Environmental Sustainability and Strategy: Resilience, Resourcefulness, and Strategic Refresh in the Post-pandemic Era

Dear Colleagues,

The pandemic has called for a thorough evaluation of strategy and organization. One distinctive need is to incorporate resilience into strategic planning. However, resilience can be burdened with a robust design and a redundancy in hoarding extra resources, which may cast issues against the “lean and less” mindset of sustainability. Finding a way to balance the two requires creative and innovative thinking and design. Companies should learn to be resourceful in terms of innovative uses of all kinds of resources, and the pandemic may force them to act differently from the past. We are interested in any research that covers the above topics.

At present, consumers in emerging economies are becoming more conscious about environmental wellbeing. Therefore, organizations are competing to make their products and practices more ecofriendly. Several studies have tried to explain the relationship between green consumerism and an individual’s buying behavior using traditional theories. For example, the concept of sustainability is increasingly present among the drivers of choice and purchase in the consumer decision-making process. In the food sector and especially in the agro-food sector, the impacts of social, environmental, and economic sustainability on the creation of product image and value are increasingly evident. How do these sustainability aspects affect different consumer targets? How does the consumer interpret sustainability? The aspects of sustainability and their correct promotion to the consumer, for example, have facilitated the recovery of some markets that had been experiencing critical moments for years. A market analysis has in fact shown that products such as red meat and cow milk, after years of crisis in terms of consumption, are exhibiting signs of recovery; however, consumers are no longer opting to buy a generalized or conventional product, instead choosing a local and therefore sustainable and safe product. The aim of this Special Issue is to collect original contributions that consider consumer behavior, perception, and attitude toward aspects of sustainability that affect food product choice and agro-food chain evaluation. In addition, this Special Issue also welcomes research on strategies to enhance and promote sustainable production, as well as consumer acceptability of sustainability-oriented process/product innovations. This Special Issue will also provide a platform for presenting results related to demand composition and heterogeneity in relation to an aspect such as sustainability that in the consumer’s mind takes on different meanings and interpretations depending on the kind of food product and the geographical area of origin and sociodemographic characteristics of the individual.

Prof. Dr. Satyanarayana Parayitam
Prof. Dr. YJ Bao
Dr. Alex Aruldoss
Dr. C.Vijaya Banu
Guest Editors

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• resilience
• sustainability
• strategies
• consumer behavior
• supply chain management
• knowledge management