SPECIAL ISSUES

This article provides a framework to guide the construction of transformative stories by social impact organizations (SIOs) including nonprofit organizations, public policy entities, and for-profit social benefit enterprises. This framework is built from the integration of the academic literature on narratives and narrative construction relevant to SIO story construction. This transformative story construction framework outlines how SIOs can assemble and craft authentic and effective stories that convey the organization's impact, engage audiences, and call those audiences to action as well as how SIOs can develop and manage a portfolio of such stories. The framework also provides recommendations to guide the marketplace practice of transformative story construction by SIOs. Finally, the authors pose questions to engage SIOs in collaborative research to refine the practice of constructing stories with the power to transform.

Corporate sustainability management encompasses multiple dimensions: environmental, social, and economic. Companies are increasingly evaluated within the public sphere, and within their own organizations, according to the degree to which they are perceived to simultaneously promote this nexus of virtues. This article seeks to explore the tensions frequently faced by organizations that strive to manage these dimensions and the role of public policy in that pursuit. A multiple-case study approach is utilized in which the authors selected case organizations according to whether they were attempting to manage the three dimensions of sustainability. The authors utilize paradox theory and a typology provided by previous research to understand the nature of the tensions that emerge in the selected case study organizations. They extend this previous work by examining the role of public policy in providing the situational conditions to make these paradoxical tensions salient, and they examine organizational responses to these conditions. Directions for firms, policymakers, and future researchers are provided on the basis of this study's findings.

Food waste presents a complex global problem that involves multiple actors and institutions within the aggregate food marketing system. Food waste occurs across food production and distribution, as well as at the hands of the consumer. In this research, the authors focus on waste that occurs across what is termed the "squander sequence," which describes waste that occurs from consumer behaviors at the preacquisition, acquisition, consumption, and disposition stages. The authors set forth a behavioral theory-based agenda to explain food waste in the squander sequence with the ultimate goals of encouraging future research to uncover the psychological underpinnings of consumer-level food waste and of deriving transformative consumer solutions to this substantive issue.

This research delineates and critically examines extant empirical research on marketplace morality within the context of transformative consumer research. The authors identify how public policy can be leveraged to promote moral consumption in the marketplace in line with the transformative consumer research objectives of personal and collective well-being. They conduct a systematic review of the last decade of marketing literature and find that the definition of what is considered "marketplacemorality" has been rather narrow. Subsequently, the authors propose a broader definition and develop a typology of moral consumption behaviors based on the valence of moral judgment/behavior (moral or immoral) andmoral content (harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity). The authors find that most research has focused on understanding one-time (im)moral behaviors in narrow domains, which have local implications and short-term impact. This research proposes that there is untapped potential in investigating repeated (im)moral behaviors associated with lifestyle choices and habits and that these have wider, long-term moral implications (e.g., wastefulness, overindulgence, pollution, authenticity, discrimination). Finally, the authors consider the underlying motivations for (im)moral behaviors and offer recommendations for policy development and research.

This article discusses the concepts of omission and commission as marketplace trauma within the theoretical framework of cultural trauma theory. The authors identify the meanings and processes of the people, activities, and outcomes likely when marketplace omission and/or commission occur, as well as the factors that elevate these events from collective to cultural trauma. The authors use concepts of social structure, collective practices, and collective discourse in exploring the interconnectivity of marketplace traumas and their actors, victims, and consequences (i.e., constrained consumption, damaged marketing systems, and institutional privilege). They then leverage the same framework to propose further research and corrective actions.

Although much saving research has been conducted in affluent nations, little is known about consumer saving and well-being at the base of the pyramid, which includes over 3 billion people who live on less than US$2.50 per day. Research evidence suggests that financial situation, and especially saving, is central to well-being in impoverished societies; however, to our knowledge, this relationship has not been tested with a global sample. Thus, in this study, we consider how societal poverty, individual saving ability, and satisfaction with one’s household financial situation influence well-being. Further, we examine how poverty moderates the relationship between individual financial drivers and well-being to test the saving-well-being centrality assumption. Our multilevel study uses hierarchical linear models with about 50,000 consumers across 38 countries and demonstrates that as societal poverty increases, well-being decreases. Yet in high-poverty societies, saving greatly improves well-being. This significant finding among saving, poverty, and well-being is particularly telling, as household financial satisfaction was not moderated by societal poverty. As a result, we suggest novel transformative financial services that should improve the lives of the poor through formal saving mechanisms that are grounded in their lived experiences.

As humans and consumers, we spend much of our time immersed in an array of services and service systems (e.g., telecommunications, education, financial, government, and health care) that affect almost every aspect of our lives. Our continuous connection with and usage of services and the implications they have for our lives go far beyond questions related to traditional service dependent measures such as service quality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. Service fundamentally affects our lives and our well-being as individuals, employees, families, and communities. Given this, we are honored to be the guest coeditors for this special issue on transformative service research (TSR). First conceptualized by Anderson (2010), today we regard TSR as any research, regardless of academic discipline, that, at its core, investigates the relationship between service and well-being. More specifically, TSR represents research that focuses on creating “uplifting changes” aimed at improving the lives of individuals (both consumers and employees), families, communities, society, and the ecosystem more broadly (Anderson et al. 2013). What distinguishes TSR from other service work is often the outcomes under investigation. With TSR, indicators of both increasing and decreasing well-being take center stage. These metrics may focus on assessing aspects of well-being, such as physical health (objective and subjective perceptions), mental health (e.g., resilience, stress, and burnout), financial well-being, discrimination, marginalization, literacy, inclusion, access, capacity building, and decreased disparity among others (Anderson et al. 2013; Rosenbaum et al. 2011). Although the term “transformative service research” is relatively new, prior service, consumer, and marketing research has emphasized service and well-being.

This article examines the transformation of service systems through actors’ resource integration and value cocreation in contention. It is based on a netnographic study focusing on the use of information and communications technology (ICT) tools by online activists during the “Arab Spring.” The transformation of service systems is conceptualized on the basis of existing service research and on the theory of strategic action fields. Focusing on Syria, the findings suggest that activists transformed four interdependent service systems—the media, the social movement, health care, and the financial service systems—during the Arab Spring by means of integrating resources and cocreating value within several ICT tools. A key contribution to transformative service research is the fact that the positive transformation of service systems derives from the conflict between two types of actors, namely, incumbents and challengers. This article also contributes to our knowledge of triggers of service system transformation, what motivates actors to transform service systems, how service system transformation is enabled by actors’ integration and use of ICT tools serving as opportunity spaces, and the transformative roles actors adopt. In addition, this article contributes to the conceptualization of service systems and to the understanding of resource integration and value cocreation.