Our solution, the “Category Landing Pages” would tackle this issue by re-organizing SPLC’s resources into category specific pages where any and all guidance SPLC has on a particular purchasing category can be easily accessed. Many procurement professionals often specialize and deal in a certain spend or commodity category, which makes a category organized page the most logical. This is certainly valuable to individuals and organizations who subscribe to a membership with SPLC, but there is also opportunity for SPLC to benefit from this restructuring.
Since the 1980’s, there has been a growing interest in the concept of sustainability. The prime directive of sustainability is to balance the needs of economics, environmental health, and human society. The change in the global climate, loss of biodiversity, increased levels of pollution, and general trend toward resource scarcity have all increased the momentum of the contemporary sustainability movement. Simultaneously, poverty and nutrition scarcity have attracted many to sustainability’s principles of resource equity. What one can gather from the diversity of sustainability’s intended functions is that it’s meant to solve several problems at once. In another sense, the most impactful sustainability solutions are multipurpose. This is not to say that any given solution is a panacea. On the contrary, sustainability advocates often dispute the existence of so-called “silver bullets” for these global issues. While this tends to reign true, it does not stop policy makers, communities, or researchers from attempting to employ multifaceted solutions. One such example is the myriad of sustainability issues associated with industrial agriculture. With the compounding issues of high water consumption, habitat destruction via land use change, biodiversity loss and climate change, industrial agriculture appears to be a damaging system. Areas like Arizona are projected to be affected by many of these issues. It thus stands to reason that if Arizona is to aggressively address its long-term drought, as well as global sustainability issues, a systematic change in farming practices needs to be made. Firstly, an analysis of the agricultural and water histories of Arizona will highlight the events most relevant to the region’s contemporary issues. Following this, the analysis will frame the greater problem through specific pieces of evidence associated with water scarcity in Arizona. Then, a summary of findings will illustrate the fundamental theories surrounding regenerative agriculture and three of its alternative forms: permaculture, dryland farming, and carbon farming. These theories will be instrumental in recommending a useful conception of regenerative agriculture for Arizona; it will be known as a Regenerative Dryland Farming System (RDFS). The extent and utility of current solutions will then be explored. The remainder of the section will illustrate the principles of the RDFSs, explore their potential weaknesses, and recommend policy for their successful deployment. Overall, it will be argued that RDFSs should fully replace industrial agriculture in Arizona. This will be vital in addressing the nine planetary boundaries and freshwater reality of the region.
For decades, understanding the complexity of behaviors, motivations, and values has interested researchers across various disciplines. So much so that there are numerous terms, frameworks, theories, and studies devoted to understanding these complexities and how they interact and evolve into actions. However, little research has examined how employee behaviors translate into the work environment, particularly regarding perceived organizational success. This study advances research by quantitatively assessing how a greater number of individual employees’ pro-environmental behaviors are related to the perceived success of environmentally sustainable workplace activities. We have concluded that the more pro-environmental behaviors an employee embodies, the more positively they perceive the success of their local government's sustainable purchasing policy. Additionally, other factors matter, including organizational behaviors, like training, innovation, and reduction of red tape.
Published frameworks were utilized to identify SB practices in use, and the Competing Values Framework (CVF) to identify dimensions of culture. Data from 1021 Corporate Sustainability Reports from 212 companies worldwide was collected for computerized text analysis, which provided a measure of the occurrence of a specific SB practice and the four dimensions of the CVF. Hypotheses were analyzed using cluster, crosstab, and t-test statistical methods.
The findings contribute significant insights to the Business and Sustainability field. Firstly, clustering of SB practice bundles identified organizations at various levels of SB practice awareness. The spectrum runs from a compliance level of awareness, to a set of organizations aware of the importance of culture change for sustainability. Top performing clusters demonstrated different priorities with regards to SB practices; these were in many cases, related to contextual factors, such as location or sector. This implies that these organizations undertook varying sustainability strategies, but all arrived at some successful level of sustainability. Another key finding was the association between the highest performing SB practice clusters and a culture dominated by Adhocracy values, corroborating theories presented in the literature, but were not empirically tested before.
The results of this research offer insights into the use of text analysis to study SB practices and organizational culture. Further, this study presents a novel attempt at empirically testing the relationship between SB practices and culture, and tying this to financial performance. The goal is that this work serves as an initial step in redefining the way in which businesses adopt SB practices. A transformation of SB practice adoption will lead to major improvements in sustainability strategies, and subsequently drive change for improved corporate sustainability.
Globally we are struggling to match the need for development with the available resources. Kate Raworth’s (2012) developed the idea of a “safe and just space” as a balance between the planetary boundary approach and ensuring a level of basic needs satisfaction for everyone. O’Neill et al. (2018) argue that countries are currently not able to provide their populations with basic needs without concurrently exceeding planetary boundary measures. While attempts have been made to get people to change their habits through moral self-sacrifice, this has not been successful. Kate Soper (2008) argues that a change towards sustainability will only be possible if an alternative to high consumption is offered, without trade-offs in well-being. Technological improvements are often thought to end up providing solutions to the problem of overconsumption, but as Jackson (2005) shows convincingly, this is highly unlikely due to the overwhelming scale of changes required.
‘Alternative hedonism’ (Soper 2008) is a philosophical approach that has been proposed to solve this dilemma. By changing what humanity pursues to be less focused on consumption and more linked to community interaction and living healthy, fulfilling lives, we would simultaneously reduce stress on the globally limited resources and sinks. By developing and understanding satiation points – the point beyond which well-being no longer increases because of increased consumption - affluence that wastes resources without improving well-being could be reduced. This paper explores how ‘alternative hedonism’ and the development of ‘satiation points’ could be helpful in getting humanity closer to the ‘safe and just space’. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges that taking up of ‘alternative hedonism’ would entail.