Fostering Responsible Communities: A Community Social Marketing Approach to Sustainable Living

Carrigan, Marylyn, Caroline Moraes, and Sheena Leek, “Fostering Responsible Communities: A Community Social Marketing Approach to Sustainable Living,” in Journal of Business Ethics (Springer Netherlands, 2010), 1-20.

Think of an SME as a small community, because while a community is obviously not a business, its residents are the people who own, operate and work at SME’s. Furthermore, while a socially irresponsible organization can negatively impact people’s image of business and CSR, organizations that are responsible can have a positive impact and even encourage change. We’ve discussed previously that green products are becoming more the norm, but a key component of sustainability is to reduce consumption. This article reports on an amazing study of a community which did what it could to bridge the gap between people’s buying of sustainable products and their conflicting consumption habits. It was an experiment done in the small town in the UK called Modbury in which they attempted to eliminate the waste of plastic shopping bags because they do not biodegrade, only break down into smaller pieces and pollute the environment and kill species which ingest them. This article promotes the idea that SME’s are, in fact, small communities and if their leaders can adopt changes than their employees will follow. In the Modbury case the whole town committed to banning plastic shopping bags from any of its small businesses, therefore drastically reducing its carbon footprint and making a statement to other “communities” that change can happen.