Search results

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise how place management practices in UK housing associations (HAs) involve processes of ecological place management.

Ethnographic fieldwork focusing on how communal spaces are organised on a housing estate in a UK city revealed the importance of negotiation with other actors, including an HA which is responsible for managing the estate. The authors draw on extensive participant observation with residents, as well as interviews with both residents and employees of the HA, to show the wider forces and complexities involved in these ecological place management practices.

This paper identifies hybrid socio-ecological, socio-political and political-economic dynamics unfolding as places are managed and organised. These widen the scope of place management research and practice to account for multiple ways places are organised.

This paper offers a critical perspective on place management, developing an ecological approach that is applicable both to the relatively new context of housing and to more established sites in town and city centres.

This paper’s findings point to ways that housing and place management practitioners, both in the UK and elsewhere, can use an ecological approach to re-frame their strategic and practical actions with regards to “place”.

This paper contributes to unveiling the complexity involved in place management and organisation, thereby encouraging place managers to embrace ecological thinking capable of addressing future challenges.

This paper aims to investigate place marketing and branding at the micro-place scale through the case study of St Christopher’s Place in London (UK). This study illustrates the distinctive differences of micro-place marketing, in comparison to city and country levels.

An exploratory case study was conducted through a sequential mixed methods approach involving direct observation, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and social media analysis. Analysis of data was performed by using thematic analysis and triangulation of quantitative measures collected through the questionnaire and social media analysis.

Analysis of data illustrated noticeable differences of place management at the micro-place level compared to city or country scale of place marketing and branding. The function of emotional marketing leading to value co-creation is more effective at this level, establishing close and personal ties between occupiers and customers. Yet, measurement of micro-place marketing and branding value creation is difficult to achieve.

This study draws attention to the unique value and benefits of place branding at smaller spatial scales. Findings contribute to the place micro-brand concept by adding knowledge of micro-places through place management activities comparing them with city and country scales, and emotional marketing value co-creation practices, including challenges relating to measurement.

This study aims to propose a framework to drive organizations, and particularly multinational enterprises, to understand and internalize a sustainable mindset for implementing efficient and effective corporate sustainability initiatives and helping them achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs).

The framework is based on the bidirectional iterative process of the flexible pattern matching methodology. The literature on ecocentric management was examined from top to bottom in its dialogue with corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR). The bottom-up phase was based on highly visible deviant cases of companies that were significantly recognized for their CSR or for their sustainability programs but became well-known examples of unsustainability. Additionally, an illustrative case was analyzed to examine the mindset in practice.

The study offers a framework based on six constructs that were identified in ecocentric management literature. It translates the ecocentric management mindset framework into behaviors for organizations that want to conduct efficient sustainable programs that help them achieve the SDGs.

The proposed new framework highlights the conceptual pillars of ecocentric management, and offers practical and theoretical perspectives on how sustainability can be better addressed at the corporate level, and help achieve the SDGs.

This paper aims to contribute to the emerging entrepreneurship research that deals with resilience by examining how embeddedness in place and in trans-local grassroots networks influences proactive entrepreneurship for local resilience.

Three theoretical propositions are developed on the basis of the existing literature. These propositions are assisted with brief empirical illustrations of grassroots innovations from the context of agri-food systems.

Embeddedness in place and in trans-local grassroots networks enables proactive entrepreneurship for local resilience. Social-cultural embeddedness in place facilitates access to local resources and legitimacy, and creation of social value in the community. Ecological embeddedness in place facilitates spotting and leveraging of environmental feedbacks and creation of ecological value. Embeddedness in trans-local grassroots networks provides entrepreneurs with unique resources, including globally transferable knowledge about sustainability challenges and practical solutions to these challenges. As result, entrepreneurship for resilience is explained as an embedding process. Embedding means attuning of practices to local places, as well as making global resources, including knowledge obtained in grassroots networks, work in local settings.

Researchers should continue developing the emerging domain of entrepreneurship for resilience.

The objective of resilience and due respect to local environment may entail a need to consider appropriate resourcing practices and organisational models.

The critical roles of place-based practices for resilience deserve more recognition in today’s globalised world.

The specific importance of the ecological dimension of embeddedness in place is emphasised. Moreover, by combining entrepreneurship and grassroots innovation literatures, which have talked past each other to date, this paper shows how local and global resources are leveraged throughout the embedding process. Thereby, it opens unexplored research avenues within the emerging domain of entrepreneurship for resilience.

Aboriginal people across Australia have diverse practices, beliefs and knowledges based on thousands of generations of managing and protecting their lands (Country). The intimate relationship Aboriginal people have with their Country is explored in this chapter because such knowledge is important for building insight into the relationship between social and ecological systems. Often in research Aboriginal views have been marginalised from discussions focused on their lands to the detriment of ecosystems and human health. This chapter aims to understand if such marginalisation is evident in Western human–nature relationship discourses.

This chapter provides a critical literature review which examines whether Aboriginal people’s diverse understanding of their ecosystems have been incorporated into human–nature theories using the biophilia hypothesis as a starting point. Other concepts explored include solastalgia, topophilia and place.

Critiques of these terminologies in the context of Aboriginal people’s connection to Country are limited but such incorporation is viewed in the chapter as a possible mechanism for better understanding human’s connection to nature. The review identified that Aboriginal people’s relationship to Country seems to be underrepresented in the human–nature theory literature.

This chapter emphasises that the integration of Aboriginal perspectives into research, ecological management and policy can provide better insight into the interrelationships between social and ecological systems.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept of ecological sustainability is attracting attention of global business community as neoclassical approach continues to fail in delivery. There is now an emerging need to explore new approaches towards balancing ecological and economic returns. The paper extends the philosophy of Permaculture into business domain and explores its compatibility to be integrated with strategic management perspectives.

The study primarily conducts a review of Permaculture and Strategic Management domains and uncovers the compatibility between the two domains while arguing that the integration of Permaculture philosophy in business strategy would achieve sustainability.

Permaculture philosophy is compatible with Strategic Management process for developing business strategies. It can incorporate ecological and social aspects for developing integrated strategy process for sustainability in organizations.

Focusing on financial and non-financial value addition contributed by organizations towards community would lead to long-term sustainability of the organization and the community which supports it.

The study extends the emerging philosophy of Permaculture into the established domain of Strategic Management. Arguing that simultaneous equilibrium of capacities, resources and demands of stakeholders must be maintained for sustained economic success in business world.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how proponents of biodiversity offsetting have sought to produce an ecologically defensible mechanism for reconciling economic development and biodiversity conservation.

The paper analyses a case study biodiversity offsetting mechanism in New South Wales, Australia. Michel Callon’s framing and overflowing metaphor is used to explain how accounting devices are brought into the mechanism, to (re)frame a space of calculability and address anxieties expressed by conservationists about calculations of net loss/gain of biodiversity.

The analysis shows that the offsetting mechanism embeds a form of accounting for biodiversity that runs counter to the prevailing dominant anthropocentric approach. Rather than accounting for the biodiversity of a site in terms of the economic benefits it provides to humans, the mechanism accounts for biodiversity in terms of its ecological value. This analysis, therefore, reveals a form of accounting for biodiversity that uses numbers to provide valuations of biodiversity, but these numbers are ecological numbers, not economic numbers. So this is a calculative, and also ecocentric, approach to accounting for, and valuing, biodiversity.

This paper contributes to the extant literature on accounting for biodiversity by revealing a novel conceptualisation of the reconciliation of economic development and biodiversity conservation, producing an ecologically defensible form of sustainable development. The paper also makes a methodological contribution by showing how Callon’s framing and overflowing metaphor can be used to enable the kind of interdisciplinary engagement needed for researchers to address sustainable development challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of ecology-centred accounting for biodiversity in efforts to conserve biodiversity.

The paper examines a case study of biodiversity conservation efforts to restore a degraded blanket bog habitat. The analysis adopts a social nature perspective, which sees the social and the natural as inseparably intertwined in socio-ecological systems: complexes of relations between (human and non-human) actors, being perpetually produced by fluid interactions. Using a theoretical framework from the geography literature, consisting of four mutually constitutive dimensions of relations – territory, scale, network, and place (TSNP) – the analysis examines various forms of accounting for biodiversity that are centred on this blanket bog.

The analysis finds that various forms of ecology-centred accounting for biodiversity have rendered this blanket bog visible and comprehensible in multiple ways, so as to contribute towards making this biodiversity conservation thinkable and possible.

This paper brings theorising from geography, concerning the social nature perspective and the TSNP framework, into the study of accounting for biodiversity. This has enabled a novel analysis that reveals the productive force of ecology-centred accounting for biodiversity, and the role of such accounting in organising the world so as to produce socio-ecological systems that aid biodiversity conservation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an original six-phase model describing entrepreneurial learning in the transition of place-based enterprises toward a sustainable exploitation of natural common resources (commons).

The six-phase model proposed by this study explains the learning processes involving place-based enterprises through two important existing theories: adaptive co-management and Lachmann’s evolutionary, embedded theory of entrepreneurship. The proposed model integrates these two theories on the basis of a longitudinal case study on the fishing enterprises in an Italian marine protected area (MPA).

In the case study, the success factors identified by the adaptive co-management literature proved important in enabling an embedded entrepreneurial learning process consistent with Lachmann’s view. The case analysis allowed the authors to cluster these learning processes around six phases. Further, even if traditional fishing is not knowledge-intensive, this case shows the transition to a sustainable business model required intense efforts of educated institutional work and scientific research. Interestingly, the key learning processes were enabled by the emergence of a larger, networked social entity (a network form of organization) including the community of fishermen, the MPA management and a network of scientists studying the marine area ecosystem.

This study is explorative and relies on a single case study. Despite this limitation, it opens up new research paths in the fields of entrepreneurship, institutional work, network organizations and adaptive management of the commons.

This study is strongly interdisciplinary; it proposes an original model based on a theoretical view that is highly innovative for organization and management studies; and addresses a relevant but overlooked issue with important societal implications.