead to individual voluntary simplicity when faced with evidence asserting its necessity. Sufficiency is also often written away as a spiritual problem. The domain of ascetics and the religious. How to habilitate sufficiency in a political economy for the secular modern facing its biggest existential challenge yet, in the form of the environmental crisis?
Annotation. In this second volume of collected essays, Samuel Alexander develops the provocative ideas contained in Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits. Given that the global economy is in gross ecological overshoot, Alexander argues that the richest nations need to transcend consumer culture and initiate a 'degrowth' process of planned economic contraction. To achieve this, he shows that we need to build a post-capitalist politics and economics from the grassroots up, restructuring our societies to promote a far 'simpler way' of life based on notions of sufficiency, frugality, appropriate technology, and localism.
Our world is under pressure, with growing inequalities in wealth and access to food and clean water. We depend too heavily on polluting fuels and diminishing natural resources. Traditional cultural practices are being swamped by global popular culture. The Thai model of sufficiency thinking aims to transform the mindset of a whole population to achieve the seemingly impossible: enriching everyone's lives in a truly sustainable way. Innovative management practices developed by King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand have been applied across Thailand in agriculture, education, business, government and community organisations for over two decades. In this book, chapters written by eminent Thai scholars explain sufficiency thinking and review its implementation in different sectors including community development, business, agriculture, health care, schools, and even in prisons. Is Thailand unique in having discovered the holy grail of a more responsible form of capitalism? No, it is not, but it is the first country whose government has adopted this kind of thinking as national policy. '...we obviously need to revise dramatically our thinking about the outlines of a just economy and a decent society in which everyone can lead dignified lives. Sufficiency Thinking provides creative approaches to this quandary and this important volume is a brilliant addition to the growing literature critical of mainstream business-as-usual ideology.' - John Komlos, Professor Emeritus, University of Munich
