Abstract
This special issue of The Journal of Marketing Education extends recent calls for marketers and marketing scholars to become more relevant and to have both a greater impact on society and contribute to wellbeing by focusing on how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) help achieve those goals. As a community of scholars, we face significant global challenges including increasing inequalities, exacerbated by the pandemic (e.g., increasing poverty), mistrust of brand’s intentions, changing expectations of a firm’s stakeholders including consumers, suppliers, community, shareholders, and national governments, emphasising the role business and marketing should be playing in this world. Within this dynamic context, there have been increasing calls for marketers to engage with the 17 SDGs, the most accepted framework for addressing the biggest societal challenges (see https://sdgs.un.org/goals).
Ongoing conversation seeks to connect various marketing sub-disciplines (e.g., macro marketing, marketing and public policy, business-to-business marketing, and strategic marketing) to sustainable development and to the SDGs (e.g., Bolton, 2022; de Ruyter et al., 2022; Rosenbloom, 2022; Scott et al., 2021; Voola et al., 2022a and b). Although marketing students may be introduced to the SDGs in sustainability, business ethics, and/or corporate social responsibility courses, we are still to gain a deeper understanding as to what extent we are preparing faculty and students within their marketing course work to be agents of change for sustainability by engaging deeply with the SDGs. Thus, the goals of this special issue are to better understand how marketing educators (1) are bringing the SDGs to the forefront of marketing education practices; (2) are incorporating the SDGs into course curriculum, assessments, pedagogical approaches, and discussions; and (3) are investigating marketing students’ and marketing faculty understanding of and attitudes toward the SDGs.
Assessment of pedagogies that engage students and faculty with the SDGs in new, creative ways
Course and/or program redesigns/reorientations that use the SDGs as a primary lens for course content revision
Explorations of how marketing educators are aligning private sector involvement with the SDG to transform courses and programs
Research projects that assess faculty and/or student understanding of, attitudes toward, and motivations for learning about the SDGs
Analysis of challenges connected with multidisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary team-based approaches to tackling the SDGs
Macro-level discussions of how departments, courses, and programs have used the SDGs as an overarching framework for course and/or content transformation. This could be in the context of the PRME framework that encourages signatories to engage with the SDGs at the broader business school level (Wersun et al., 2020).
Discussions of how the SDGs are incorporated in marketing curricula at institutions with unique regional and/or cultural components (e.g., countries experiencing high-income inequality, in fragile economies, or specific faith/ethical orientations).
Potential contributors should feel free to contact the co-editors with any questions. All manuscripts will be judged on their scholarly merits and overall ability to advance the marketing and business education literature. Authors should follow the style guidelines found at jmd.sagepub.com with all submissions via the Journal of Marketing Education editorial manager on the journal website. The following are the special issue co-editors
Ranjit Voola, The University of Sydney, Australia
Michael Polonsky, Deakin University, Australia
Carmela Bosangit, Cardiff University, UK
Al Rosenbloom, Dominican University, U.S.A.
Paromita Goswami, Shiv Nadar University, India