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Becoming Naturecultural: Rethinking Sustainability for a More-Than-Human World
Abstract
The Earth is facing extraordinary ecological crises resulting from human impact on the planet. Meanwhile, a growing body of research studies the relationship of organizations with the natural environment but often overlooks anthropocentrism: the premise of human superiority over nature. Unfortunately, this human exceptionalist premise is the crux of the ecological crisis that cannot be overlooked any longer. To address this discrepancy in the literature, we claim that an ontological shift is necessary. Drawing from feminist new materialisms and Deleuzian relational ontologies, we develop becoming naturecultural, a material-discursive assembling process of more-than-human and more-than-capitalist entanglements. To illustrate the analytical value of becoming naturecultural, we engaged in empirical work at an organic cotton t-shirt supply chain and conducted a multi-sited fieldwork with affective ethnographic methodologies. Working with the data collected, we narrated a human de-centered case study fostering critical but affirmative inquiries about sustainability from a non-anthropocentric relational ontology. At the end we discuss two implications for organizational sustainability research: thinking with and writing with becoming naturecultural. They facilitate moving beyond critiques of anthropocentrism and articulating affirmative possibilities for organization studies in and for the Anthropocene.
... Recent debates have pointed to the relational agencies involved in organizational processes that are concurrently shaped by human and nonhuman beings (Banerjee and Arjaliès 2021;Ehrnström-Fuentes and Böhm 2022;Ergene, Banerjee, and Hoffman 2021). Furthermore, the posthuman turn has created an opening to explore the ethical implications of nonhuman stakeholders (Kortetmäki, Heikkinen, and Jokinen 2023;Tallberg, García-Rosell, and Haanpää 2022), human-animal entanglements (Clarke and Knights 2022;Coulter 2022;Huopalainen 2022;Sayers 2016;Tallberg and Hamilton 2022), and other organizing contexts that include beings other than just humans (Bell and Vachhani 2020;Ergene and Calás 2023;Gherardi and Laasch 2022). However, with the exception of a few empirical case studies (e.g., Beacham 2018; Davies and Riach 2019;Vlasov 2021), what is missing is an understanding of the ethico-political dynamics of organizing processes shaped by the relational agencies of a myriad of different species situated in specific ecological contexts. ...
... Instead, the focus lies on how humans and other beings become with, and relate to, each other through their affective and corporeal encounters (Fotaki, Kenny, and Vachhani 2017), constantly "in a state of interdependent embodied becoming: being born, becoming co-constituted in ecologies, capable of pleasure, pain, suffering, and dying" (Sayers 2016, 372). As such, posthumanism challenges the binaries that separate culture (values) from nature (materialities) and the assumed human exceptionalism in organizations that elevates human agency over that of animals (Ergene and Calás 2023;Paring 2023). Organizations are understood as hybrid assemblages constituted by humans and multiple other nonhumans that, through their everyday practices and distributed agencies, shape management's organizing space (Gherardi and Laasch 2022;Sage et al. 2016;Valtonen and Pullen 2021). ...
... Although we rely extensively on work by scholars who frame these types of organizational contexts (or assemblages) as "posthuman," we deliberately choose to work with the concepts of "multispecies organizing" rather than the abstract terms prevalent in current debates on relational ontologies in business ethics, such as "more-than-human" and "naturecultures" (Beacham 2018;Ergene and Calás 2023;Ergene, Banerjee, and Hoffman 2021;Gherardi and Laasch 2022). We make this choice because it grounds the organizing process in the relational threads between different species as they care for (and are cared for by) the specific ecologies upon which their lives depend (Davies and Riach 2019). ...
Contemporary human-centered organization and management practices endanger the planet’s health, affecting the life and death of multiple species—including humans. Drawing on insights from multispecies ethnography and feminist new materialism, this article contributes to the business ethics literature by developing a theoretical framework for multispecies organizing as a matter of care. Going beyond existing understandings of human-animal relations, we show how ethico-political dynamics shape multispecies relations in three ways: how we and other species relate to ecologies-in-place (affective relationalities); what we and other species do (vital doings); and, finally, what kinds of worlds we—through our ethical sensibilities—commit to bringing into being (ethical obligations). Using an illustrative example of a rewilding site in England, this article shows how multispecies organizing plays out in a specific ecology-in-place. Our argument has important implications for the conception and contemporary practices of the organizational ethics of life and death.
... Central to this debate is therefore the call for recognition and integration of other-often underrepresented and undervaluedtraditions, knowledge systems, and perspectives on the relationships between humans and nature. These include those held by individuals from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and especially different indigenous populations around the world (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021;Salmon et al., 2022;Whiteman & Cooper, 2000) as well as those of women (Braidotti, 2019;Ergene et al., 2018;Sjåfjell et al., 2022;Tallberg et al., 2022), children (Jeurissen & Keijzers, 2004;Walker, 2017), and, critically, also animals, plants and the physical natural environment, sometimes also defined as nonhuman and more-than-human entities (Beacham, 2018;Ergene & Calás, 2023;Kalonaityte, 2018;Kortetmäki et al., 2022;Lliso et al., 2022;Soga & Gaston, 2021). ...
... • How do we achieve ecological (and social) restoration and resilience (Folke et al., 2016;Wieland, 2021;Williams et al., 2021? Economics, demographics Specifically, scholars have long called for a shift in our assumptions about the world at large away from an exclusively human-centric view, particularly of the generalised and biased kind arguably reflected in much of anthropocentric research and thinking, and towards an ecocentric view in which nature sits at the heart of theorising (Banerjee, 2003;Ergene & Calás, 2023;Ergene et al., 2021;Heikkurinen et al., 2016). In this understanding, nature is argued to be endowed with properties that exist independent of social construction by humans (Purser et al., 1995). ...
... Key examples include transdisciplinary forms of deep engagement , interpretivist approaches (Gould et al., 2019), and ethnographies (Whiteman & Cooper, 2000). Moreover, to better recognise the interrelated nature of parts and wholes, especially of humans and organisations within the flows and systems of the natural environment, calls for increased use of systems (King, 1995;Starik & Rands, 1995) and relational thinking including socialecological network analysis have led to growing adoption in sustainability sciences (Eyster et al., 2023;Fazey et al., 2020;Sayles et al., 2019), but remain far from mainstream in business and management research (Bansal et al., 2021;Edwards et al., 2021;Ergene & Calás, 2023;. ...
Complex and urgent challenges including climate change and the significant decline in biodiversity provide a broad agenda for interdisciplinary scholars interested in the implications facing businesses, humanity, and other species. Within this context of sustainability, persistent conflicts between key paradigms create substantial barriers against—but also opportunities for—developing new conceptual approaches and theoretical models to understand and respond to these critical issues. Here, I revisit paradigmatic tensions to assess their impact on research and debate on sustainability, ethics, and business. Drawing on relational ontology and values of nature that recognise humanity’s tight embeddedness within the planetary ecosystem, I examine how conceptualising sustainability as the pursuit of life might generate new insights for research and practice into the wider transformation needed to sustain and restore socioecological systems. The aim here, however, is not to reconcile these paradigmatic tensions but instead use them as a fruitful lens for examining the implications for sustainability, while acknowledging the inherent ethical dilemmas for individuals, organisations, and society.
... It has a "material temporality" (Hernes, Feddersen, & Schultz, 2021) and follows its temporal structure to germinate from seed, blossom, and bear bolls. In its conventional use as a raw material, cotton is translated and transformed into a social actor, e.g., when it is spun into yarns and knitted into t-shirts (Ergene & Calás, 2023). Non-human actors and more-than-human actors, which are primarily ecological, often become naturecultural through the social process of craftwork (Ergene & Calás, 2023;Kroezen, Ravasi, Sasaki, Żebrowska, & Suddaby, 2021;Reinecke, Manning, & von Hagen, 2012). ...
... In its conventional use as a raw material, cotton is translated and transformed into a social actor, e.g., when it is spun into yarns and knitted into t-shirts (Ergene & Calás, 2023). Non-human actors and more-than-human actors, which are primarily ecological, often become naturecultural through the social process of craftwork (Ergene & Calás, 2023;Kroezen, Ravasi, Sasaki, Żebrowska, & Suddaby, 2021;Reinecke, Manning, & von Hagen, 2012). ...
... Grand challenges involve heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, or simply more-than-humans (Ergene, Banerjee & Hoffman, 2021;Ergene & Cal as, 2023). However, the ability to communicate reflexively and convincingly to make a point is typically viewed as uniquely human (Clark, 1999), leading human actors to feel entitled to speak on behalf of more-thanhuman actors, such as animals. ...
... As mentioned, we suggest mapping the human and nonhuman actors involved in a grand challenge and explicitly defining spokespersons for nonhuman actors (who, in turn, value their well-being and not only their potential financial profitability). This recommendation implies a situated approach that decenters human voices (Hawhee, 2020(Hawhee, , 2023 and relationally engages morethan-humans (Ergene et al., 2021;Ergene & Cal as, 2023), which can help decision-makers attune to social-ecological system dynamics (Howard-Grenville & Lahneman, 2021;Williams et al., 2021). ...
... An ecological engagement is about "restoring and creating liveable ecologies for all" (Ergene et al., 2021(Ergene et al., , p. 1325, through life-sustaining meshed webs of relations that include the health and well-being of humans, animals, mountains, rivers, the sky, carbon and indeed the larger cosmological whole (Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2022). Driving these entanglements and connections are the unfolding practices and flows that produce these relations (Ergene et al., 2021;Ergene & Calás, 2023;Pavlovich 2021) that increasingly contain 'care'. Indeed, Beacham (2018) claims that relationality-the interdependence of all things-is essential to care in that it is intricately connected in reproducing 'the social.' ...
... The current use of capitalist extractive practices has separated food production from the web of life within which it resides is unsustainable, with resources frequently being selected on their ability to improve economic profitability rather than their ability to create a flourishing system (Carolan, 2015;Dowler et al., 2010). There is therefore a need to engage more deeply with the living system, foregoing the active selection of resources for instrumental use, and instead acknowledging that systems have relational qualities that need to be considered in the engagement process (Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2022;Ergene & Calás, 2023;Ingold, 2012). The notion of 'care' thus provides an opportunity to integrate a more thoughtful, moral, ecological sensibility towards organising. ...
Concerns over the organising of food are widespread, stemming from unsustainable production practices that focus on extractive ‘use’ of resources that privilege wealth creation over planetary flourishing, care and well-being. We propose a conceptual framework based on ecologies of care to assist in the re-entanglement of food systems. The concept of ecologies of care brings together theoretical understandings of relationality, ecology and care, along with an Aotearoa New Zealand indigenous Māori perspective. We examine how food production can be underpinned by interdependent webs of relationships (whanaungatanga), stewardship (kaitiakitanga), and care and support (manaakitanga) with healthy land and healthy people at the core of organising.
... This paper discusses the methodological implications of embedding sociomateriality (the entanglement of the discursive and the material) in the study of management and organizations, as several scholars (e.g. Ergene and Calás, 2023;Harding, Gilmore and Ford, 2022;Orlikowsky, 2006Orlikowsky, , 2007Orlikowsky, , 2010Orlikowski and Scott, 2008;Scott and Orlikowski, 2014) urge us to embrace new materialism in order to produce new knowledge that recognizes the contribution of material ...
... Bryant and Wolfram Cox, 2014;Calás and Smircich, 2023;Cooren, 2020;Fotaki, Metcalfe and Harding, 2014;Harding, Gilmore and Ford, 2022;Hultin and Introna, 2019) are increasingly engaging with new materialism and posthumanism to contribute to the rethinking of the relationship between human beings, work and organizational objects and the environment (Parmiggiani and Mikalsen, 2013). This impetus is due to the sway of Artificial Intelligence (AI), technological advancement and ecological threats on management and organizations, and the subsequent calls for more-than-human approaches to research (Ergene and Calás, 2023). These approaches consider more-than-human influences on the phenomenon studied, and not only include the role of animals, organisms or objects, but encompass much more, such as the climate, geography, ecosystems, politics, health systems and so on. ...
This paper offers methodological and theoretical contributions to the field of management at the so‐called ‘turn to matter’ postulated within new materialist perspectives. It discusses more‐than‐human perspectives in management research and provides some methodological directions to support new materialist empirical investigations. Theoretically grounded on new materialism and posthumanism, the paper applies the assemblage approach that focuses on understanding the redistribution of agency to the network of people, things and discourses. In developing three exemplars of assemblages, it shows how it is possible to methodologically encompass the entanglement of the material, the organic, the human and the more‐than‐human to explore a phenomenon such as working from home. The paper concludes by reflecting on what new materialist qualitative research in management could become in order to generate new ways of imagining management, organizations and working lives, as more‐than‐human entanglements.
... Frictions put natural brakes on acceleration; they re-inject attention to local contingencies into the project's constituent organizational features; and they generate a reconnecting movement that shapes the evolution (Riad, 2023). In keeping with Tsing's ecological take, we suggest that this notion of thriving, inherently patchy, may be particularly appropriate for organizational researchers who seek to move beyond the Anthropocene to think and write with 'naturecultures' (Ergene & Calás, 2023). ...
This paper formulates an affirmative non-binary conceptual basis for rethinking the growth/‘post-growth’ binary in the context of repair thinking. We propose the twin notions of resonant organizing and thriving as new imageries of a ‘hopeful’ organizing for a better world in transitional times. These notions arise from our diffractive engagement with Anna Tsing’s reflections on frictions and Hartmut Rosa’s notion resonance, which we brought into dialogue with a case of a solidarity initiative that sprang up in Italy during the Covid-19 pandemic – SpesaSospesa. Our findings contribute to the current post-growth debate by: (1) shifting post-growth organizing’s focus from trying to overcome capitalist expansionist striving toward contaminating its building blocks; (2) theorizing ways in which post-growth organizations may thrive in space and time, relationally; and (3) proposing resonant organizing as a form of reflexive and transformative thriving that expands by constantly rethinking its basic elements. Our research thus contributes to the broader political project of repair crystallizing in organization studies that seeks to help alternative economies exit their marginal role and accomplish their transformative potential.
... Some business scholars are expanding their understanding of business ecosystems to cogitate on nonhuman animals' culture, agency, cognition, subjectivity, and world-making, as well as considering other living organisms, such as plants and fungi through the prism of multispecies relations (see e.g. Ergene and Calás, 2023;Kandel et al., 2023;Muñoz and Hernandez, 2024). Natural scientists have long recognized that animals-ranging from the Bengal finch (Taeniopygia guttata) to the sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus)-engage in complex communication and are deeply embedded in intricate ecological relationships. ...
This article extends the entrepreneurship literature by presenting a multispecies lens that attends to the rights, agency, and welfare of nonhumans in the ecological and climate change crises. It responds to calls for rethinking entrepreneurship beyond anthropocentrism, integrating insights from multispecies studies and philosophical ethology. The multispecies lens framework amalgamates humans and nonhumans as equal partners in entrepreneurial endeavors. Based on seven years of field research, including over 200 interviews, participant observation, and archival data, the article uses meta-ethnographic analysis to synthesize findings from four related multispecies studies and develop a line-of-argument analysis. Three themes showcase how multispecies relations can be reconciled in theory and practice: 1) community engagement and environmental education, 2) the interdependency of species through One Welfare, and 3) organizing for intrinsic value over profit. These themes shape the multispecies lens in entrepreneurship framework, offering a foundation for scholars and practitioners to consider nonhumans as equal partners within capitalist endeavors. The article concludes with recommendations for fostering equitable multispecies partnerships in entrepreneurship, if it's not already too late given the dire circumstances of the Anthropocene.
... Finally, Figure 7 reinforces the need to overcome the human-nature dualism that is prevalent in business studies and establish new onto-epistemologies to accommodate both natural and social realities as discussed in critical management studies (Banerjee and Arjaliès, 2021), the 'more-than-human' approach (Ergene and Calás, 2023) and more generally in calls for interdisciplinary research (Whiteman et al., 2013). We welcome diverse approaches that can contribute to this shift -either by rethinking dominant theories to account for the Anthropocene or by establishing new theories based on different human-nature assumptions as a foundation for future research (Banerjee and Arjaliès, 2021;Böhm et al., 2022;Dahlmann, 2024;Ergene et al., 2018;Labatut, 2023). ...
We systematically review business research concerning the planetary boundaries framework: A natural science framework that identifies nine Earth system boundaries that govern the safe operating space for humanity. Ten years after the introduction of the planetary boundaries in business studies, we pose two critical questions: How has the planetary boundaries concept been integrated into business studies and how has research on each of the nine boundaries advanced? Our review demonstrates growing scholarly interest in both questions. However, the topic remains niche with critical gaps, with most studies published in sustainability‐focused journals and only occasionally in mainstream journals. Theoretical development remains fragmented and of greater concern, a systems perspective is lacking in empirical studies: Most articles focus solely on one issue – climate change – and there is almost no cross‐analysis between boundaries. We contrast this with evidence that the planetary pressures of the Anthropocene are approaching dangerous thresholds and make the provocative assertion that planetary boundaries are not simply the foundation for specialized research on corporate sustainability but rather are the necessary boundary conditions for all business studies in the Anthropocene. We call for a transformation in how business scholars theorize, measure and engage.
... Being curious about this residual aspect directs our thinking to explore the latent, the uncanny, the peripheral, the mysterious and the 'queer' moments that momentarily indicate the brittleness of the socialized human condition and the possibility of sensing incoherence that exists beyond conceptual categories (Beyes & Steyaert, 2013;Cooper, 1986;Cunliffe & Karunanayake, 2013;Hirst & Humphreys, 2013;Steyaert, 2022). In this regard, we may pay heed to often ignored themes such as passions (Cornelius & Laurie, 2003) and radically decentring the human and giving agency to the earth (Ergene & Calás, 2023). Philosophy, therefore, extends invitations to notice and write differently (Gilmore, Harding, Helin, & Pullen, 2019;Revsbaek & Simpson, 2022), to feel (Parsley, 2022) and to allow visceral stimuli to exert their unmediated work (O'Doherty, 2020). ...
Although not always apparent, generating theories about organizational phenomena inevitably involves philosophical questions. The latter are concerned with the meaning of the concepts researchers use to describe, interpret, explain, and, in general, understand organizational phenomena. A philosophical approach to organization studies aims to scrutinize, critique, and clarify key concepts, modes of thinking, research practices, as well as assumptions about reality and ways of justifying knowledge claims. Similar to other institutionalized practices, organizational research legitimates and takes for granted certain ways of engaging with, and talking about, the world, leading inevitably to some closure of meaning. Philosophical inquiry can counteract such closure by questioning commonly accepted meanings and fostering an inquisitive mindset that allows us to perceive the world anew. The aim of this Special Issue is to further develop and critically enhance the existing endeavours that explicitly incorporate philosophical approaches in organization studies. Specifically, the objective is to promote a more philosophically oriented approach in the field, focusing on both critical analysis and the development of innovative conceptual advancements. In this Introduction, we not only introduce the featured papers but, also, reflect on the broader purpose of philosophy, its relationship to organization studies, and how it can inform and enrich the field.
... Convinced that organizations play a key role in either stalling or promoting socioecological transformations, we have analyzed streams of literature that explicitly approach the unit of the organization as capable of 'doing good', as something more than simply a tool to create shareholder value or to provide products and services. Thereby we respond to the call by Ergene and Calás (2023), who make a plea for the imagination of 'viable possibilities for creating liveable ecologies' by looking into the scholarly work already engaging with desirable visions of organizational life. ...
In this chapter, we analyze scholarly approaches that explicitly imagine organizations as capable of ‘doing good’ and investigate which answers they give to the urgent need of stimulating socio-ecological transformations. We compare three streams of literature on open, inclusive and alternative organizations. We define the transformative potential of these approaches as related to ideas of (1) de-/postgrowth and other alternatives to profit-oriented organizing; and of (2) making room for historically disadvantaged and particularly marginalized groups at the organizational power table. In our conclusion, we argue that the scale of transformative change needed asks scholars to transgress commonly separated camps of scholarship and, thus, to eclectically engage with all three organizational approaches to organize for socio-ecological transformations. At the same time, this requires challenging institutionalized underpinnings of how we organize scholarship as such.
... However, the concept of the Anthropocene reinforces the assumption of human domination over nature, which is responsible for the ecological crises in the first place (Crist, 2013;Ergene & Calás, 2023). The illusion of human exceptionalism is a dangerous one because it continues to privilege technical solutions for managing ecological crises . ...
In this paper, we are situated in postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist epistemologies to study environmental racism in the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch where human activity has changed the functioning of the earth. Drawing from critiques of the Anthropocene, the concept of racial capitalism, as well as environmental justice and racism scholarship, we show how proposed solutions to the climate crisis overlook and may even exacerbate racial injustices faced by communities of color. We contend that a climate justice agenda that is grounded on racial justice is necessary for our scholarship to develop a racially just management and organization studies (MOS). To accomplish this agenda, we propose three shifts: from studying elite institutions to researching grassroots organizations concerned with climate and racial justice, from uncritical endorsement of global technologies to studying local adaptation by communities of color, and from offering decontextualized climate solutions to unraveling racial histories that can help us address racial and climate injustices. We discuss the implications of these shifts for management research and education and argue that MOS cannot afford to ignore climate justice and racial justice—they are both inextricably linked, and one cannot be achieved without the other.
... The "design for sustainability" domain of practice and research does emerge with this purpose by embracing, in its most advanced expressions, a "more-than-human approach". It acknowledges a multiple and holistic vision, decentralizing its anthropocentric focus by giving legitimacy to human and non-human entities and their related agencies [5]. This means assigning to design the role of leading complex multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary actions to support the transition towards an environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, and culturally inclusive paradigm. ...
The proposed article addresses pressing sustainability challenges, advocating for a profound transformation of existing development models, particularly emphasizing sustainable production and lifestyles. Utilizing a research method grounded in a comprehensive international knowledge base, the study explores the evolution of design for sustainability (DfS) approaches. Its significant contribution lies in systematically investigating connections among diverse DfS approaches, providing an initial framework for situating practices within the fashion and furniture industries. The research outcomes obtained iteratively involve mapping design-driven sustainability practices in European fashion and furniture companies. This mapping reveals a transition from a product-centric to an organization-centered design perspective, calling for a holistic ecosystemic framework to revolutionize business operations. The article analyzes contemporary design-driven practices, proposing an interpretative model that identifies ongoing practices fostering incremental changes toward sustainability guided by design. Furthermore, the article outlines a three-stage design-driven sustainability continuum, synthesizing potential future trajectories. Beyond contributing to the understanding of current practices, the research provides insights into future possibilities, highlighting the transformative role of design in reshaping consumeristic systems. Ultimately, the study offers valuable insights into the transformative power of design, paving the way for sustainable business practices in the fashion and furniture industries.
How can we ethically include nonhuman animals during methodological considerations in organizational and business ethics research? Additionally, what methodological opportunities and challenges do multispecies research approaches present for these research areas? Building on critical posthumanist theory, the feminist ethic-of-care tradition in animal ethics, and the aesthetics of posthuman methodologies, this article develops a novel avenue for multispecies methodological research that expands current approaches to organizational and business ethics research beyond a purely human-centric lens. Empirical materials include diary excerpts about one author’s daily ethical encounters with her dogs and video clips of dog–human relationships, along with aesthetic reflections from two other researchers. Our reflections are shaped by posthumanist theorizing and critically problematize the seemingly static, anthropocentric categorizations of researcher, positionality, and research participant within the ethically complex context of multispecies research. Beyond discussing our findings in relation to recent business ethics research, we propose a methodological avenue for studying the aesthetic hybridization of humanimal subjectivities, including subtle bodily interactions between dogs and humans. This avenue fosters more aesth-ethically attuned and species-inclusive research methodologies in animal organization studies (AOS) and the broader fields of business ethics and organization studies, which are especially critical in the Anthropocene.
The practice turn creates possibilities for more relational approaches to entrepreneuring that challenge anthropocentric logics which exclude naturalized others, including animals, plants and ecologies, from consideration. This article uses feminist materialism to develop a more-than-human understanding of entrepreneurship, drawing empirically on qualitative data collected from a study of artisanal bakeries. I show how practices of craft, that rely on embodied proximity to materials and care(ful) making, require bakers to engage affirmatively with and become relationally dependent upon the microorganisms needed to make bread. The heterogeneous elements of artisanal bread making become connected and acquire agency through fermentation, which alerts bakers to invisible life forces they do not control and must treat with care. Through empirical insights of proximity, connections and collective agitation, fermentation offers a transversal metaphor for thinking differently about what entrepreneurial bodies can do. The article contributes to understanding craft entrepreneuring as a vital, self-organizing, emergent process of meeting with and extending care to others. By drawing attention to the more-than-human relations of artisanal bread making, it demonstrates the ethical possibilities of an entrepreneuring that remains open, attentive and curious towards others and the capacities of matter, as a basis for collective future-making.
Purpose
This article proposes diffractive vignettes as a new analytical approach that can sensitize organizational communication research to extra/linguistic forces in the communicative constitution of major societal challenges such as the climate crisis. The critical feminist concept of diffraction examines how diverse forces interact, interfere and produce new patterns of meaning and difference through entangled, performative relations.
Design/methodology/approach
Diffraction as an analytical tool is illustrated based on fieldwork on organizing the climate crisis in the tourist destinations in the Tyrolean Alps and Venice. We analytically attune to how extra/linguistic forces move and resonate with us, how we read them through each other in a diffractive experiment and how they allow us to attend to materialization differently through crafting diffractive vignettes.
Findings
We account for how the analytical work required us to experiment with juxtaposing, weaving, dividing and melting data and theories together through non-representational, post-qualitative ways of analyzing. Through a diffractive vignette, we then unfold how the extra/linguistic forces became agentic for the constitution of the climate crisis.
Originality/value
Through diffractive vignettes, we extend a fast-developing body of work on materialization within organizational communication to analytically exploit communication’s performativity, including its extra/linguistic forces in a post-qualitative, non-representational sense. With diffraction, we expand the analytical potential of organizational communication scholarship with a sensitivity to difference in materialization.
Soil is being refigured across academia and society at large as a significant and lively yet fragile actor. Caring closely for soil appears increasingly vital to organizing sustainable and equitable economies, food systems, and urban development. Soil is becoming a touchstone for a relational ethics of careful organizing with Earth’s non-human inhabitants, also encompassing animals, oceans and atmospheres. In this essay-style article I think with soil to problematize this wider relational ethics. My critique starts by explaining how soil has become central to this relational ethics and then recognizes that soil often does not fit within human narratives of attentive care. I read such soil refusals as an earthly invitation to explore forms of soil organizing that develop moral arguments for profound detachments and exclusions from non-humans. Exploring two such examples – Indigenous farming and proposals for soilless food production – I elaborate an alternative ‘more-than-relational’ ethics. This is an approach to non-human ethics where sometimes non-humans, like soil, are never known at all or become known only to then be ignored. Such a more-than-relational ethics acknowledges that while attentive care is preferable to ethical approaches that exploit non-humans it is not sufficient to organize a more sustainable, prosperous and equitable planet. Thinking with a more-than-relational ethics instead acknowledges the moral case for profound exclusions and detachments of non-humans that do not serve attentive care but can help multi-species flourishing in a time of planetary ecological crises. This novel approach to ethics contributes to organizational theory by radically problematizing prevailing scholarship valorising ever closer knowledge of non-humans and their practices of organizing. Instead, scholars should also explore knowledges and practices, including Indigenous ones, that can help us detach from and ignore some non-humans.
This study illustrates a critique of circular fashion practices using empirical insights from upcycling to highlight its potentials and limits for a degrowth transition in circular fashion. Acknowledging valuable marketing research on the motivations, benefits, and challenges of consumer upcycling, we investigate the often-overlooked domain of institutional upcycling practices, through interviews with diverse industry actors and secondary data analysis. Our analysis advances critical and theoretical debates on degrowth and circular fashion by examining how the socio-ecological value of upcycled waste is realized through institutional upcycling practices. Accordingly, we elucidate the emerging dynamics of degrowth circularity, demonstrating how these dynamics challenge and expand the degrowth principle of conviviality. Findings articulate the diverse convivialities necessary for a degrowth transition in circular fashion. Specifically, we highlight neo-material and more-than-human relationality as essential organizing principles of conviviality for degrowth circularity.
Decolonial and pluriversal perspectives have recently proliferated in organizational studies, challenging predominant Western and Eurocentric knowledge paradigms in management. Offering both a critique of and alternatives to hegemonic perspectives, the articles in the current special issue place front-and-center new possibilities that recognize multiple ways of knowing and organizing, particularly those originating within less visible, marginalized, Indigenous, or minority communities. The studies in this special issue question entrenched Eurocentric norms in management theory by privileging new perspectives that encompass three central and common concepts interwoven across this issue: hybridity, alterity, and affirmativity. These overarching themes reflect a commitment to acknowledging and integrating diverse epistemic traditions following the notion of pluriversality to resist simplistic or monolithic interpretations of human organizing practices. This commitment requires us to advocate for more inclusive publication practices beyond traditional norms to acknowledge the barriers posed by English-dominant publication outlets and standards. The present collection of articles offers an interdisciplinary exploration of decolonial practice and theory alongside a specific drive to diversify and pluralize organizational scholarship. By engaging with marginalized voices globally across contexts and organizational forms, we promote a reflexive and inclusive means to challenge hegemonic practices within academia itself and ultimately encourage organizational scholars to adopt decolonial frameworks that critique and renew management practices worldwide.
Resumo Perspectivas decoloniais e pluriversais têm aparecido com cada vez mais frequência nos estudos organizacionais, desafiando paradigmas de conhecimento ocidentais e eurocêntricos predominantes no campo da gestão. Os artigos desta edição especial oferecem uma crítica e também alternativas às perspectivas hegemônicas, colocando em primeiro plano novas possibilidades que consideram as múltiplas formas de se conhecer e organizar, particularmente aquelas originadas em comunidades menos visíveis, marginalizadas, indígenas ou minoritárias. Os estudos apresentados aqui questionam normas eurocêntricas arraigadas na teoria da gestão, privilegiando novas perspectivas que abrangem três conceitos centrais e comuns entrelaçados na questão: hibridismo, alteridade e afirmatividade. Esses temas são bastante abrangentes e refletem um compromisso em reconhecer e integrar diversas tradições epistêmicas, seguindo a noção de pluriversalidade de forma a resistir a interpretações simplistas ou monolíticas de práticas de organização humana. Tal compromisso requer a defesa de práticas editoriais mais inclusivas além das normas tradicionais para reconhecer as barreiras impostas por veículos e padrões de publicação de domínio inglês. O conjunto de artigos publicados nesta edição faz uma exploração interdisciplinar da prática e da teoria decoloniais ao mesmo tempo que demonstra um impulso específico para diversificar e pluralizar o campo dos estudos organizacionais. O envolvimento de vozes globalmente marginalizadas em todos os contextos e formas organizacionais contribui na promoção de meios reflexivos e inclusivos de desafiar práticas hegemônicas dentro da própria academia e, finalmente, encorajar acadêmicos organizacionais a adotar estruturas decoloniais capazes de criticar e renovar práticas de gestão em todo o mundo.
Ever since its inception, the Anthropocene as a concept has proven divisive among researchers in both the natural sciences and humanities. While some accept its validity, integrating the Anthropocene into a broader postanthropocentric turn alongside related ideas such as posthumanism, others reject the Anthropocene as somehow incriminating a collective ‘humanity’ as a whole. For its critics, the Anthropocene is a mistaken concept, because it is supposedly blind to historical, social and political factors. Jason W. Moore, a Marxist environmental historian, has argued for replacing the Anthropocene altogether, in favor of the ‘Capitalocene’. This would denote the causal effect capital accumulation exerts upon planetary processes. For Clive Hamilton, however, it is the Capitalocene which is too shallow. Similarly, Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that exclusively society- or history-centric ideas are not enough and fail to take account of the ways in which geological deep time radically transcends the bounds of human history. Chakrabarty admits the local relevance of critical theory – as do many Anthropocene researchers. Emphasizing the importance of social critique need not necessarily come at the expense of privileging a human temporal perspective In this article, we argue that the Capitalocene and related concepts fail to take account of how the Anthropocene challenges Western humanist meta-narratives of linear temporality, progress and emancipation.
As a symptom of the current global climate emergency, rising temperatures pervade organizational lives. Yet, organization studies have hardly investigated the everyday organizing necessary to cope and adapt, here and now, to life in a world approaching and even surpassing 50 degrees Celsius. This essay seeks to open spaces of collective inquiry to grapple with practices of organizational co-evolution with heat. I apply Barad's post-humanist notion of diffraction-patterns of interference in entangled agency-through warming organizations, as rising temperatures intra-act with the matter, materials, bodies and discourses that co-constitute them. Diffractive inquiry helps organization studies understand how rising heat alters and amplifies bodily differences across families, communities, firms, societies and ecologies. This post-humanist view forces to rethink theories of organizational resilience, inequality and identity in co-evolution with heat and other ecological phenomena as part of a relational whole.
This paper addresses calls for developing eco-centric approaches to sustainable management learning that challenge the anthropocentric technocratic foci of established models. A growing concern is that despite declarations of climate emergencies, programs making a sustainable turn perpetuate rather than challenge the status-quo. A key issue is that they rely on an ontology of separateness which further detaches humans from nature. To propose an alternative approach that re-embeds human in nature through an ontology of relatedness, we develop the concept Gaia storytelling. It combines Arendt's notion of storytelling with Latour's notion of Gaia. Gaia storytelling dissolves the anthropocentric culture-nature binary that dominates current thinking by attuning itself to the politics of relations and how this politics performs the world through complex entanglements that involve multiple agencies. Storytelling for Gaia is seen as a way to give purpose and direction in life when this life is seen as interdependent on and created from multiple tangling agencies. Two stories that emerged from management learning exercises are discussed for developing Gaia storytelling: an auto-ethnography of a supermarket allows attuning to how our stories are affectively enacted into being through constant story selling; a storytelling workshop of regional sustainable development is used to discuss the possibilities for creating spaces of appearances that can work for Gaia. Finally, we discuss Gaia storytelling with reference to three principles: (1) natureculture, (2) common space, and (3) performativity. Sustainability has entered powerfully into management programs as evidenced by a selection of courses delivered by top universities across the globe (see Table 1). These programs urge students to "get ready to make the world a better place" (ESADE) by "weav(ing] sustainability into [their]
This entry explores the new awareness that posthumanist aesthetics brings to the understanding and management of innovation in organizational life. Posthumanist aesthetics emphasizes sensible knowing, aesthetic judging, and the metaphorical and poetic comprehension of innovation. It focuses on the predisposition of the human body to hybridization with other corporealities-nonhuman animals, plant life and nature in general-and with the sociomateriality of organizational artefacts. Posthumanist aesthetics stimulates organizational researchers to investigate the daily metamorphosis of human sensible knowing and aesthetic judging. The entry takes into consideration two cases in particular: medicine and posthumanist design practices. Medicine because human corporeality is highly hybridized due to the digital translation of the human body into data and information which gives it virtual corporeality. Posthumanist design practices because they aim to decentralize the human in the innovation of organizational life.
KEYWORDS Hybridization of aesthetic feelings, organizational aesthetic research, organizational posthumanist aesthetics, posthumanist aesthetic philosophy, posthumanist design practices.
Dieser Artikel diskutiert ein umfassendes Verständnis von Nachhaltigkeit aus einer kritisch-feministischen Perspektive mit Fokus auf mehr-als-menschlichen Beziehungen in der Wintertourismusbranche. Durch die ethnografische Feldforschung in zwei österreichischen Skigebieten werden alternative Arbeitsbeziehungen mit nichtmenschlichen Akteuren wie Schnee aufgezeigt und ihr Potenzial für ein alternatives Verständnis von Nachhaltigkeit hervorgehoben. Die Ergebnisse betonen die Bedeutung nichtmenschlicher Akteure wie Schnee und Landschaften, um Nachhaltigkeit neu zu organisieren. Die empirischen Vignetten heben drei zentrale Aspekte hervor: das Potenzial alternativer Zeithorizonte in ≫waiting-forsnow≪, die Bedeutung des gegenseitigen Verständnisses und der Zusammenarbeit mit Schnee in ≫connecting-to-snow≪ sowie die verbundenen Identitäten, die durch fürsorgliche Beziehungen zu Schnee in ≫thriving-with-snow≪ entstehen. Die Studie zeigt das Potenzial dieser mehr-als-menschlichen Beziehungen zur Entwicklung alternativer Geschäftsmodelle und betont einen ganzheitlichen Ansatz für nachhaltigen Wintertourismus und andere Industrien.
While performativity, as a theoretical concept, has gained much purchase in the field of management and organization studies (MOS), there remains a dearth of empirical work operationalizing the idea. In this article, we argue that empirical studies on performativity in organizational settings have been scarce mainly due to two methodological challenges: (1) the problem of breadth, and, (2) the problem of depth. In terms of breadth, to study how a cultural/symbolic construction becomes performative, researchers need to follow threads of meanings and practices that stretch in time and space beyond the scope of what most methodologies afford. In terms of depth, studying performativity requires an in-depth, contextualized understanding of how people live in and through the symbolic world, which few methodologies offer. We posit multi-sited ethnography as a promising methodological approach that has the potential to concomitantly overcome both challenges. Through a vignette of a study that one of the authors conducted in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we illustrate how multi-sited ethnography enables empirical research on performativity in MOS.
This editorial essay introduces a special issue that tackles the seemingly intractable challenge of re-conceptualizing power and performativity as continuously interweaving and co-emergent dynamics in the processes of organizing. It is in these processes, we argue, that new futures may be visibly made through the academic activism of our scholarly communities. We position our argument, and the six papers that comprise this special issue, in relation to Rosi Braidotti’s framing of Humanism, anti-humanism and the posthuman. We also suggest some future lines of inquiry to move studies of organizing forward into a posthuman world.
Purpose
In accordance with Latour, this paper aims to respond to the call for a “down-to-earth” post-learning organization approach to sustainability, which is critical of Senge’s conception of learning organization (LO).
Design/methodology/approach
“Gaia storytelling” is used to define a LO that is “down-to-earth”.
Findings
Gaia is understood through the notion of a critical zone, which foregrounds the local and differentiated terrestrial conditions in which life on Earth is embedded.
Practical implications
Gaia storytelling implies perceiving LO as a network of storytelling practices enacted and told by unique creative citizens. Such an organization sustains and grows through several entangled storytelling cycles that allow Gaia to shape learning.
Social implications
The article distinguishes five different storytelling cycles as a way to explore how the Gaia theater cycle connects to other cycles. The four other cycles are: Gaia thinking, explorative, creative and Gaia truth-telling.
Originality/value
A Gaian LO is a new beginning for LO.
Posthuman affirmative ethics relies upon a fluid, nomadic conception of the ethical subject who develops affective, material and immaterial connections to multiple others. Our purpose in this paper is to consider what posthuman affirmative business ethics would look like, and to reflect on the shift in thinking and practice this would involve. The need for a revised understanding of human–animal relations in business ethics is amplified by crises such as climate change and pandemics that are related to ecologically destructive business practices such as factory farming. In this analysis, we use feminist speculative fiction as a resource for reimagination and posthuman ethical thinking. By focusing on three ethical movements experienced by a central character named Toby in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, we show how she is continually becoming through affective, embodied encounters with human and nonhuman others. In the discussion, we consider the vulnerability that arises from openness to affect which engenders heightened response-ability to and with, rather than for, multiple others. This expanded concept of subjectivity enables a more relational understanding of equality that is urgently needed in order to respond affirmatively to posthuman futures.
The nature and scope of changes in organizations’ external environments is without precedent due to planetary shifts, or major changes in earth’s biophysical systems. Our theories of organizational adaptation lack the capacity to explain what will be needed on behalf of business organizations, and their strategists and managers, to adjust to these shifts. In this essay, we review organizational adaptation theory and explain why it falls short of offering adequate explanations in an era of planetary shifts. We then draw on ecological theories of adaptation, with their focus on social-ecological systems and panarchy, to suggest ways to advance organizational adaptation theory for our times.
The post-Cartesian ‘material turn’ in management and organization studies understands that bodies are far more than vehicles that enable work to be undertaken, but are agentive actors in the constitution of work and working selves. This leads to the need for more empirically-derived understanding of the agency of flesh in the performative corporealization of working, embodied selves. We met this challenge through adapting feminist, posthuman research methods for a study of the materialities and materialization of working bodies. The study takes forward Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s theories of performativity by reading them through each other, and introducing flesh as an agentive actor in each moment-to-moment move. In paying close attention to the speech of supposedly ‘dumb flesh’ we show how flesh resists its negation and itself imposes control on the worker. We coin the term ‘body/flesh’ and illuminate how bodies are active and agentive, constituting corporeal/izing working selves in somewhat unexpected ways.
Rocks. Geological forces across time and space. Non‐human beings. Humans. Affect material encounters with rocks. Connecting. Being. Writing… From the Artic to Eastern Finland. From Sydney to Kangaroo Island, Australia. From the north to the south, and back again. Corporeal, affective. These rocks live with and through us. Touching rocks—rocks touch us. Bodies—rocks, co‐constituted in life. Disrupting. Non‐violent. Ethico‐political acts of writing. Writing rocks. Humans become geologic forces. Care. Response‐able.
In this essay, we argue that by taking a systems lens, sustainability researchers can better understand the implications of COVID‐19 on business and society and prevent future pandemics. A systems lens asks management researchers to move from a firm‐level perspective to one that also considers the broader socioecological context. We argue that for business to prevent future pandemics and assure future prosperity, business must recognize the limits to growth, alternative temporalities that do not pit the short against the long term, the nestedness of local phenomena in global systems, and leverage points that can reduce entrenched systems of social inequalities.
Could the everyday affective relationships that we share with our animal companions inspire us to think, write and even care ‘differently’ in the field of organisation studies? In this paper, I suggest that organisational scholars have plenty to learn from post-qualitative writing and the posthumanist practice of feminist dog-writing. Drawing from literature on posthumanism, humanimal relations and post-qualitative methodology, I first frame feminist dog-writing as a practice that relies on post-qualitative writing and discuss what this framing potentially involves, in concrete terms. Second, I experiment with ‘writing with the bitches’ to illustrate how this kind of writing ‘differently’ – in ways in which the entangled co-becoming of the humanimal is highlighted in its multiplicity – could contribute to discussions of humanimal relations in the field of organisation studies and more disruptive, post-qualitative forms of writing in our scholarly field. Despite the many challenges of anthropocentric language and representation, I argue that feminist dog-writing has the capability to creatively confuse, disrupt, and transform more ‘conventional’, mechanical, and hu man-centred forms of academic writing. Finally, I suggest that feminist dog-writing invites human animals to engage differently with the sensate, more-than-human life-worlds that human-centred accounts of organisational life have typically sentimentalised, trivialised, or overlooked.
This paper takes work by Bruno Latour as the starting point from which to critically examine conceptual moves needed to develop a formulation of voice appropriate for an expanded environmental politics which expresses the interests of human and nonhumans alike. Adopting human language and the rational speaking subject as the benchmark for entry into political debate and decision making is a central problem for theorising an expanded politics. Strong arguments suggest that an expanded politics cannot be founded in a model for the right to speak which reproduces and divide between human and nonhuman worlds. The paper draws on this critique to suggest a conception of voice as ‘voicing’. It argues that voicing as an agental socio-material assemblage is sympathetic both to Latour’s more recent AIME project and Dobson’s understanding of political voice grounded in agency.
In this paper we explore the role of affective encounters between human and non-human bodies in the proliferation of new technologies within and across work organizations. Our exploration challenges not only the long-standing rationalism within studies of technological innovation but the anthropocentrism of burgeoning studies of technology, innovation and affect. Responding to these proclivities, we propose and elaborate an affective Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an alternative analytical approach by cross-fertilizing ANT concepts with Deleuze’s reading of the affective philosophy of Spinoza. Our approach is elaborated further with the technological innovation of zero-carbon homes in the United Kingdom. Affective ANT is proposed to explain the profound role of affects in the circulation of technologies and of technologies in the circulation of affects. This theory contributes by challenging: studies of affect, innovation and technology to examine the significance of relational human affects in the proliferation of new technologies; organizational studies to consider the interplay of human and technical affects; and Deleuzo-Spinozian organizational studies to conceptualize how affects are organized to serve managerial interests and agendas, such as technological innovation.
This article introduces a new label, ‘Affective Ethnography’, and grounds it within the debates on post-qualitative methodologies and affective methodologies. Affective ethnography is theorized as a style of research practice that acknowledges that all elements—texts, actors, materialities, language, agencies—are already entangled in complex ways, and that they should be read in their intra-actions, through one another, as data in motion/data that move. I discuss three pillars for affective ethnographies that relate to researchers’ presence in doing fieldwork and their bodily capacity to affect/be affected. The first is embodiment and embodied knowing. Doing fieldwork implies the ability to resonate with, becoming-with, and the capacity for affective attunement. The second aspect relates to place as flow, and process—to placeness. The third relates to affect as the power to act and therefore to the presence in the fieldwork of the capacity to ‘make do’, either intentionally or unintentionally.
In this article, I describe how following the contour of concepts can enable a minor inquiry in which voice might be rethought as what Deleuze and Guattari called a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” Following the contour of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature” and thinking voice as an assemblage, I both explain the characteristics of a minor literature and provide examples of the conditions for a minor inquiry. Mapping an enactment of a minor inquiry with examples from my previous work on voice, I conclude with what minor inquiry might look like as I experiment further with collective assemblages of enunciation.
Though mainstream sociological theory has been founded within dualisms such as structure/agency, nature/culture, and mind/matter, a thread within sociology dating back to Spencer and Tarde (Karakayali, 2015) favoured a monist ontology that cut across such dualistic categories. This thread has been reinvigorated by recent developments in social theory, including the new materialisms, posthumanism and affect theories. Here we assess what a monist or ‘flat’ ontology means for sociological understanding of key concepts such as structures and systems, power and resistance. We examine two monistic sociologies: Bruno Latour’s ‘sociology of associations’ and DeLanda’s ontology of assemblages. Understandings of social processes in terms of structures, systems or mechanisms are replaced with a focus upon the micropolitics of events and interactions. Power is a flux of forces or ‘affects’ fully immanent within events, while resistance is similarly an affective flow in events producing micropolitical effects contrary to power or control.
What if we imagine we have been leaving the épistème of the age of 'Man at the center of knowledge', the epoch which has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster through discourses and practices of advanced market capitalism, and move on to imagine that we are entering the age of the Anthropocene, positing the need for radically reconceptualizing the relationship between humanity and nature? What discourses and practices would carry this? What kind of knowledge would be possible? Who would be the subject of such knowledge? Inspired by Braidotti's definition of cartography as a method and Latour's articulation of matters of fact and matters of concern, we bring together a variety of feminist ecological perspectives, materialist and new materialist, to eventually assemble a cartographic lens we label ecologies of sustainable concerns. Such a lens would facilitate reclaiming 'sustainability' in organization studies discourses and practices for living well and living with others in the Anthropocene. It is our expectation that in reclaiming 'sustainability' through the feminist literatures we are using, and their discursive variations, it would become clearer that there are options for an economy and ecology beyond what is permissible to say and do as knowledge in organization studies under advanced market capitalism. © 2017 The Authors. Gender, Work & Organization published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
In this article, we explore how a posthumanist stance has enabled us to work a different consideration of the way in which voice is constituted and constituting in educational inquiry; that is, we position voice in a posthuman ontology that is understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceed the traditional understanding of an individual. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, and Bennett, we present a research artifact that illustrates how this posthuman voice is productively bound to an agentic assemblage. The reconfiguration of a posthuman voice with/in an educational research artifact further enables us to explore various analytic questions: What happens when voice exceeds language and is more than (un)vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject? If the materiality of voice is not limited to sound (i.e. self-present language emitted from a human mouth), how do we account for it? That is, how might the materiality of voice be located in the space of intra-action among human and non-human objects? We conclude with implications for thinking qualitative methodology in education differently.
This paper explores social inquiry in terms of the 'research-assemblages' that produce knowledge from events. We use the precepts of new materialism (and specifically DeleuzoGuattarian assemblage ontology) to develop understanding of what happens when social events are researched. From this perspective, research is not at root an enterprise undertaken by human actors, but a machine-like assemblage of things, people, ideas, social collectivities and institutions. During social inquiry, the affect economies of an event-assemblage and a research-assemblage hybridise, generating a third assemblage with its own affective flow. This model of the research-assemblage reveals a micropolitics of social research that suggests a means to interrogate and effectively reverse-engineer different social research methodologies and methods, to analyse what they do, how they work and their micropolitical effects. It also suggests a means to forward-engineer research methods and designs to manipulate the kinds of knowledge produced when events are researched.
Theory building is conditioned by three registers – the ontological (reality), the epistemological (knowledge) and the ethical (values). The significance of the first two is widely acknowledged. But the third register tends to be overlooked, especially where a positive/normative dichotomy is assumed. Post-positivist thinking problematizes this dichotomy but leaves the ethical register unthematized. The paper addresses this neglect and illustrates the role of the ethical register in processes of theory formation. Attentiveness to the ethical register is seen to invite radical reflection on a dominant, anthropocentric value-orientation, and thereby problematize the institutionalized estrangement of researchers from the ‘objects’ of their analysis and the abstraction of organizations from their embeddedness in the biosphere.
Open access at : http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13645579.2014.921458
This paper discusses issues of research design and methods in new materialist social inquiry, an approach that is attracting increasing interest across the social sciences as an alternative to either realist or constructionist ontologies. New materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how assemblages of the animate and the inanimate together produce the world, with fundamental implications for social inquiry methodology and methods. Key to our exploration is the materialist notion of a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising researcher, data, methods and contexts. We use this understanding first to explore the micropolitics of the research process, and then – along with a review of 30 recent empirical studies -- to establish a framework for materialist social inquiry methodology and methods.
This article examines the historically constituted dimensions of anthropocentrism. tracing the emergence of linear perspective. a camera theory of knowledge. and the human-nature dualism. These epistemological conventions are socially reproduced in organization science and management practice in their more contemporary anthropocentric forms: a disembodied form of technological knowing conjoined with an egocentric organizational orientation. Following this critique. the paradigmatic differences between anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches for dealing with issues related to the natural environment are discussed in what is referred to respectively as the environmental management and ecocentric responsibility paradigms. Our analysis suggests that corporate environmentalism and so-called ''greening-business'' approaches are grounded in the environmental management paradigm. It is argued that environmental management approaches are incommensurable with the ecocentric responsibility paradigm. The tensions between these competing paradigms are examined as a useful stimulus for theory development toward an ecocentric organizational paradigm.
This paper explores the contradictions inherent in one of the more popular buzzwords of today: sustainable development. I argue that, despite claims of a paradigm shift, the sustainable development paradigm is based on an economic, not ecological, rationality. Discourses of sustainable development embody a view of nature specified by modern economic thought. One consequence of this discourse involves the transformation of 'nature' into 'environment', a transformation that has important implications for notions of how development should proceed. The 'rational' management of resources is integral to the Western economy and its imposition on developing countries is problematic. I discuss the implications of this 'regime of truth' for the Third World with particular reference to biotechnology, biodiversity and intellectual property rights. I argue that these aspects of sustainable development threaten to colonize spaces and sites in the Third World, spaces that now need to be made 'efficient' because of the capitalization of nature.
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world’s leading social theorists to how we understand society and the ‘social ‘. Bruno Latour’s contention is that the word ‘social’, as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as ‘wooden’ or ‘steely ‘. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why ‘the social’ cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a ‘social explanations’ of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of ‘the social’ to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the ‘assemblages’ of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a ‘sociology of associations’, has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
In this paper we investigate how craft as tekhnē configures organizations and their politics by exploring the relations of technology and organization. Through a two-year ethnographic study of remote craft villages in Vietnam, we consider how political concerns are mobilized, distributed and materialized through craft. Defining craft as a process of organizing that often involves mundane objects, but also sits at the centre of political concerns, we are interested in understanding how craft as tekhnē is realized in organizations and suggest two key features: craft as a location for politics and as a basis for mobilizing politics of scale. We provide three main contributions. First, we show that tekhnē can hold steady a focus on organizing through mundane objects. Second, we demonstrate that attending to the mundane reveals distinct relationships between technology and forms of organizing, that mobilize political concerns. Third, we explore the ways mundane objects of tekhnē are not only involved in representing and preserving cultural heritage, but also in challenging the marginalized status of these communities.
We have entered the Anthropocene: a new geological epoch in which human activities, led by business interests, have inexorably compromised the Earth System. The current failure to provide a comprehensive and systematic response to this transition does not result from a lack of reason but is instead the manifestation of a generalized crisis in communication. Drawing from the work of Michel Serres, we analyze how the roots of this crisis lie with ‘parasite logic’, which has prevented reasoned responses to the Anthropocene. To work through this crisis, it is necessary to adopt different forms of reasoning and imagination to reshape the rational basis of management education. We propose to do this through an engagement with pataphysics, a science subjecting dominant modes of rationality to a divergent thinking of the absurd and proposing playful forms of reasoning. Pataphysics provides a mechanism for developing ‘imaginary solutions’ to the current situation, that can disrupt anthropocentric forms of reason and reasoning, and further serve to slow down the endless cycles of inclusion and exclusion that arise from parasite logic. Finally, we propose slow design as an example of an ‘imaginary solution’ that comes from this process of conceptual and practical deacceleration.
In this essay, we trace the evolution of the field of sustainability in management and organization studies and narrate its epistemological twists and turns. Concerned by the current trajectory that tends to diminish a focus on political concerns, we propose a new research agenda, an ecological case for business, that transforms our paradigmatic orientation in four shifts: (1) altering our epistemological lenses from managerial to critical perspectives; (2) altering our ontological lenses from realist to relational view; (3) changing the way we design and conduct research from discipline-focused to interdisciplinary knowledge; and (4) transforming our scholarly stance from value-neutral to engaged scholarship. We argue that these shifts have capacities to overcome the conceptual limitations of the business case and, more fundamentally, help us question our scholarly positioning to the ongoing socio-ecological crises.
Feminism is a theoretical perspective and social movement that seeks to reduce, and ultimately eradicate, sexist inequality and oppression. Yet feminist research remains marginal in the most prestigious management and organization studies (MOS) journals, as defined by the Financial Times 50 (FT50) list. Based on a review of how feminism is framed in these journals (1990–2018), we identify three overlapping categories of how feminism is represented: (i) as a conceptual resource which is used to address specific topics; (ii) as an empirical category associated with the study of specific types of organization or organizing practice; and, rarely, (iii) as a methodology for producing knowledge. While feminist knowledge exists beyond these parameters, such as in the journal Gender, Work & Organization, we suggest that the relative absence of explicitly feminist scholarship in the most prestigious MOS journals reflects an epistemic oppression which arises from the threat that feminism presents to established ways of knowing. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's work, we use the ‘sweaty concept’ of dangerous knowledge to show how feminism positions knowledge as personal, introducing a radical form of researcher subjectivity which relies on the acknowledgment of uncertainty. We conclude by calling for the epistemic oppression of feminist scholarship to be recognized and redressed so the potential of feminism as a way of knowing about organizations and management can be realized. This, we argue, would enable feminist research praxis in MOS to develop as an alternative location of, in bell hooks' term, healing that challenges the main/malestream.
Practice-based studies of organization have drawn attention to the importance of the body as a site of knowledge and knowing. However, relational encounters between bodies and objects, and the affects they generate, are less well understood in organization studies. This article uses new materialist theory to explore the role of affect in embodied practices of craft making. It suggests that craft work relies on affective organizational relations and intensities that flow between bodies, objects and places of making. This perspective enables a more affective, materially inclusive understanding of organizational practice, as encounters between human and nonhuman entities and forces. We draw on empirical data from a qualitative study of four UK organizations that make bicycles, shoes and hand-decorated pottery. We track the embodied techniques that enable vital encounters with matter and the affective traces and spatial, aesthetic atmospheres that emerge from these encounters. We suggest that a concern with the vitality of objects is central to the meaning that is attributed to craft work practices and the ethical sensibilities that arise from these encounters. We conclude by proposing an affective ethics of mattering that constructs agency in ways that are not confined to humans and acknowledges the importance of orientations towards matter in generating possibilities for ethical generosity towards others.
In recent years, feelings such as melancholia, paranoia, despair and political depression have been deemed distinctive political moods, also within critical theories. This, the author argues, is the affective landscape for understanding and situating new materialist endeavours. As much as new materialist approaches have been praised and even celebrated lately, they have also provoked highly controversial reactions and evoked questions, such as: Why a new materialism, why at this historical moment? And what is so attractive about this material turn? In this article, the author argues that new materialist approaches seek to oppose the contemporary affective condition of political depression, despair and hopelessness by desiring and mobilizing to achieve a different political future, one that ultimately relates to care and commonality as well as to (new) modes and modalities of political agency. However, while new materialist approaches doubtlessly provide engaged and powerful inventions and interventions within contemporary struggles for agency, the author also demonstrates the risk of depoliticization inherent in this longing for something different, which can ultimately even compromise opening up possibilities for agency. This article, thus, aims to discuss new materialist concerns within the context of contemporary political and theoretical landscapes in order to better decipher the new materialist signals of our times, but also to critically push further the possibilities for political agency within feminist theory, at times even against all odds.
In this article, I consider how organisations within ‘Alternative’ Food Networks might help us to enact a more-than-human ethic of care in the Anthropocene. Drawing on the diverse economies framework of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006a, 2006b) as well as readings in the feminist ethics of care literature, I explore an ethnographic study of three community supported agriculture schemes in the north-west of England. While there has been surprisingly little scholarly work linking food and the Anthropocene, much more has been made of the relationship between the food system and Anthropogenic processes of climate change. The orthodox responses to the problems that climate change may bring about are undergirded by Hobbesian visions and the perceived viability of instrumental, technocratic ‘fixes’ that are, for many reasons, worthy of critique. Broadening our viewpoint, and recognising that the Anthropocene and climate change require different responses, I argue that AFNs can provide a more hopeful perspective in how we might understand our existence within a more-than-human world. Rather than reading AFNs through analytical binaries as either reformist or radical entities merely confronting the ills of the food system, I develop an account that instead understands them as open-ended and tantalisingly different forms of organisation (Stock et al., 2015b) that can play a central role in fostering a more-than-human ethics of care for the Anthropocene.
The overarching purpose of this article is to add to the theorization of the Anthropocene in organization studies by investigating how long-term planetary concerns can be better accounted for in organizing. To do so, the article draws on the scholarship of Jacques Rancière to show how the dichotomy of nature and culture shapes the dominant framings of organizing, and to outline premises for artistic, scholarly and political interventions into the status quo that could aid the process of making our entanglements with the geo-biophysical politically viable. The article concludes that the Anthropocene can add to a renewal of organizational and political decision-making processes through a radical rethinking of the liberal humanist separation of nature and culture and related concepts such as democracy and political subjecthood.
The motivation for this anthology is a challenge raised in the growing volume of academic work on affective processes — or what is often termed ‘the affective turn’ in contemporary cultural analysis (Clough, 2007; Thrift, 2008; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Brennan, 2004; Massumi, 2002; Blackman, 2012; Wethereil, 2012; Leys, 2011; Ahmed, 2004). The challenge under discussion is how to develop and account for methodologies that enable cultural researchers to investigate affective processes in relation to a certain empirical study. The collection’s main methodological focus is thus how to perform empirically grounded affect research. We define an affective method as an innovative strategy for (1) asking research questions and formulating research agendas relating to affective processes, for (2) collecting or producing embodied data and for (3) making sense of this data in order to produce academic knowledge. The aim of this edited collection is therefore not to challenge or deconstruct established methodological categories (e.g., research questions, data production and data analysis), but rather to begin experimenting with how these categories can be used and reinterpreted in inventive ways in order to engage with the immaterial and affective processes of social life. The chapters in the collection deal with the various elements of this definition in different ways: some focus more on starting points and asking questions, others more on the production or sense-making of data through the use of new analytical and conceptual approaches.
In a stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, Banu Subramaniam explores how her dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. As she shows, the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, Subramaniam uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field. © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
This essay explores the act of touching as it takes place in physical matter, in theorizing, and in the productive spaces where the two are indistinguishable. First, the author considers how feminist theory goes about touching science and unpacks touch as an act that reveals the self within the other and the other within the self. The essay then offers a tutorial in quantum field theory to prepare the reader for an unexpected interlocutor on the topic of touching: the electron. As Barad demonstrates with descriptions of electrons and how they have troubled physicists to the point of being “normalized” and called “immoral,” these particles resist normative notions of physical contact; they are perverse. On the human scale, electrons trouble the notion of touch by making it impossible to close the distance between atoms: the sense of touch paradoxically relies on electric repulsion between neighboring objects. On the subatomic scale, each electron gleans its energy from touching itself as if undergoing an exchange with another. Not only does the presence of contact come from its absence but also the presence of electrons themselves relies on a void holding their virtual counterparts. On every level, one can never reach the other—even the other within oneself. This paradox on the micro scale that constitutes all macro-scale matter calls into question the spatial and temporal fixity of identity. Barad shows that the notion of a unified, autonomous self is problematic not just on the personal level but on the particle level as well, and she responds to this deconstruction of matter with an ethics of response-ability.
We consider how genre and gender are implicated in academic writing about work organizations, noting that masterful, rational and penetrating masculine forms have long been dominant. The result is the privileging of a masculine style of writing that has come to be seen both as gender neutral and mandatory. This has served both to marginalize women's writing and to disable men's femininity. To subvert and undermine this, we consider the possibilities of a feminine writing of organization that defies rational categorization so as to enable a multitude of affectual voices and texts to cross over from exclusion. This creates a space where feminine writing can be encouraged and published and where issues surrounding the feminine can flourish.
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
In this article, I note that the idea of a new materialist turn has recently been gathering steam. The first part considers some of the signature elements of the new materialisms. The most distinctive aspect identified here is the invocation of a generative or vital ontology of immanence. Following discussion of some of its principal claims, the article draws out its implications for reconceptualising agency, in particular regarding the way agentic capacities are recognised to be distributed across animate, and perhaps also inanimate, entities. The significance of this development for the political sciences is then explored. In a second part, I suggest that the new materialism entails a normative project. Here, ethical overtures towards a new sensitivity predicated on vital materialist insights are contrasted with a renewed critical theory. The latter is commended as a material reckoning of the 21st century: a project provisionally labelled a capacious historical materialism.
Science studies has often been against the normative dimension of epistemology, which made a naturalistic study of science impossible. But this is not to say that a new type of normativity cannot be detected at work inscience studies. This is especially true in the second wave of studies dealing with the body, which has aimed at criticizing the physicalization of the body without falling into the various traps of a phenomenology simply added to a physical substrate. This article explores the work of Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret in that respect, and shows how it can be used to rethink the articulation between the various levels that make up a body.
This paper surveys the return to materialist concerns in the work of a new generation of cultural geographers informed by their engagements with science and technology studies and performance studies, on the one hand, and by their worldly involvements in the politically charged climate of relations between science and society on the other. It argues that these efforts centre on new ways of approaching the vital nexus between the bio (life) and the geo (earth), or the ‘livingness’ of the world, in a context in which the modality of life is politically and technologically molten. It identifies some of the major innovations in theory, style and application associated with this work and some of the key challenges that it poses for the practice of cultural geography.
Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth... involving a gradual but thorough displacement from text to territory.
Over the past hundred years organizational activities have caused devastating damage to the natural environment. In response, environmentalism has emerged as an influential intellectual current, and as a worldwide mass move ment. Despite these trends, Organizational Studies as a field has failed to engage seriously in environmental discourses.
Organizational theories cannot adequately address environmental concerns because of their limited ideas of 'organizational environment'. This paper iden tifies and critiques these limitations. It proposes an alternative view of organ izational environment as an economic biosphere. It examines the implications of this view for creating more nature-centred (green) organizational theories.
This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...
At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both as sites of becoming and as opportunities for belonging. But no longer can we see subjects as simply human and places as human-centered. The ‘arrival’ of the Anthropocene has thrown us onto new terrain. Feminist critiques of hyper-separation are pushing us to move beyond the divisive binaries of human/nonhuman, subject/object, economy/ecology and thinking/acting. The reframing of our living worlds as vast uncontrolled experiments is inspiring us to reposition ourselves as learners, increasingly open to our interconnections with earth others and more willing to intervene in adventurous ways. In this article we begin to think about more-than-human regional development and regional research collectives that have the potential to perform resilient worlds. For us the project of belonging involves both participating in the vast experiment that is the Anthropocene and connecting deeply to specific places and concerns.
Over Antipode's 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science we frame research as a process of learning involving a collective of human and more-than-human actants—a process of co-transformation that re/constitutes the world. From this vision of how things change, the essay begins to develop an “economic ethics for the Anthropocene”, documenting ethical practices of economy that involve the being-in-common of humans and the more-than-human world. We hope to stimulate academic interest in expanding and multiplying hybrid research collectives that participate in changing worlds.
