Date: Wednesday 20th February 2019
Venue: 1.003WBS, Scarman Road – Seminar
Time: Seminar commences 13.00 hrs (Lunch for registered participants available in WBS staff Lounge 1.022 from 12.00hrs)
Abstract:
As humanity, we are facing an increasing pressure to engage in a large-scale transformation of our current lifestyle to be able to sustain our future on planet earth. According to current statistics we are, on average, using the resources of 1.6 planets while the number of people living on the planet is increasing exponentially. An increasing number of people is pointing to private businesses to be the agents of global change. However, the transformation of big businesses towards more sustainable modes of value creation often remains incremental.
In this paper, we argue that a lack of psychological ownership amongst many members of organizations explains the prevailing idleness regarding sustainable behaviours. Further, we identify the potential of internal marketing of the idea of sustainable business to fuel the urgently needed transformation processes. For this purpose, we develop the construct of "sustainability ownership". Interestingly, though highly relevant, the role of psychological ownership of an organization’s sustainability in enhancing employees’ willingness to contribute to the sustainability transformation of their organization remains, to date, unexplored.
Thus, we address the following research questions in this paper. First, how can we define the construct of sustainability ownership and why is it especially important in the transformation towards more sustainable businesses? Second, what are the psychological processes by which sustainability ownership develops and subsequently translates into sustainable behaviours? And third, how can organizations actively enhance their employees’ sustainability ownership through internal marketing practices?
As we address previously unexplored territory, we first used a qualitative approach and conducted interviews with practitioners to develop an understanding of sustainability ownership. We juxtapose the insights gained through the interviews with existing literature on psychological ownership and develop our conceptual framework. We test this framework in several empirical studies, including data from real organizational contexts.
Biography:
Laura Marie Edinger-Schons is Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at the University of Mannheim. Laura Marie Schons frequently collaborates with private businesses (e.g., IKEA, SAP, BASF, Adidas, Novartis) and NGOs (e.g., Greenpeace, WWF, Social Impact, or Phineo) to jointly tackle theoretical and managerial puzzles. Her work has been published in renowned academic journals including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Journal of Business Ethics.
She received the Overall Best Paper Award at the 2014 Winter AMA, was voted into the Top Ten Junior Academics 2015 (by Zeit and academics), and received the German Science Award 2016 for the best collaboration with private business (20,000€). For her teaching, she received the AACSB Innovations that Inspire Award 2017 and the students’ teaching award of the faculty of business management of the University of Mannheim 2017. For her habilitation thesis "Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Marketing – CSR Strategy, Communication, and Innovative Pricing", Laura Marie Edinger-Schons received the Wolfgang-Ritter Award 2017 (10,000€), the Roman Herzog Research Award 2018 (5,000€), as well as the Max Weber Research Award 2018 (3,000€).
Before accepting the position in Mannheim, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Sales and Marketing Department of the Ruhr University Bochum where she finished her doctoral thesis in 2011 (supervised by Prof. Jan Wieseke and Prof. Mario Rese). She studied economics, business management, and social psychology at Ruhr University Bochum and Udayana University Denpasar (Indonesia), and took additional courses in philosophy.
Research interests
- Micro CSR (Customer and Employee Perceptions of Companies‘ Social Responsibility Communications and Actions)
- Sustainable Consumption
- Stakeholder Involvement and Empowerment
- Creating Shared Value & Social Impact Valuation
- Social Entre-/Intrapreneurship
Innovative Business Models & Sharing Economy
Contact: Please reserve your place by emailing mktoffice@warwick.ac.uk