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2021/2022  KAN-CCMVV4019U  Creating markets for sustainable products

English Title
Creating markets for sustainable products

Course information
Language English
Course ECTS 7.5 ECTS
Type Elective
Level Full Degree Master
Duration One Semester
Start time of the course Autumn
Timetable Course schedule will be posted at calendar.cbs.dk
Max. participants 70
Study board
Study Board for MSc in Economics and Business Administration
Course coordinator
  • Trine Pallesen - Department of Organization (IOA)
Main academic disciplines
  • CSR and sustainability
  • Sociology
Teaching methods
  • Blended learning
Last updated on 15-02-2021

Relevant links
Learning objectives
  • Describe, classify, and combine the concepts and methods of the course.
  • Analyse concrete problems faced by firms developing sustainable goods/markets by applying the concepts and methods of the course.
  • Discuss the possible roles of markets in overcoming environmental and social challenges.
Examination
Creating Markets for Sustainable Products:
Exam ECTS 7,5
Examination form Oral exam based on written product

In order to participate in the oral exam, the written product must be handed in before the oral exam; by the set deadline. The grade is based on an overall assessment of the written product and the individual oral performance, see also the rules about examination forms in the programme regulations.
Individual or group exam Oral group exam based on written group product
Number of people in the group 2-4
Size of written product Max. 20 pages
Definition of number of pages:
Groups of
2 students 10 pages max.
3 students 15 pages max
4 students 20 pages max

Note that the exam is a group exam. If you are not able to find a group yourself, you have to address the course coordinator who will place you in a group.

Students who wish to have an individual exam might be able to write a term paper in the course. Please see the cand.merc. rules for term papers for more information.
Assignment type Project
Duration
Written product to be submitted on specified date and time.
15 min. per student, including examiners' discussion of grade, and informing plus explaining the grade
Grading scale 7-point grading scale
Examiner(s) Internal examiner and second internal examiner
Exam period Winter
Make-up exam/re-exam
Same examination form as the ordinary exam
Re-take exam is to be based on the same report as the ordinary exam:

* if a student is absent from the oral exam due to documented illness but has handed in the written group product she/he does not have to submit a new product for the re-take.

* if a whole group fails the oral exam they must hand in a revised product for the re-take.

* if one student in the group fails the oral exam the course coordinator chooses whether the student will have the oral exam on the basis of the same product or if he/she has to hand in a revised product for the re- take.
Course content, structure and pedagogical approach

This course is part of the group of three electives qualifying you for the “CBS cand.merc./M.Sc. Minor in Sustainable Business'.  The course can also be attented without taking the minor.

Entrepreneurship and markets are increasingly seen as plausible sources for solutions to reduce carbon (or other) polluting emissions and economize on the use of limited natural resources. The question is how, and under what conditions, this may be the case? What does it take to make markets shift to new and environmentally more viable products? With the help of analytical concepts from recent material market studies and the new economic sociology, this course provides the students with concepts and methods to understand markets (products, consumers and whole new market arrangements) for sustainable products as practical achievements. Students will learn to understand and analyze how sustainable products and processes are facilitated or hindered by the existing technical infrastructure, the regulative arrangement, the construction of value, and networks between corporations, regulators, consumers, social movements, claims to legitimacy, and the frames of knowledge used to construct and evaluate a particular market regime. In the context of bringing new sustainable goods/technologies to the market, innovation is not only about heroic entrepreneurs, but depends on transforming the lock-in of existing technologies and enrolling a long list of unglamorous characters including calculative tools, new practices of valuation, standards, trials and tests, and the human and non-human participants in chains of production and commercialization.
Description of the teaching methods
Course activities include lectures, group exercises and student presentations. The lectures and group exercises will be based on the course literature, while the latter will be based on the students’ work with their projects. The projects typically focus on a particular innovation/technology and/or controversy regarding the development and use of these innovations and employ and discuss the theories and literature presented in the course. In the project, students demonstrate ability to work with a particular theory or different theories and concepts from the course literature in relation to a topic and material from real-life. In the end of the course, the students will understand the differences between different theoretical approaches to markets and the implications thereof both in analytical and practical terms.
Feedback during the teaching period
Feedback is mainly provided in two ways:
First, all classes include exercises involving in-class discussions between students and lecturers, thus providing students with peer-to-peer feedback as well as feedback from lecturers.

Second, the course contains two workshops (of 3 hours and 6 hours), where students get a task in groups, prepare a presentation, present to the class and get feedback from fellow students and lecturers. The the second workshop encourages the students to present their exam case and thus provides students with feedback that they can integrate in their exam projects.

Student workload
Teaching 33 hours
Preparation/reading/group work 123 hours
Exam 50 hours
Further Information

This course is part of the minor in Sustainable Business

 
Expected literature

Callon, M. (1998): “An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology”, in M. Callon (ed.): “The Laws of the Markets”, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 244-269.

Coase, R. (1988): “The Firm, the Market and the Law”: Chapter 1, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press: 1-31.

Cochoy, F. and Vabre, M. (2004) “From Political Consumption to Political Production or the Resistible Implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility in a French Mining Company” in Political Consumerism: Its motivations, power, and conditions in the Nordic countries and elsewhere. Proceedings from the 2nd International Seminar on Political Consumerism, Oslo August 26-29, 2004.

Corvellec, H., M. J. Zapata, and P. Zapata (2013): “Infrastructures, lock-in, and sustainable urban development: the case of waste incineration in the Göteborg Metropolitan Area”, in Journal of Cleaner Production vol. 50: 32-39.

Dubuisson-Quellier, S. (2013): “A Market Mediation Strategy: How Social Movements Seek to Change Firms’ Practices by Promoting New Principles of Product Valuation”, in Organization Studies, vol. 34(5-6): 683-703.

Ehrenstein, V., and Muniesa, F. (2014): “The Conditional Sink: Counterfactual. Display in the Valuation of a Carbon Offsetting Reforestation Project”, Valuation Studies1(2) 161–188.

Fourcade, M. (2011): “Price and Prejudice: On Economics, and the Enchantment/ Disenchantment of Nature”, in Beckert, Jens and PatrikAspers (eds.) “The Worth of Goods”, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garcia-Parpet, M.F. (2007): “The Social Construction of a Perfect Market – The Strawberry Auction at Fontaines-en-Sologne”, in MacKenzie, D., F. Muniesa and L. Siu “Do Economists Make Markets”, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ingram, P., & Rao, H. (2004): “Store Wars: The Enactment and Repeal of Anti‐Chain‐Store Legislation in America”. American Journal of Sociology, 110(2), 446-487.

Lohmann, L. (2009): “Toward a different debate in environmental accounting: The cases of carbon and cost–benefit”, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(3), 499-534.

Lohmann, L., and Böhm, S. (2012): "Critiquing carbon markets: A conversation." Ephemera 12 (1): 81-96.

McFall, L. and J. Óssandón (forthcoming): What’s new in the ‘new, new economic sociology’ and should Organisation Studies care?

Mirowski, P. (2013):“The Red Guide to the Neoliberal Playbook”, in “Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown”, London: Verso.

Musselin, C. & C. Paradeise (2005): “Quality: A Debate” Sociologie du Travail, 47, S89–S123

Rao, H. (2009): “You can’t get people to sit on an explosion!’ The cultural acceptance of car in America”, in H. Rao “Market Rebels”. Chapter 2, pp. 18-42. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Reijonen. S. and K. Tryggestad (2012): “The dynamic signification of product qualities: on the possibility of ‘greening’ markets”, in Consumption, Markets & Culture vol. 15 (2): 213-234.

Roth, A. (2007): “The Art of Designing Markets”, in Harvard Business Review, October.

Stark, D. (2009): “The Sense of Dissonance – Accounts of Worth in Economic Life”, Chapter 1, pp. 1-31, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Unruh, C.G. (2000): “Understanding carbon lock-in”, in Energy Policy, vol. 28: 817-830.

Unruh, C.G. (2002): “Escaping carbon lock-in”, in Energy Policy, vol. 30: 317-325.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Last updated on 15-02-2021