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Critical studies within the economic and administrative sciences are increasingly paying attention to the way markets shift responsibility to consumers for societal and personal goals, referring to this process as consumer responsibilization. This article advances a new approach to responsibilization theory with the aim of overcoming some of its limitations.

A conceptual approach is used to critique dominant post-structural understandings of consumer responsibility and to advance alternative ways of thinking about responsibilization regimes that highlight the embodied and embedded experiences of responsible consumers.

The article suggests that responsible consumption is embodied and embedded within neoliberal social structures characterized by inherent tensions and will produce strained experiences rather than skilled and empowered neoliberal subjects. The authors underscore the need for an empirical focus on the adaptational responses of consumers to responsibilization processes. With a focus on the frictional relationship between the idealization pressures involved in responsibilization processes and the real-world consequences embodied in consumer experiences, the conceptual approach may provide new ways to advance the concept of responsibilization as a critique of neoliberal marketization.

While responsibilization theory has been gaining widespread attention, this is the first paper to critically examine its limitations and offer an embedded-embodied perspective on consumer responsibility.

Food consumption impacts heavily on the environment. It is therefore highly relevant to study food‐purchasing processes and needs for environmental information in the food supply chain. The objective of this article is to report findings from a study identifying practices in using environmental information when making decisions on what food to procure and purchase.

Using a phenomenographic approach, professional purchasing managers at food production companies and wholesalers in public and commercial food services as well as retailing were interviewed with the aim of identifying practices when using environmental information in decisions on what food to procure for purchasing.

The findings show that purchasers are dependent on corporate policy when it comes to environmental considerations related to food. Purchasers are mainly guided by business parameters with respect to price, quality and service. These factors are given priority over co‐operation along the food supply chain. Such co‐operation has been shown to have the potential to encourage environmentally friendly purchasing decisions.

The study places the issue of the use of and need for environmental information in the food supply chain on the national agenda in Sweden. Thus, the study contributes to increasing the awareness of the importance of professional food purchasers as actors for change towards more environmentally friendly food consumption.

This chapter examines the increase in global demand for quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) and considers the impact of such demand on the Peruvian and Bolivian farmers who produce it. Specifically, it analyzes the social media marketing of U.S. based I Heart Keenwah (IHK) and considers the role of “storied food” with respect to corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in a Web 2.0 context. This chapter reports the results of textual, rhetorical, and cultural analyses of the digital marketing materials IHK deploys, and considers IHK’s use of Web 2.0 tools to mobilize discourses of socially responsible marketing, and implications of industrial quinoa production on Andean biodiversity and indigenous culture. This chapter principally concludes that the social media and digital marketing materials that IHK deploys obfuscate the social, economic, and ecological complexities surrounding the quinoa industries in Peru and Bolivia. This chapter provides evidence of new tendencies in capitalist commodification, and demonstrates how the traditional and indigenous protectors of the quinoa plant species are being denied their agricultural and cultural heritages. Further more, it demonstrates how the language of corporate social responsibility is abused in the service of less sustainable, branded, and extractive imaginaries and corporate profit. Given the significant rise in international quinoa demand, IHK’s explosive economic success, and IHK’s reliance on Andean quinoa, this case study provides unique insights into global food capitalism in the age of social media.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

This study covers an experience of teacher training carried out in an Undergraduate Business School from a private university in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The purpose of the project was to provide teachers with an opportunity to reflect on their teaching practices at the university. The aim of this study is to systematize lessons and challenges that emerge from this teacher training experience and get to know in which way this helped to improve student’s learning process.

A group of teachers, who showed willingness to learn teaching abilities, was selected. They worked in two learning communities that were organized by expertise: one community of the field of social sciences and one of the field of economic sciences. They completed a formative process that began by diving into a pedagogic topic, continued with class observations and finished with an individual and collaborative reflection exercise. They repeated this process with each of the topics in a systematic way among colleagues. In this study, the production of eight teacher’s e-portfolio and the expected product of their training journey are analyzed.

The analysis shows that after the process of shared reflection, traits related to powerful teaching and meaningful learning have appeared in the classes. Teachers reflect having reached an awareness of their own practices, identifying strengths and opportunities for improvement. The experience of sharing their own way and knowing the successes and failures of others was valued.

Teacher training programmes in business education are infrequent. This experience promotes a journey of pedagogical transformation for teachers of a Business School in Argentina, which could lead to a change in teaching practices for the entire Business School. The present study involves theoretical and pedagogical aspects of business education and its direct implications for the workplace, which may be transferred to other educational contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore risk and protective factors for alcohol use among school-going adolescents in Montevideo (Uruguay).

A self-report survey was administered to 331 school-going adolescents in Montevideo (Uruguay) (M_age=13; SD=0.05), using the alcohol screening instrument of the Uruguayan National Drug Board to assess adolescents’ alcohol use (yes/no), a screening instrument for psychopathology and resilience (the adolescent self-report) and a socio-demographic questionnaire.

Logistic regression analyses identified antisocial behaviour, substance use and negative emotionality (F2), disruptive and dysregulated behaviour (F8), higher age and recent death of a close relative as risk factors, while the number of close friends was identified as a protective factor for past year alcohol use (yes/no). No straightforward relationship was found between schools and the risk for the past year alcohol use. In addition, age, F2, F8 and recent death of a close relative appeared to be the most robust predictors.

The study was the first in Uruguay to relate adolescents’ alcohol use to risk and protective factors. Given the cross-sectional nature of the study, causal relationships could not be determined.

The study provides preliminary recommendations for policy makers and other stakeholders involved in youth affairs on core elements to focus on school-, community- and family-based alcohol prevention programmes for adolescents.

With the demographic increase, especially in big cities, heavy traffic, traffic congestion, road accidents and augmented pollution levels hamper transportation networks. Finding the optimal routes in urban scenarios is very challenging since it should consider reducing traffic jams, optimizing travel time, decreasing fuel consumption and reducing pollution levels accordingly. In this regard, the authors propose an enhanced approach based on the Ant Colony algorithm that allows vehicle drivers to search for optimal routes in urban areas from different perspectives, such as shortness and rapidness.

An improved ant colony algorithm (ACO) is used to calculate the optimal routes in an urban road network by adopting an elitism strategy, a random search approach and a flexible pheromone deposit-evaporate mechanism. In addition, the authors make a trade-off between route length, travel time and congestion level.

Experimental tests show that the routes found using the proposed algorithm improved the quality of the results by 30% in comparison with the ACO algorithm. In addition, the authors maintain a level of accuracy between 0.9 and 0.95. Therefore, the overall cost of the found solutions decreased from 67 to 40. In addition, the experimental results demonstrate that the authors’ improved algorithm outperforms not only the original ACO algorithm but also popular meta-heuristic algorithms such as the genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) in terms of reducing travel costs and improving overall fitness value.

The proposed improvements to the ACO to search for optimal paths for urban roads include incorporating multiple factors, such as travel length, time and congestion level, into the route selection process. Furthermore, random search, elitism strategy and flexible pheromone updating rules are proposed to consider the dynamic changes in road network conditions and make the proposed approach more relevant and effective. These enhancements contribute to the originality of the authors’ work, and they have the potential to advance the field of traffic routing.

The study aims to analyze the effect of the previous preparation and the work carried out in the field during a study trip on the development of competencies in agribusiness students.

The destination was the pineapple area of the Papaloapan Lower Basin in Mexico, and 42 students from 6 different semester levels participated. The students answered a test prior to the trip, received an evaluation for their activities in the field and prepared reports and posters as products of the experience. The relationship between the scores obtained was examined through a comparative analysis.

The findings are framed in the cyclical model of experiential learning with four stages (feeling, watching, thinking and doing) by Kolb (1984). It is found that the acquisition of specific knowledge about what the experience will entail leads to better preparation, motivation and confidence to live the experience (potentiation of feeling and watching). In turn, specific knowledge and better use of experience promote the development of problem solving, interpersonal and communication skills (potentiation of thinking and doing).

Statistical representativeness is not a quality of the study since it is based on a comparative analysis.

The study analyzes an educational component of great value in the business area, about which little is known in the agribusiness subarea.