Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Organizing sustainably raises complex ethical questions – particularly about how organizations relate to both natural and social environments. Yet ethical inquiries into such relations are complicated by the fact that ethical thought has often been conceived as a “human” science, primarily concerned with human beings and their interrelations (De Colle et al., 2024). In contrast, environmental ethics brings up questions of ethical duty, moral agency, and responsibility that cross species boundaries (Daher, 2024; Ergene & Calás, 2023), engaging what has come to be called more-than-human relations – those involving non-human entities such as animals, plants, ecosystems, and technologies, which may be ethically significant or agentic (Whatmore, 2002; Abram, 2012).
 
More-than-human ethical concerns may take the form of questions around human beings (and their organizations), responsibilities toward the natural environment and its geological systems (Böhm et al., 2022; Starik, 1995), or they may involve treating more-than-human entities as moral agents in their own right, asking questions about responsibility and ethical relationality among entities beyond the human. Such considerations raise philosophical questions about the foundations of ethical thought (Kortetmäki et al., 2023), while also containing important organizational, economic and legal consequences. Expanding ethical thinking to more-than-human domains introduces new conceptual challenges, including the ethics of emerging or speculative beings, the moral considerations of possible futures, and meta-ethical questions about when and how ethical language is appropriate. It also introduces practical challenges around the responsibility for – and responsibility of – more-than-human beings, and how to organizing in ways that recognize the moral aspects of a broader array of entities.
 
Organizational and business ethics discussions are beginning to broach questions of environmental and more-than-human ethics (Dahlman, 2024; Ehrnström-Fuentes & Böhm, 2023; Ergene et al., 2024). While this literature is growing, it remains marginal to the core themes of the field. Much of business ethics – particularly normative work – continues to revolve around the “big three” conceptual frameworks of utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics (Grant et al., 2017). However, emerging approaches such as the ethics of care (e.g., Beacham, 2018) and relational ethics (e.g., Pérezts et al., 2024) offer promising avenues for engaging more-than-human concerns. What new ethical theories or approaches might be particularly well-suited to examining the more-than-human? And how might these approaches build upon, extend, or challenge dominant currents in organizational ethics?
 
A second area of consideration is in the institutionalized distinction between descriptive and normative ethics, a core distinction in the field that has been both widely contested and remarkably resistant to change (Donaldson, 1994). Normative frameworks may offer criteria for evaluating environmental practices, yet they are often geared toward human goods and desires, limiting their applicability in more-than human contexts. Can we envision new normative approaches that allow more-than-human entities to participate in ethical worlds? Descriptive and empirical approaches, on the other hand, tend to focus on human impacts or interactions with non-human actors, such as technologies or ecosystems. But can descriptive ethics be reimagined to focus on more-than-human phenomena themselves? What would such a descriptive practice look like? And how might empirical methods such as interviews or ethnography account for agents that do not speak in conventional human language? Moreover, is the descriptive-normative distinction itself still adequate in an era where the boundaries between humans and their natural environments are increasingly blurred? Forms of ethical thinking that challenge or move beyond this binary may be especially valuable for theorizing environmental ethics in organizational contexts.
 
Finally, organizational ethics scholarship can benefit from direct theorizing and study of organizations that seek to reshape their own relations with more-than-human entities. Social movements, ecologically conscious organizations, and technologically focused organizations may exhibit distinct ways of relating or framing the human and the more-than-human. Understanding these situated practices of organizing provides essential ground for new ethical theorizing. Modes of inquiry that emphasize collaborative inquiry, ethnographic immersion and theorization from the field are particularly valuable in these contexts where the view “from the ground” may be at the avant-garde of ethical innovation, and where theorists may have much to learn (both positively and critically) from actors in various kinds of organizations.
 
With the above considerations in mind, we invite contributions that engage with the following questions (among others):

• How does a focus on more-than-human entities change foundational questions of environmental ethics or ethical theory?

• How do foundational views of nature facilitate or inhibit ethical thinking? Is the concept “nature”, or the distinction “nature-culture” helpful to environmental ethics discussions?

• In what ways can more-than-human entities be considered moral agents, and what are the implications of expanded notions of moral agency for environmental ethics?

• How do discussions of ethics include more-than-human actors, and how does such inclusion challenge or complement how scholars think about ethics?

• How do environmental and more-than-human concerns challenge traditional distinctions between descriptive and normative ethics, and how does the descriptive-normative binary fare in an “Anthropocene” world where human actions shape geological realities?

• How do practice-oriented perspectives, including those of environmental activists, NGOS or public actors, provide opportunities for developing ideas about environmental ethics?

• What are the practical applications of ethics of care and connectedness (relational ethics) in business and environmental policies?

• How do worldviews outside of the Global North, including Indigenous perspectives on the natural environment, provide opportunities to develop new perspectives on environmental ethics and more-than human entities? How can Indigenous ethical perspectives be integrated into mainstream ethical frameworks to address global challenges like climate change?

• How do environmental ethics relate to social movements around gender, decolonization, racial justice, social class, and other ethically relevant social movements? What are the possibilities and limitations of intersections between ethical thinking across these areas?

• How do different organizational forms (e.g., cooperatives, B-corps, commons-based structures) facilitate or hinder ethical engagement with more-than-human entities?

• What does accountability look like in a world where organizational actions impact beings and systems beyond the human? Who speaks for the more-than-human, and how are such forms of representation ethically justified or critiqued?

• How do technologies such as AI, environmental sensors, or biotechnology mediate relationships between human and more-than-human actors in ethical terms? What are the ethical implications of organizations increasingly relying on non-human decision-makers or environmental data streams? 

References

• Abram, D. (2012): The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

• Beacham, J. (2018): “Organising food differently: Towards a more-than-human ethics of care for the Anthropocene.” Organization, 25 (4), 533–549.

• Böhm, S., Carrington, M., Cornelius, N., de Bruin, B., Greenwood, M., Hassan, L., Jain, T., Karam, C., Kourula, A., Romani, L., Riaz, S., & Shaw, D. (2022): “Ethics at the Centre of Global and Local Challenges: Thoughts on the Future of Business Ethics.” Journal of Business Ethics, 180 (3), 835–861.

• Daher, S. (2024): “Organizing at the End of the World: Ontological Perspectivism as an Approach to Ecological Crises.” Academy of Management Proceedings, 1, first published online on July 9, 2024, https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2024.14bp.

• Dahlmann, F. (2025): Conceptualising Sustainability as the Pursuit of Life.” Journal of Business Ethics, 196, 499–521.

• De Colle, S., Freeman, R.E., & Wicks, A.C. (2024): “Toward humanistic business ethics.” Business & Society, 63 (3), 542–571.

• Donaldson, T. (1994): “When integration fails: The logic of prescription and description in business ethics.” Business Ethics Quarterly, 4 (2), 157–169.

• Ehrnström-Fuentes, M., & Böhm, S. (2023): “The Political Ontology of Corporate Social Responsibility: Obscuring the Pluriverse in Place.” Journal of Business Ethics, 185 (2), 245–261.

• Ergene, S., Banerjee, S.B., & Hoffman, A.J. (2020): “(Un)Sustainability and Organization Studies: Towards a Radical Engagement.” Organization Studies, 42(8), 1319–1335.

• Ergene, S., & Calás, M.B. (2023): “Becoming Naturecultural: Rethinking sustainability for a more-than-human world.” Organization Studies, 44 (12), 1961–1986.

• Grant, P., Arjoon, S., & McGhee, P. (2017): “Reconciling Ethical Theory and Practice.” Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 36 (1), 41–65.

• Kortetmäki, T., Heikkinen, A., & Jokinen, A. (2023): “Particularizing Nonhuman Nature in Stakeholder Theory: The Recognition Approach.” Journal of Business Ethics, 185 (1), 17–31.

• Pérezts, M., Fotaki, M., Shymko, Y., & Islam, G. (2024): “Breathe and let breathe: Breathing as a political model of organizing.” Organization, 32 (1), 136–153.

• Starik, M. (1995): “Should trees have managerial standing? Toward stakeholder status for non-human nature.” Journal of Business Ethics, 14 (3), 207–217.

• Whatmore, S. (2002): Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London: SAGE Publications.