Sub-theme 56: Organizing for a Living Earth: Beyond Human-centered Analyses of Organization and Management
Call for Papers
We live in the midst of severe ecological crises and overshoots of planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009). Despite
efforts to include topics such as CSR, sustainability and business impacts on the natural environment, organization and management
studies (OMS) have generally remained stuck in, what can be called, a ‘weak sustainability’ paradigm (Daly, 1995). This means
that OMS scholars mostly approach sustainability through a corporate environmental management frame, rather than defining
concrete steps of how business can contribute to sustainable development, as defined by the United Nations (Roome, 2012).
Yet, even studies that see organizations’ purpose through a ‘strong sustainability’ lense – taking a much broader societal
perspective that goes beyond the boundaries of the firm – often treat ‘the environment’ as an exogenous entity that organizational
members should harm less (e.g., Marcus et al., 2010; Whiteman & Cooper 2011; Whiteman et al., 2013).
While
climate change and other environmental issues are now increasingly problematised in OMS, organizational and natural phenomena
are usually treated as two separate entities. That is, there tends to be a deeply held, dualistic conception of nature being
‘out there’, i.e. outside the organization (Good & Thorpe, 2019). The whole discourse of doing less harm and reducing
organizations’ impact on the environment assumes that humans are separated from nature. Viewing organization as an outcome
of just human actions within particular socially constructed structures (i.e. institutions, economic systems, organizational
or cultural boundaries) does not account for how different living organisms, materia, and ecosystems contribute to the life-making
relations of the organizations (Moore, 2015). Such anthropocentric theories create a distorted view of the actual agencies
involved.
The spread of the virus Covid-19 has made visible how nonhuman others, through their inseparable
interdependencies and interconnections, can intervene and disrupt all forms of human organizations in a matter of weeks all
over the globe. The dire societal consequences of the Coronavirus crisis makes it evident that we can no longer ignore how
other living (and dead) organisms play a central role in the ways we organize the sustainment of our own lives. Organizing
for a living earth – which we here understand as the ability to collectively sustain, repair and regenerate the world beyond
just human beings (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) – calls for new theoretical, methodological and analytical approaches to OMS,
which do not separate social relations from the wider natural world. Humans and companies are not just part of nature, they
are nature and ecosystems participating in the life- or death-making processes of their own beings. From this perspective,
even the most polluting, extractive companies can be seen as ecological organizations.
In a variety of academic
disciplines, scholars have for long argued that other than human beings (i.e., things, animals, physical forces, earth beings)
cannot be separated from humans or the processes that collectively sustain their lives (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018; Capra
& Luisi, 2014; Escobar, 2018; Naess, 1984). These networks of beings constitute a wider web of relations from which the
reproduction of life on earth emerge (Haraway, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Shiva, 2015). Although recent work in OMS
have created an opening for viewing organizations as a wider network of actors and entangled practices (e.g., Bell & Vacchani,
2020; Hultin & Mähring, 2017; Introna, 2019), such insights have not yet been sufficiently connected to work on OMS sustainability
research.
Perhaps we need to even stop talking about nature, given that it is so engrained in people’s minds
as something untouched and ‘natural’. Morton (2007) takes a more radical step and wants to understand ecological organizing
as a wider ontological force that includes human activities, even texts, even perhaps corporate manifestos. Equally, taking
an entropy perspective, energy clearly cannot be seen as simply an oil-based or renewable industry; instead, energy is the
stuff that connects all ecological relations on the planet (Georgescu-Roegen, 2014). Living systems themselves should be seen
as powerful self-organized systems that emerge out of the energy of life itself (Shiva, 2015).
In this sub-theme,
we want to open up a debate on how to move beyond human-centered theories of organization and management in order to tackle
questions of sustainability and climate change. We ask: what does organization mean when we think and live interdependently
with others within an ecological, living system? We call for contributions that engage with diverse approaches and methodologies
that explore and theorize organizational practices involving how people, together with other living beings and things, co-construct
an (un)livable earth. We are interested in the relations, senses and emotions that ‘glue’ people together with soils, nonhuman
animals, microorganisms in socio-bio-material processes that enable a living and thriving earth. Such contributions could,
for example, be informed by ecological economics, ecofeminism, post-structural philosophy, world-ecology theory, science and
technology studies, practice theories, and others. While theory is clearly of interest to us, we are also encouraging empirical
investigations and practical cases that vividly engage with the problems outlined here.
The following topics
might form a starting point for some contributions, although the list below is by no means supposed to be exhaustive:
Theoretical and onto-epistemological approaches that can support a conceptual broadening of the term ‘organizing’ so that it also includes other than human agents
Theories and methodologies that explore entanglements between humans, soils, animals, waters and other living and dead beings within and beyond the limits of established approaches in organizational research
Entanglements that enable harmonious relations in organizations comprised of humans and more than human beings
Violence and destruction, in patriarchal, colonial organizing of some human lives causing death and destruction of other human and nonhuman actors
How to understand power and how different constellations of power enable/limit/suppress transformations in more than human organizations
How to expand theories of planetary boundaries and other environmental science approaches to include questions of ‘organization’
Theories and empirical cases of an entropy perspective of organizing
Land-based models and processes of organizing that are not human-centered
Organizing for climate change that are not anthropocentric
Circular economy perspectives that are embedded in wider flows of ecology and materiality; waste as a natural ingredient of open, living systems
References
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