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Modern slavery in global value chains is an emerging topic of interest across various fields, including in international business, but is often fragmented in its approach. This study aims to provide a practical framework for studying relationships between participants in global value chains by exploring the nexus of three concepts – vulnerability, resilience and empowerment (VRE) – in the context of modern slavery.

This article offers a deductive thematic analysis of 51 empirical and conceptual business research studies on modern slavery in global value chains published until mid-2021 according to the three categories of interest at the micro (within individuals and organisations), meso (between individuals and organisations) and macro (structural) levels.

The findings have informed the development of three themes, each of which is an opportunity for future research with clear policy implications: a reductionist approach to vulnerability obscures its complexity; externalising the empowerment process and locating it outside of the agency of workers serves to further disempower them; and focusing exclusively on organisational resilience conceals the essentiality of resilience within individuals, communities and societies.

This article is among the first to extend the focus of business literature on modern slavery in global value chains beyond its current largely facile engagement with VRE, offering an original descriptive VRE typology to engage with the nexus between these three concepts.

Social marketers set out to undertake interventions that benefit society. However, at times, there can be inadvertent, unintended consequences of these interventions that can be seen as unethical. Such ethical issues can arise from the context, process, method and outcomes of interventions and often bring to the fore the “social fairness” of social marketing. Given that social marketing is aimed at societal benefit, the authors believe that the issue of social fairness is an important one in the context of ethical social marketing. With that in mind, the purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion of the application of a normative ethical framework, labelled the integrative justice model (IJM) (Santos and Laczniak, 2009), to social marketing. This amounts to a macro-social marketing ethical framework.

Conceptual broadening of a normative ethical framework.

The authors hold that the IJM provides several helpful normative guidelines for improving the “social fairness” of social marketing. As such, the presented normative framework of macro-social marketing ethics provides useful guidelines for future development of social marketing codes of ethics.

The macro-social marketing ethics framework provides practical guidelines for social marketers to assess ethical issues in social marketing.

The macro-social marketing ethics framework answers the call of Carter, Mayes, Eagle and Dahl (2017) for development of ethical frameworks for social marketers. It provides a reconciliation of multiple normative frameworks to give a set of guidelines for social marketers that are clear and non-contradictory.

People living with a disability (PWD) are often a marginalized vulnerable group who are economically and socially disadvantaged. This paper aims to explore the implementation of new social and financial policy reforms aimed at transforming the disability sector. Using the capabilities approach, the authors explore the experience of carers and evaluate how this sector may have become more exposed and vulnerable as a consequence of the new policy.

This is a qualitative study with two rounds of semi-structured interviews; at initial-phase (n = 18) and post-phase (n = 14). Thematic analysis was applied to the capabilities and vulnerabilities framework to categorize and analyze the interview data.

The findings show that there are many ways PWD and carers are experiencing increased levels of vulnerability because of their capabilities. There is evidence of increased vulnerability in the intersections between PWD/carers’ inherent nature, the disruption to vital social relationships and conflicting values and interests of stakeholders and the complexity of situational policy changes.

Practical implications developed from the findings include identifying ways the government can improve its social marketing communication strategies. They also highlight the importance of building effective social support networks and provide guidelines for measuring capacity building to address some of the underlying factors leading to vulnerability.

This paper introduces into social marketing, the three-factor vulnerability framework, which conceptualizes the nature of vulnerability, and examines and evaluates the intersections of these factors in relation to the capabilities approach.

Despite the amount of attention given to social cohesion, divisions within many societies are becoming wider due to various factors including religious and far-right extremism and economic austerity. Given its “wickedness”, social cohesion has been researched from various dimensions. However, to develop an effective solution-based programme, these multi-facets need to be brought together for a clearer way forward. This paper aims to bring together multiple disciplines to propose a way forward in the social cohesion discourse in the following two ways: by developing a common conceptualisation of social cohesion and identifying an effective approach to operationalise social cohesion.

This research adopted a critical qualitative research approach and used three expert discussion forums consisting of academics and practitioners from multiple disciplines.

The research identifies contact theory and participatory approaches as providing an effective way forward for social cohesion. Social cohesion is conceptualised in the form of factors needed to build a cohesive society and outcomes of a cohesive society. Using the social marketing approach of down- mid- and up-stream strategies and interventions, this research proposes a bottom-up approach to addressing the wicked problem of social cohesion.

Social cohesion has been discussed by various academics and practitioners from multiple disciplines. This paper developed a common conceptualisation of social cohesion based on a review of multi-disciplinary literature combined with discussions with experts from academia and practice. Relating this to the down-, up- and mid-stream social marketing, and this paper also identified the participatory approach, based on contact theory, as an effective way in which social marketers can achieve downstream social marketing objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrative framework for vulnerability analysis in social marketing systems by identifying, investigating and problematising the relationships among several interrelated concepts, including power, power asymmetry, vulnerability and resilience, in the context of social marketing systems.

This is a conceptual paper synthesising literature from social marketing, sociology and marketing management.

The main outcome of the discussion is a proposed integrative framework for vulnerability analysis. The framework identifies the main groups of stakeholders within a social marketing system and the bases for their power and consequential power asymmetries. It focusses on the types and states of vulnerability to identify the distinct characteristics of the social conditions of vulnerability for micro-level system actors. It leads to building positive resilience through efforts aiming to change the power asymmetries at the downstream, midstream and upstream levels.

The integrative framework for vulnerability analysis answers the call from Wood (2019) for the development of practical approaches to better understand resilience-building approaches in social marketing programmes. The framework provides reconciliation for diverse dimensions of vulnerability as a natural characteristic of all social marketing systems and as a universal, constant and inherent social condition.

The social transformation of “disadvantaged segments of society” requires an in-depth understanding of their behavioural reactions in different social contexts. To this end, the present study focuses on individuals who become vulnerable owing to their functional illiteracy in an “English”-dominant marketplace. Thus, the purpose of this study is to understand the sources of stress as perceived by functionally illiterate individuals and the mechanisms adopted by them to manage such stress when making “high-involvement” product purchases. Insights gained from the study would be beneficial for developing efficacious support programs for vulnerable populations.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 bottom-of-the-pyramid individuals living in slums and housing schemes located in and around Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka.

Two sources of perceived stress and five coping strategies were derived from the thematic analysis of the data. Participants highlighted the sources of their perceived stress as possible loss of resources and possible loss of self-esteem. Further, the participants were found to adopt several mechanisms to cope with the state of their stress and vulnerability experienced within English-dominant shopping environments, namely, seeking help from salespeople, continuing to shop at the same store, shopping with companions, “convenience purchasing” and buying only well-known brands.

These insights into the vulnerability, stress and coping mechanisms as experienced by functionally illiterate consumers will allow for the design of efficacious interventions to empower vulnerable populations.

As indicated in the Italian law (No. 109-1996), agri-food co-operatives can also play a role in combatting mafia-type systems by choosing to grow their food products in lands confiscated from mafia-type organisations. These food products provide individuals with a new opportunity to fight criminal organisations on the marketplace. The purpose of this study is to explore how people react to a social marketing initiative devoted to promoting food “buycotting” to counteract mafia-type organisations in Italy.

The data were obtained from a convenience sample of 339 Italians, and the study adopted a model inspired by the general theory of marketing ethics. A structural equation model was applied to estimate both the parameter and coefficient functions.

Individuals recognise the ethical value of “buycotting”. However, they perceive this form of critical choice as not yet being fully effective in counteracting mafia-type systems in Italy.

The results suggest that promotional and psychological approaches from marketing literature can be effectively used to influence the consumer’s ethical judgement by selectively communicating and emphasising the benefits of the critical consumption investigated.

This is one of the first studies to address consumers’ ethical judgments and their reactions towards buycotting food as a critical choice to reward socially responsible corporations.