Complementing the Dominant Social Paradigm with Sustainability

Introduction

The dominant social paradigm (DSP) structures society’s beliefs and perceptions of the world (Kilbourne, McDonagh, and Prothero 1997). The DSP drives hyper-consumption and is based on the assumption that ever-increasing consumption lies at the core of satisfaction and happiness (Baudrillard 1998). On a macro-level the DSP relies on economic growth that can be achieved only to the detriment of the environment (Kilbourne, McDonagh, and Prothero 1997). One manifestation of the DSP is that large quantities of potentially valuable resources are lost and wasted. As such the DSP is often perceived as opposed to environmental and sustainable issues (Prothero, McDonagh, and Dobscha 2010).

Sustainability and environmental issues are on the rise and could be considered as a megatrend (Varey 2013). Environmental concerns such as pollution (Humphreys and Thompson 2014) or waste issues are of concern to different marketplace actors (Brosius, Fernandez, and Cherrier 2012). Activist consumers often strive to assert their world-views and ethics into the DSP (Kozinets and Handelman 2004), which causes conflicts or tensions. For instance, Guillard and Roux (2014) describe how sustainable ideas oppose hygienic ideas that have been nurtured under the umbrella of the DSP.

Research in marketing has often treated sustainability as a micro-level problem to be addressed through changes in the awareness, attitudes and actions of individual actors (Connolly and Prothero 2003; Prothero, McDonagh, and Dobscha 2010) and through appeals to them with tactics such as a greener marketing mix (Ginsberg and Bloom 2004). Such initiatives, however, yield minor results, as evidenced by an intransigent attitude-behavior gap among consumers (Holt 2012). We argue, in line with macromarketing thinking, that environmental issues flow from systemic problems (Holt 2012). Meaningful progress toward sustainability requires a macromarketing approach to research and practice (Ertekin and Atik 2014; Varman and Costa 2008).

To better understand the relationship interaction between dominant belief structures and sustainability initiatives (Campana, Chatzidakis, and Laamanen 2015), we study an alternative market arrangement that has managed to achieve some success in reducing food waste in the retail sector. Alternative market arrangements are often grounded in non-capitalist roots (Williams 2005) with major goals that background profit-maximization in favor of postmaterialist objectives of a more ethical, sustainable, political or humanistic nature (Ertekin and Atik 2014; Geiger-Oneto and Arnould 2011; Tencati and Zsolnai 2012), creating inevitable tensions with the DSP. We investigate an alternative market arrangement that became a viable and attractive choice for different marketplace actors (Prothero and Fitchett 2000) both within the DSP and among postmaterialist activists. We study the idiosyncratic perspectives and objectives of food retailers, consumers, and public policy makers regarding retail food waste, and we examine arising tensions. We then introduce the case of Foodsharing, a consumer-driven initiative against food waste. Foodsharing negotiates and alleviates tensions experienced by the different marketplace actors by complementing instead of opposing the DSP (Kozinets and Handelman 2004; Williams 2005) or running parallel to it (Ertekin and Atik 2014; Tencati and Zsolnai 2012). Our findings offer some interesting insights for researchers and practitioners in the area of macromarketing.

Sustainability and Alternatives

Postmaterialist values are ascending in our time (Jägel et al. 2012; Pepper, Jackson, and Uzzell 2009). Researchers have identified sustainability as a megatrend (Kotler 2011; Prothero et al. 2011). Consumers are increasingly aware of the impacts of their actions on society and the environment, and increasing numbers strive for more sustainability in their consumption behavior. Some do this through means such as reduced consumption described as voluntary simplicity (Etzioni 2004; Shaw and Newholm 2002), downshifting (Schor 1999), or consuming in an ethical, sustainable way (Carrigan and Attalla 2001; Carrigan, Szmigin, and Wright 2004; Cherrier 2007).

Consumers whose values conflict with those of prevailing market logics may also take activist positions with respect to market entities. They attempt to hold companies more accountable for their actions, and they expect more sustainability through the whole production chain (Albinsson and Perera 2012). Activism may take the form of consumer movements such as anti-consumption (Fournier 1998; Price and Penaloza 1993) or boycotts (Klein, Smith, and John 2004; Kozinets and Handelman 2004), with the aim of pushing companies to change market practices that the activists judge to be socially or environmentally harmful.

Alternative markets or market alternatives arise from postmaterialist values and consumer activism. This study focuses on an alternative market arrangement that has roots in a culture of resistance (Williams 2005), but that became rooted in a status quo business model, bringing more sustainable practices to it. We use the term “alternative market arrangement” to mean an alternative subsystem within a market. For example, a particular sustainable supply chain may not constitute a market per se, but it may constitute an alternative arrangement operating on postmaterialist principles within a more traditional market. Alternative market arrangements mainly pursue postmaterialist goals of ethical, humanistic or environmental natures (Chaudhury and Albinsson 2015; Geiger-Oneto and Arnould 2011). They may include monetary exchanges; however, profit maximization is not necessarily their major goal (see for instance, Tencati and Zsolnai 2012). Sharing models such as carsharing provided by huge car manufactures (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012) do not fall under our definition as they do not stem from postmaterialist values, but should be more seen as business model innovations.

Expressing non-capitalist roots, alternative market arrangements often encounter tensions with the DSP and as such offer an ideal setting for investigation tensions between the DSP and sustainability. For instance, Guillard and Roux (2014) show how the practice of gleaning for castoff items such as discarded furniture oscillates between sustainable and hygienic norms (a manifestation of the DSP). Ertekin and Atik (2014) call out barriers and conflicts encountered by the Slow Fashion Movement as some people fear that sustainable production can lead to a slowdown in economic growth.

Prior literature establishes that alternative market arrangements mainly display two major forms of relationship towards traditional markets or the DSP: either they run counter to it or they run parallel with it (Campana, Chatzidakis, and Laamanen 2015). Examples of alternative market arrangements that run counter to traditional markets include voluntary simplicity (Etzioni 2004; Shaw and Newholm 2002), downshifting (Schor 1999), freeganism (Edwards and Mercer 2012; Pentina and Amos 2011), consumer resistance (Price and Penaloza 1993), brand avoidance (Lee, Motion and Conroy 2009), or buycotts / boycotts (Klein, Smith, and John 2004; Kozinets and Handelman 2004). Overall, those alternative market arrangements try to abstain from interaction with the traditional marketplace or try to induce change through their practices. In most of cases, existing markets and belief structures are portrayed as incarnations of a consumerist world (Kozinets and Handelman 1998) that is not guided by ethical or sustainable values (Kozinets and Handelman 2004).

Other alternative market arrangements run parallel to the DSP, meaning that they enact the major principles of the DSP and compete with traditional businesses for customers while being grounded in postmaterialist values. They may provide similar products as traditional market arrangements, but embedded in sustainable production or consumption. Two examples are the slow fashion and slow food movements, which can be viewed as green alliances between companies and environmental groups. The slow fashion movement positions itself against unsustainable production and consumption in the fashion industry. Through local design and production, transparent production systems, and the production of sustainable and sensorial products, slow fashion has a goal of offering the necessary mechanisms to produce, acknowledge and cultivate durable quality (Ertekin and Atik 2014). In a similar way, the slow food movement exists in parallel to the dominant food industry (Chaudhury and Albinsson 2015; Jenkins 2009; Sebastiani and Montagnini 2013; Sebastiani, Montagnini, and Dalli 2012; Tencati and Zsolnai 2012). According to the slow food movement, food must taste good, but it should also be ecologically and socially sustainable. Eataly, an innovative Italian food company, advances the slow food movement by grounding its retail format on concepts such as sustainability and responsibility (Sebastiani and Montagnini 2013). Eataly blends belief structures from the DSP (such as profit-orientation and retail stores) with alternative beliefs (e.g. sustainability). In contrast to alternatives that are manifested in consumer resistance, parallel market arrangements accept and enact the belief structures of the DSP while combining them with other values. They run parallel as they compete for the same customers as existing businesses.

Prior research has shed light on a diversity of alternatives; however, it falls short of capturing the whole variety (Campana, Chatzidakis, and Laamanen 2015). In this paper, we study an alternative market arrangement than runs neither in opposition to existing market structures nor in parallel with them. Instead, our empirical example becomes embedded in an existing traditional marketplace and complements it in a beneficial way resulting in more sustainable outcomes. As alternative market arrangements that complement existing structures may be a viable way towards more sustainable marketplaces, we explore how Foodsharing became an attractive option for several marketplace actors within the DSP.

Foodsharing

This paper focuses on an alternative market arrangement called Foodsharing, which distributes unsold food products from retailers to ordinary consumers without monetary transactions. Foodsharing facilitates the sharing of food among private persons, however the greatest impact comes from cooperation with retailers that allow the organization to redistribute edible food originally destined for destruction. This paper focuses on the Foodsharing arrangement with retailers. Foodsharing represents an ideal context for studying alternative market arrangements in that it is rooted in sustainable values and represents a special case of cooperation between retailers and activist consumers, all of which highlights developing tensions within the DSP and their eventual resolution to the satisfaction of both retailers and food activists.

Foodsharing is a consumer-driven platform founded in Germany at the end of 2012 by activists for the purpose of reclaiming edible food discarded by retailers and redistributing it among members of the Foodsharing community. Driven by sustainability-related motivations, the Foodsharing organization has as its prime directive the reduction of food waste. Retailers have traditionally culled for destruction massive amounts of safe, edible food. Recent reports estimate that about 2,500,000 tons of food waste occur at the retail level, of which 90% could be avoided (Noleppa and Cartsburg 2015). The reasons include aesthetic imperfections in produce and pending expirations of best-before dates (FAO 2011). Foodsharing is a volunteer-based community organized and communicating through an online platform, foodsharing.de. Volunteer Foodsharers, trained by the organization, interact directly with retailers to collect food that would normally be sent either to landfills or to utilities for anaerobic digestion or burning for energy generation (Zhang et al. 2007). The recovered food is then made available to consumers that participate in the program, regardless of relative need or affluence.

With the cooperation with retailers, Foodsharing has managed to save over 5.3 million kg of safe food waste. Over 19,000 active Foodsharing members and almost 3000 retailers were collaborating in this arrangement as of September 2016. Foodsharing is more prevalent in bigger German cities than in the countryside, and the most active cities are Berlin, Munich, Cologne and Hamburg (Foodsharing Statistics 2016). Food is often picked-up several times of a week in agreement with the cooperating retailer. The amount of food varies from day to day as it depends on how much the retailers cull. In contrast to food banks or other charities (Hill and Stamey 1990; Riches 2002), the food items are allotted to anyone who is interested, whether indigent or affluent, without any monetary transactions. Foodsharing gives food banks and charities – in the German speaking area those are mainly represented under the concept “Die Tafeln” – the first pick of food items (press release, foodsharing.de, April 2015), and only collects and distributes food items after charities have taken their share. However, catering to the needy is not their primary goal (Gollnhofer, Hellwig, and Morhart 2016). Their main objective is reducing food waste. The decision of retailers to cooperate with Foodsharing is notable in that giving free food to non-indigent individuals (i.e., potential costumers) might have the power to cannibalize their sales and profitability and therefore violate the retailers’ primary business objectives. This study examines the perspectives of the various stakeholders, namely retailers, consumers and policy makers, in the context of retail food waste and uncovers how Foodsharing accommodates their idiosyncratic and sometimes conflicting agendas.

Research Methods

The first author collected ethnographic data from January 2013, shortly after the official launch of the online platform of foodsharing.de, until August 2015. The author’s deep immersion as an active member in the Foodsharing community enabled data collection from diverse sources. Data include in-depth interviews with Foodsharing members and cooperating retailers; fieldnotes that capture observation; online data; sustainability reports of 6 major retail chains; and a Wikipedia on food waste. For a detailed list, please refer to table 1. The diversity of data allowed us to capture the perspectives of different stakeholders, namely retailers, consumers and public policy makers.

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Table 1.

Overview of Data.

In-depth Interviews with foodsharing members	13 in-depth interviews (average length: 47 minutes with foodsharing members; including four interviews with co-founders of foodsharing)
In-depth Interviews with cooperating retailers	Six managers of grocery stores that cooperate with Foodsharing (average length 36 minutes)
Observation & Participation	Observational data over the spam of three years resulting in 60 pages of fieldnotes
Observation Sites	Community meetings (8), fair-distribution points (13), retailers stores (14), International foodsharing gatherings (2)
Online data	Media articles, blog entries, and forum discussions regarding foodsharing, resulting in 43 newspaper articles and 25 written pages of relevant blog entries and forum discussions
Wikipedia on food waste	Written by foodsharing members on topics such as ethical questions, guidelines and events. Retrieved online, resulting in 24 pages of single-spaced text
Reports on sustainability	Reports on sustainability – retrieved online from major German supermarket chains
Photos	78 photos for triangulation purposes

Interviews with retailers and with Foodsharing members started with “grand tour” questions and the focused on the activities, practices and perceptions of the respective interview partners (McCracken 1988). The interviews with consumers also included questions regarding occupation and financial status. All of our informants had sufficient monetary means to shop normally, and most were employed full-time. Our interview partners from the cooperating retailers are all managers that initiated the cooperation with Foodsharing. Throughout the interviews, we were especially interested in macro-economic factors such as cultural tensions and objectives of the interview partners. The diverse nature of sources allowed for triangulation (Denzin 1970) of the data and greater confidence in the findings.

Our analysis followed the hermeneutic method advocated by Arnold and Fischer (1994), which relies on researchers’ acknowledged pre-understandings of the research context, interpretation by a dialogic community, and use of the hermeneutic circle. Pre-understanding reflects “the accumulation of the beliefs, theories, codes, metaphors, myths, events, practices, institutions, and ideologies” (Arnold and Fischer 1994, p. 56) that researchers bring to the interpretation. The first author is German, has a lifelong interest in sustainability, social justice and activism, and brought to the analysis the knowledge and experience built over two and a half years of deep immersion in the field. The second author is American and brought to the analysis a comparatively naïve perspective with respect to German food retailing and social movements. The dialogic community included primarily the two authors but also members of the Foodsharing community, with whom the first author repeatedly shared insights and sought opinions.

The hermeneutic circle involves moving back and forth between interpretation and empirical data, within and between individual narratives, between individual utterances and the developing gestalt, and between the findings and extant theory. This is done iteratively until such time as the overall interpretations can accommodate all levels of analysis either as consistent with the whole or as meaningful and explicable exceptions to it (Arnold and Fischer 1994). Following Spiggle (1994) we engaged in an initial coding process focusing on the motivations and on the macro-cultural influences for each marketplace actor. We then sought logical relationships among the codes, building themes and testing them against individual understandings and against plausible theoretical frameworks (Strauss and Corbin 1990). Throughout the process we compared interview data with media data and with fieldnotes from participant observation. This allowed us to take into account the cultural context of the empirical context (Askegaard and Linnet 2011) and to explore the emergence and the characteristics of an alternative market arrangement from a macromarketing perspective.

Findings

Embedded within a German and European regulatory structure, within an increasingly sustainability-conscious macroculture, and within a competitive retail environment, the Foodsharing project and organization require the coordinated activity of multiple stakeholder groups: retailers, consumers and regulators. Each of these stakeholder groups, in its own ways, strives for sustainability; however by acting on their own they are restricted in their actions. The success to date of Foodsharing resides in the efforts of activist consumers, who took the initiative to organize an alternative market arrangement that has allowed the different stakeholders to work together for a common cause without compromising their own idiosyncratic objectives, such as profit (retailers) or consumer protection (public policy). We illustrate how foodsharing became a viable and attractive choice to each of the stakeholder groups. Finally, we discuss complementarity as the underlying mechanism that allows for combining the DSP with sustainable concerns.

Discussion

Our analysis highlights the positions of key stakeholders in the retail food-waste problem, namely food retailers, regulators and the consumer-led Foodsharing organization. The first two stakeholders are firmly embedded in and committed to the dominant social paradigm of capitalism and consumerism. Foodsharing, an activist organization with explicit sustainability goals in the form of reducing food waste at the retail level, is not committed to the ideals of the DSP. Indeed, many of its members are ideologically opposed to it.

Although at least nominally concerned with food waste, retailers and regulators faced a conflict of motives, wherein their own sustainability goals were compromised by and subordinated to their primary goals of profit, consumer choice, and consumer protection. As retailers and regulators stood fast with respect to their primary goals, their practices and policies made massive amounts of food waste practically inevitable.

Foodsharing, an interloper with limited power in the retail food market, managed to negotiate a means of achieving significant reductions in food waste with the cooperation of both retailers and regulators. It did this, despite formidable tensions, by presenting an alternative market arrangement that was complementary to the existing structures of the retail food market. To ease profitability concerns Foodsharing collaborated with retailers on good-will and image politics, and they relieved retailers of much of the cost and responsibility for managing their food waste. To ease concerns of regulators the arrangement intervened with a diversion of responsibility and liability for food safety to willing and educated consumer collaborators.

This alternative market arrangement provides a meso- or institutional-level solution to an historically intransigent macromarketing problem, namely tensions between sustainability goals and conflicting priorities of the DSP. In line with the call for papers for this special issue (Campana, Chatzidakis, and Laamanen 2015), we were interested in the interaction dynamics between the alternative market arrangement and the DSP. Historically such interaction has produced conflicts of an ideological and/or structural nature. The difficult integration between postmaterialist practices, beliefs and attitudes and the dominant social paradigm seems partly to explain the emergence and existence of alternative market arrangements.

This research identifies a previously unrecognized form of alternative market arrangement. Prior literature has characterized alternative market arrangements, especially those with postmaterialist sensibilities, as either oppositional to existing markets or parallel to and in competition with them. Foodsharing is neither. Instead it operates in a complementary fashion, bridging and resolving the classic tensions between sustainability and key priorities of the DSP, including profitability, consumer choice and consumer protection.

The success of Foodsharing and its strategy of complementarity reveals interesting macromarketing insights into the DSP and the potential for activism to bring about meaningful changes in market practices either within or in spite of the DSP and its prioritization of capitalist and consumerist interests. One implication is that, although the DSP may not currently prioritize environmental sustainability to the extent that holders of postmaterialist values would desire, neither is the DSP patently anti-sustainability. Both retailers and regulators in Germany demonstrated clear concern about the problem of massive food waste. Constrained by prior and institutionally binding obligations, they simply lacked the tools to combat food waste without compromising their main missions. The complementary solution provided by Foodsharing expanded the available tool kit and made waste reduction more feasible and practical for retailers.

A second and corollary implication is that the simplistic reduction of consumer activism or social entrepreneurship into binaries such as oppositional versus sympathetic to the DSP, may be counterproductive to both research and practice. Foodsharing grew from an ideological place that was not sympathetic to the DSP, but by taking a collaborative, respectful and diplomatic attitude toward major institutions the organization was able to find common ideological ground, and on that ground to construct effective mitigations to a serious problem. By contrast, a more oppositional approach to food-waste activism, namely dumpster diving, had already occasioned backlash that made collaborative problem solving a non-starter (Gollnhofer 2016).

One effect of an oppositional-versus-sympathetic binary is that it also tends to hang the label of cooptation on successful collaborations with traditional institutions. The implication is one of moral inferiority, of sleeping with the enemy and selling out principles for cash. Thompson and Coskuner-Balli’s (2007) study of community supported agriculture provides an example of this thinking. Clearly there is another perspective worth considering, namely that cooptation equals success. Initiatives such as organic food production that are coopted or embraced by massive market systems gain the advantages of their power and scale in production, distribution, promotion, influencing legislation and so on, effectively bringing better practices and products to the masses.

A final implication that flows from the previous ones is that the DSP may be less of an immovable impediment to more sustainable systems than what much of the macromarketing literature has tended to suggest. The institutions studied in this case are at their very bones pragmatic. To a lesser but significant degree they are also adaptive. Foodsharing activists didn’t need to convince retail managers or regulators that food waste is bad. They just needed to imagine an alternative arrangement for dealing with it, or more to the point, an arrangement that wouldn’t upset the apple carts of profitability and bureaucratic duty. Complementarity in alternative market arrangements may provide creative activists with the entry into existing market systems that allows them to influence how those systems work, thereby helping to bring about market level change in the realms of sustainability and social welfare. It is possible that the complementarity of partial solutions, such as Foodsharing, only treats symptoms rather than root causes of unsustainable behaviors and systems. To the extent that it signals “mission accomplished” to retailers and forestalls more radical and systemic solutions, it might even have adverse effects in the long run. Further research would be required to investigate in-depth the impact of Foodsharing in terms of market level change.