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This chapter discusses the extent to which the empirical study concerning the moral aspect of green marketing achieved the aims set out for it, and assesses the overall significance and contribution of the study and its findings. It will be shown how the insights developed here provide important new understandings of marketing, morality and the natural environment. Moreover, by placing the study in a wider organizational, cultural and international context, it will be shown that whilst only a handful of organizations from a single country have been examined here, there are important implications to be gleaned for understanding similar phenomena in other organizations, other countries, and at other times. That is not to say that there are not problems associated with the approach adopted here, and as the chapter proceeds, a number of possible limitations will be identified. In addressing these limitations, it will be elucidated how the literature might usefully be advanced so as to build upon the insights provided here, and indeed consolidate them into a more systematic and concrete stream of theory. Finally, some possible implications of a more practical nature for managers, policy entrepreneurs, green activists and the like will be advance, and in the very last section, to ensure that the essential message has not been missed, and at the very least to summarize the key contributions of the book, a brief summary of my main findings will be provided.

This chapter attempts to develop further the findings relating to the organizational approaches, namely, conventional companies, social mission companies and business enterprises-nongovernmental organization collaboration, as integrated around the aspects of green marketing and morality. Two main themes--amoralization and moralization--have been set out and explored. Certainly it is true to say that prior to this, these themes have yet to be examined to any extent within the existing green marketing literature (nor even the broader marketing literature) and therefore it is suggested that the discussion should be seen as an attempt to develop new and original grounded theory in this respect. A number of important insights have been made. First, amoralization has been defined in the current context as the removal of moral meaning from the green marketing process, or from the objects of green marketing. Second, amoralization was shown to be tied to the behaviour of certain individuals and groups within the organization--usually the principal environmental protagonists--and have argued that these agents of amoralization effected this process in a number of ways. Third, the roots of amoralization, and its different manifestations in the three organizational contexts, within the realms of structure, power, politics and culture were located. Fourth, the consequences of amoralization discussed in this chapter, and although it was argued that even extensive greening of the marketing process could potentially take place without strong moral engagement being widely shared throughout the organization, the degree of amoralization was shown to vary according to organizational type. Fifth, possibility of moralization of green marketing in the context of these findings were discussed. And finally, possible routes to moralization were examined for each of the three organizational approaches considered in this study.

This chapter discusses green marketing practices and processes, and morality in green marketing. Environmental considerations had impacted upon marketing, in one form or another. In some firms, products with environmental attributes were being developed or were currently marketed; in others, environmental considerations were less directly product-related and impacted more on packaging and distribution systems, or communications policies. Contemporary green marketing practice as perceived and presented by respondents in the case organizations are discussed in this chapter. This covers both tactical (marketing mix) and strategic issues, before going on to set out a more grounded theory of green marketing. This is followed by an examination of where and how morality is found to have impacted upon green marketing. The classification of moral arenas in marketing is utilized such as macro and micro moral domains. Implications are also drawn for different views of organizational greening. The findings relating to the three organizational approaches have been developed in order to present a clear analysis of green marketing practice and of its moral dimensions. And finally, the mainpoints in the chapter are summarized and some brief conclusions are set out.

This chapter explores a very different approach to green marketing, which is the collaboration between business, both conventional and social mission, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The chapter provided considerable insight into the practice of green marketing through business-NGO collaboration, and also to some degree through supply chain management. Moreover, the analysis of the particular moral landscape that such an approach was found to describe in the case of CollabOrg might be seen as contributing significantly to an understanding of the way in which notions of morality are handled and transferred in settings characterized by such cultural heterogeneity. Green alliances are based on an assumption of mutual dependence amongst businesses and pressure groups in relation to the environment. The evidence of the CollabOrg case study, however, was that this dependence can also be extended to incorporate wider network interdependencies between firms and their chains of suppliers/customers. Hence, it is reasonable to suggest that alliances widen the scope and domain of green marketing, bringing it into broader strategic and industrial policy debates. Critically, the importance of environmental criteria in industrial marketing exchanges appears to be, for the most part, contingent on the nature of existing relationships, characterized primarily by issues of loyalty, power differentials and resource dependencies. Hence, the environment remains a subordinate issue in industrial marketing networks (or at least those centred on the timber and paper trade), highlighting the important role for rigidities in industry attitudes in dampening green marketing projects, irrespective of the concerns of individual firms or managers.

This chapter examines the social missions of four companies, a retail consumer co-operative (RetailSoc) a mutually owned, environmentally branded financial services provider (FinanceSoc), a manufacturer of vegetarian cosmetics (ManufactureSoc) and a broker and marketer of sustainable wood products (MarketingSoc). In many ways these four companies were a fairly diverse group. However, as argued, the purpose of investigating social mission companies was to provide a comparative case study methodology with which to explore significantly different organizational contexts for the enactment of morally relevant green marketing practices. The explicit integration of social goals into the founding mission of these companies was thought to provide such a distinction. This is not to say though that we should consider the social mission companies to be a wholly homogeneous group. In particular, one of the case organizations, RetailSoc, was clearly much larger and much longer established than the other three. Not only did this mean that a far greater volume of useful data could be collected for RetailSoc, but also its age and size were seen to distinguish it from the rest of the group in certain important aspects. Accordingly, over the course of this chapter, certain commonalties and contrarieties between the case organizations as a result of size and age differences will be indicated and discussed.

This chapter examines the green marketing initiatives of conventional companies, RetailCo and ManufactureCo. The firms' approach to green marketing was broadly described. Particular reference is made to how these approaches corresponded with notions of social responsibility and societal marketing. In the next section, the observed and reported cultural dynamics of green marketing in the case study companies are set out. Here, attention is focused in the main on RetailCo, mainly because this case offered far deeper and more useful data with which to build up a picture of moral meaning in a conventional firm. This was largely a product of access limitations at ManufactureCo, as well as the lack of any significant environmental programme at the company. The principal intention of this section is to draw out some emergent themes which help to explain how green marketing practices were enacted within the conventional companies, and to assess what implications this might have for understanding moral meaning in marketing. Finally, the main findings of the chapter are summarized and issues of concern for the following chapter are set out. In terms of their principal products and markets, the two companies were clearly in very different positions in relation to green marketing. RetailCo, as a retailer of branded and own-label personal care products, gifts, food products, etc. certainly could not be regarded as operating in a dirty industry, but many areas within its scope of operations could be environmentally controversial.

This chapter emphasizes a way of approaching the study of the moral meaning in green marketing. The existing literature was shown to be deficient in a number of important ways, and in particular in its positivistic, and overly objectivist approach to studying morality. Whilst being a crucial cornerstone in the conceptual basis of much of the extant literature, issues of moral meaning were shown, to date, to have been largely ignored. The response to the problems encountered with the existing literature has been to focus specifically on moral meaning in green marketing, utilizing an interpretive, inductive approach. This approach has been centred on a comparative case study methodology and has used qualitative data and methods. This chapter has set out the kind of contribution that can be made using such an approach, examined its epistemological and ontological assumptions and implications, and also detailed the mechanics of the methods actually applied. This form of research methodology and method is unusual in the study of marketing and morality. But the benefits of the approach utilized here are not simply that it is underdeveloped in this area. Rather, it can be seen to be extremely appropriate for many of the questions regarding moral meaning that are of relevance to this area of study, and more specifically, for the investigation of the broad research questions presented in this chapter.

This chapter discusses perspectives and issues related to the moral dimension of marketing. The moral criticisms of marketing was discussed in this chapter followed with an examination of the changing models of morality and marketing that have appeared in the literature. Whilst the former of these represents quite a complete body of research, the latter is less well developed. Notions such as social marketing, societal marketing, ethical consumerism and ethical marketing may have all entered the marketing lexicon, and even gone some way to enhancing the moral dimension of marketing, but they have yet to really make much of an impression on mainstream marketing theory. Moreover, many of these concepts and theories remain as yet underdeveloped and under-theorized. This means that the various attempts that have been made in the literature to suggest how marketing should more properly be carried out seem somewhat premature. Almost without exception, models of marketing and morality begin with the assumption that any given decision or dilemma has moral content, and that it is treated as such by organizational members. Be it the development of products to satisfy ethical consumers, decisions to target potentially vulnerable consumers or the wording of green claims, the literature brings with the assumption that marketing personnel will treat these as decisions which are moral in nature and which require some degree of moral reflection and will then go on to engage in ethical decision making. There is very little discussion of how these initial stages might happen, how they might be experienced, or indeed whether they happen at all.

This article presents an introduction to the book Marketing, Morality and the Natural Environment. The book attempts to explore how those involved in marketing deal with morality in their work. The core thesis of the book is fashioned from extensive fieldwork conducted in and around a number of British organizations between 1995 and 1997. The rest of the book is set out as follows. In chapter 2, marketing is explored as a moral domain. The main concepts and theories which have been brought to bear on the study of marketing and morality are discussed and analysed. In Chapter 3, the philosophical perspective of the study is set out, and the research method employed during the fieldwork. The interpretive approach is explained, the comparative case study methodology is justified, and the particular case organizations studied are introduced. The decision to focus the study mainly on green marketing is justified and explained. In Chapters 4 to 6 the main results of the empirical study which forms the main basis of the book are presented. Each chapter relates to a different organizational type, with conventional organizations, social mission companies and business-nongovernment organization collaboration being the respective subjects. In Chapters 7 to 9, the findings of the study are discussed, their implications examined and conclusions reached. Chapter 7 deals specifically with green marketing as observed in the case organizations. In Chapter 8, the discussion is extended to examine in detail some of the principal findings of the study, namely the phenomena of amoralization and moralization. These are described in some depth and possible explanations and consequences are explored. This discussion is then used as a basis to explore the likely implications for the management of morality in marketing. Finally, in Chapter 9, the main contributions of the book and some conclusions regarding marketing, morality and the natural environment were summarized and presented.

This article presents the preface of the book Marketing, Morality and the Natural Environment. This book is the product of some six years research and reflection on issues of morality and how they relate to marketing and the natural environment. Its main basis comes from my doctoral research, carried out at the University of Nottingham in England between 1994 and 1998. The data presented in the book then relate back primarily to 1995 and 1996 when the bulk of my fieldwork was carried out. As an example of inductive research, the analysis, findings and theoretical propositions presented in the book have been developed from this fieldwork, and are thus firmly grounded in the data. As far as possible, I have attempted to present my analysis of my informants' experiences in a way that is sympathetic to the context in which they operated. But clearly this is very much my interpretation of the situation, as I perceived it, albeit filtered through their perceptions and descriptions. Having completed my doctorate in 1998, I have since had time to revisit and rethink this work, and in many parts of the book, my original analysis has been strengthened, developed and enhanced. The final result, I believe, makes for a much stronger and more insightful explication. The format and style of the book is that of a fairly traditional research monograph. The opening three chapters introduce the issues, assess the literature and make a case for the research agenda and method. The central part of the book reports the empirical work, with Chapters 4, 5 and 6 covering in turn three different organizational contexts. The final part of the book consists of three chapters which discuss these findings, theorize about them, and draw out implications and conclusions.

This article presents information on the book Marketing Morality and the Natural Environment, by Andrew Crane. This volume provides a new look at marketing, and in particular at the move to establish ostensibly green marketing. Presenting evidence from extensive case studies, covering conventional companies, social mission companies and business--non-governmental organization (NGO) collaborations, these concerns are addressed through an examination of the morality at the heart of managers' and employees' understandings of the green marketing activities and processes that are part of their organizations.