Robert Caruana

‘Business and society’ is a field (not a management practice per se) driven by normative debates about the nature and extent of the role of business in society and characterized by a wide range of frameworks (e.g., CSR, stakeholder theory, corporate governance) for conceptualizing business and society relations. Whilst the emergence of a field for business and society research has been more of a contemporary phenomenon, corresponding with dedicated journals (e.g., Business and Society), established networks (IABS), books, taught modules, academic centres and posts, debates about the role of business in society go way back to civic and religious interventions in profit-making endeavors in society. Yet, it was not until the invention of the modern academic study of business and management and the corresponding proliferation of business schools at the end of the last century that these debates entered overtly into academic discourse. Since then, the number of debates, topics and theories entering and shaping business and society scholarship has mushroomed.

Business ethics frameworks can be employed to help ascertain how businesses should act in morally ‘correct’ ways (normative ethical theory), as well as whether or why businesses do or do not enact their responsibility(ies) (descriptive ethical theory). In this vein, the concept of business ethics is not restricted to single business entities in and of themselves, but further extends to encapsulate the stakeholders that are involved in, and implicated by, (un)ethical business practice and decision-making. In this entry, we consider the conceptualization and application of business ethics, types of business ethics theory, and opportunities for business ethics going forward. We project a number of scenarios that implicate the future role of business ethics within the business and management literature and other fields, such as CSR and sustainability. Business ethics is well placed to help ground the corresponding surge of new scholarship around fundamental questions about harm, freedom and choice.

This article develops a sociological understanding of consumer resilience across three national contexts during a prolonged, global health crisis – COVID-19. We asked 112 individuals from the UK, China and Malaysia to diarise their consumption during the initial lockdowns of 2020. We found that when social subjects were confronted with material, socio-relational and symbolic restrictions, two types of anxieties emerged – health, safety and wellbeing and social alienation – along with three coping-response strategies, consumer purification, consumer policing and consumer sociality. At this anxiety–coping interface, we identify reflexive, emotive and transformative narratives that are productive of consumer resilience. In this era of ‘Permacrisis’ relating to war, health, climate and cost-of-living, it is essential to examine consumer behaviour under conditions of deep uncertainty to comprehend how (resilient) social subjects use the (non-)market domain to cope with anxieties caused by multifaceted restrictions placed on everyday life.

Prototypes have long been acknowledged as playing a critical role in the emergence and consolidation of new organizational and market categories. However, the precise forms, characteristics, and effects of prototypes in the categorization process remain unclear. We address this gap by conducting a discourse analysis of different stakeholder contributions to the emergence of the new legal category of ‘modern slavery’ in the context of the UK’s Modern Slavery Act, 2015. Drawing on a political agency view of categorization, our findings reveal that contrary to existing research, the role of prototypes in categorization is heterogeneous. Our analysis identifies four different general forms of prototype, namely typifying, mobilizing, familiarizing, and scoping prototypes, each of which are deployed by different actors to achieve specific goals in the emergence and consolidation of the new category.

This paper reviews the development of discourse‐based analysis in marketing and consumer research and outlines the application of various forms of discourse analysis (DA) as an approach. The paper locates this development alongside broader disciplinary movements and restates the potential for critical DA (CDA) in marketing and consumer behaviour research. We argue that discourse‐based approaches have considerable potential and application particularly in terms of supporting disciplinary reflexivity and research criticality. A discursive lens offers novel ways of understanding marketing as a subject/discipline as well as how marketing academics conceive and investigate objects of marketing inquiry. The objectives of this paper are fourfold: to outline the development of discourse and text‐based studies in marketing and consumer research; to reveal how this has shaped, framed and limited the application and utilisation of DA in particular ways; to synthesise the main principles of DA generally and CDA specifically; and highlight how these approaches could be applied to a range of marketing and consumer behaviour issues and contexts. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.