| Abstrakt: |
This chapter emphasizes a way of approaching the study of the moral meaning in green marketing. The existing literature was shown to be deficient in a number of important ways, and in particular in its positivistic, and overly objectivist approach to studying morality. Whilst being a crucial cornerstone in the conceptual basis of much of the extant literature, issues of moral meaning were shown, to date, to have been largely ignored. The response to the problems encountered with the existing literature has been to focus specifically on moral meaning in green marketing, utilizing an interpretive, inductive approach. This approach has been centred on a comparative case study methodology and has used qualitative data and methods. This chapter has set out the kind of contribution that can be made using such an approach, examined its epistemological and ontological assumptions and implications, and also detailed the mechanics of the methods actually applied. This form of research methodology and method is unusual in the study of marketing and morality. But the benefits of the approach utilized here are not simply that it is underdeveloped in this area. Rather, it can be seen to be extremely appropriate for many of the questions regarding moral meaning that are of relevance to this area of study, and more specifically, for the investigation of the broad research questions presented in this chapter. |
