A Strategic Marketing Framework for Emerging Out of the Climate Change Social Trap: The Case of the Fashion Industry

Climate change mitigation is arguably the most significant challenge of the twenty-first century. On the foundations of research on social traps by economists and behavioral scientists, this research: (1) conceptualizes the climate change social trap as the behavior of entities (firms, individuals, or social groups) favoring short-term positive consequences over long-term negative consequences of climate change for society; (2) provides a brief overview of the impact of the fashion industry on climate change; (3) develops a summary overview of research on social traps and taxonomies of solutions for social traps; (4) discusses, in detail, a strategic marketing framework built on a taxonomy developed in macromarketing; and (5) using the framework, evaluates 130 leading companies in the fashion industry with reference to their strategic marketing efforts to draw insights for emerging out of the climate change social trap. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for marketing theory and practice in helping firms emerge out of social traps in general, and the climate change social trap in particular.

Incarceration as a result of the play of interests in the Polish judicial system

The main aim of this article is to show one of the social trap of the Polish justice system. Using Mertonian category of 'unforeseen consequences' the authors show how the constellations of interests of the main social actors in Polish courts leads to far-from-optimal effects. Inside the system, judges, court staff, lawyers, defendants and others fall into the trap of unforeseen consequences. At the same time, from the macro-social perspective, the effects imply increasing fragmentation of society, instead of cohesion, for increasing which the whole judicial system is constructed.

Unlocking the Social Trap: Inequality, Trust and the Scandinavian Welfare State

Recent research suggests that economic inequality thwarts attempts to establish a welfare state. The corollary of this view is that today's welfare states had witnessed an equality revolution already before the rise of social policies aiming at redistribution. The paper brings this insight to bear on the creation of the welfare state in Sweden, for many the very model of a universal welfare state, and enquires into whether equality really predated the formation of universal welfare policies in the 1950s. We present evidence on inequality based on labor market outcomes and corroborate the view that there has been a sharp reduction in inequality during the 1930s and 1940s. Hence Sweden underwent a true equality revolution prior to the establishment of the welfare state. A leveling of incomes is a necessary precondition for the rise of the universal welfare state, we suggest, because of trust, which correlates negatively with inequality. High trust levels solve the problems associated with collective goods and boosts support for universal solutions of income security. The paper provides a narrative in which the formation of institutions, the removal of large income differentials, and the creation of higher trust levels interacted in the 1930s and 1940s to form the foundation for the welfare state in the 1950s. It adopts a dynamic view of trust by departing from the assumption that trust arises endogenously as a concomitant to changes in the underlying fundamentals like income inequality and redesigned institutional frameworks.

The evolution of anti-social rewarding and its countermeasures in public goods games

Cooperation in joint enterprises can easily break down when self-interests are in conflict with collective benefits, causing a tragedy of the commons. In such social dilemmas, the possibility for contributors to invest in a common pool-rewards fund, which will be shared exclusively among contributors, can be powerful for averting the tragedy, as long as the second-order dilemma (i.e. withdrawing contribution to reward funds) can be overcome (e.g. with second-order sanctions). However, the present paper reveals the vulnerability of such pool-rewarding mechanisms to the presence of reward funds raised by defectors and shared among them (i.e. anti-social rewarding), as it causes a cooperation breakdown, even when second-order sanctions are possible. I demonstrate that escaping this social trap requires the additional condition that coalitions of defectors fare poorly compared with pro-socials, with either (i) better rewarding abilities for the latter or (ii) reward funds that are contingent upon the public good produced beforehand, allowing groups of contributors to invest more in reward funds than groups of defectors. These results suggest that the establishment of cooperation through a collective positive incentive mechanism is highly vulnerable to anti-social rewarding and requires additional countermeasures to act in combination with second-order sanctions.

Theater and its Social Uses: Machiavellis Mandragola and the Spectacle of Infamy*

Long seen as a play that celebrates the new-found freedom of its female protagonist, Mandragola may in fact question the very possibility of theatrical "liberation. "Drawing on the foundational myth central to Renaissance thinking about theater, the abduction of the Sabine women, this essay shows how Machiavelli endeavored to make his play a discomfitting experience for characters and audience alike. This conception of comedy as social trap both challenged humanistic notions of the ideal relationship between theater and the city, and accentuated the surveillant norms inherent in humanists'understanding of the role of the stage in society.