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.
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.
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.
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.
The way organizations manage entrepreneurship has changed dramatically over the past decade. Today, organizations take account of economic issues, but they also adopt a broader perspective of their purpose including social and environmental issues (i.e. sustainability). Yet, despite its global spread, sustainable entrepreneurship remains an uncertain and poorly defined ambition with few absolutes. This book reaffirms the important need to improve comprehension and explore the subtleties of how individuals, groups, and organizations can discover, create, and seize opportunities for blended value generation, by designing and operating sustainable ventures. It examines, in an interdisciplinary fashion and across sectoral and geographical boundaries, how entrepreneurial activities can be developed to be generally consistent with sustainable development goals, as well as by whom, for what reasons, and with what implications. The Editors comprehensively review key dimensions of the sustainable entrepreneurship phenomenon to establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. The 19 chapters cover 4 main topics: Understanding the intentions and motivations for sustainable entrepreneurship Fostering and enacting sustainability through entrepreneurial action Leading and inspiring sustainable entrepreneurial action Finding the contextually grounded implications of and challenges to sustainable entrepreneurship and blended value generation This book is an important resource for entrepreneurs and policy makers as well as students in the fields of entrepreneurship, innovation, and sustainability.
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.
Now, more than ever, people across the country are turning toward simpler, greener, and quieter ways of living—whether they’re urbanites or country folk. Following in the footsteps of Back to Basics and Homesteading, this large, fully-illustrated book provides the entire family with the information they need to make the shift toward self-sufficient living. Self-Sufficiency provides tips, advice, and detailed instructions on how to improve everyday life from an environmentally and organic perspective while keeping the focus on the family. Readers will learn how to plant a family garden and harvest the produce; can fruits and vegetables; bake bread and cookies; design interactive and engaging “green” projects; harness natural wind and solar energy to cook food and warm their homes; boil sap to make maple syrup; and build treehouses, furniture, and more. Also included are natural crafts readers can do with their kids, such as scrapbooking, making potato prints, dipping candles, and constructing seasonal decorations. Whether the goal is to live entirely off the grid or just to shrink their carbon footprints, families will find this book a thorough resource and a great inspiration.
The first systematic account of the powerful decision-making framework which is being applied across all areas of life in Thailand to build a fair, resilient and sustainable economy and society.
"Growth" is the only political, economic and social goal recognized today. But it brings us up against the ecological limits of the planet - and against the increasingly widespread recognition of the fact that material wealth alone cannot make us happy. For this reason, ever growing numbers of people are seeking and discovering alternative and sustainable ways of living. This is to be welcomed, but it is not enough. We need a politics of sufficiency that will make it easier to live with fewer resources but with stronger relationships. This book outlines the political framework and policy guidelines that will enable us to reduce the speed, complexity, clutter and commercialization currently blighting our lives. And it demonstrates what that would mean in practice for where we live, how we get around, and how we eat, work and learn.
