Ecological sensemaking and climate change

There is not enough understanding of the issues affecting our environment and climate system. This raises the crucial question: are modern managers prepared to ‘embed’ themselves in our natural world to monitor and make sense of local variability in the natural environment

That which Doesn’t Break Us: Identity Work in the Face of Unwanted Development

Studies on identity work have focused primarily on internal organizational relations, and have yet to examine if, and how, identity work occurs amongst stakeholder groups. Our paper addresses this gap in the literature through an ethnographic study of one Indigenous group – the Machiguenga, a remote Indigenous tribe affected by the Camisea Gas Project in the Peruvian Amazon. We also introduce concepts such as ‘glocalization’ from anthropological studies of Indigenous identity processes and integrate these with organizational knowledge of ‘identity work.’ Our findings demonstrate that Indigenous cultural identity can be both threatened and strengthened in response to natural gas development and is related to how individuals, communities and the Machiguenga (as a collective) engage in identity work

Planetary boundaries and corporate sustainability

Real intellectual innovation happens when multi-disciplinary researchers get together and collaborate. And innovation is urgently needed, if we are to take corporate sustainability to the next level. Supporting this shift, nine ‘Planetary Boundaries’ have been identified by natural scientists, defining the parameters of a safe environment for humanity

Making Sense of Climate Change: How to Avoid the Next Big Flood

Over the last two decades, management studies on sustainability have grown considerably, including a recent surge of research on climate change. However, environmental problems have not been resolved, and most of the top management journals remain focused on the firm, not the system. This presents both a paradox and an opportunity. The year 2010 was the hottest year on record, making it the warmest decade since 1880. In certain places (like Australia and the Arctic), the impacts of climate change are already apparent. In the future, as CO2 continues to rise, we can expect more extreme events like floods, droughts, fires, and melting ice caps. This has profound implications for the way we manage and organize our societies. Before we can manage something, we have to make sense of the situation. In a complex environment, people need to pay attention to subtle cues, overcome barriers, and collectively develop ‘sensemaking’ across organizations. If people do not pay sufficient attention, they will encounter a ‘predictable surprise’ – a crisis situation that could be avoided but isn’t because of existing social and economic structures. This lecture considers how to make better sense of climate change. Professor Whiteman argues that it essential for managers and academics to take a more systemic approach and collaborate with the natural sciences and local people. She ends with management lessons for the 21st Century

The Role of Narrative Fiction and Semi-Fiction in Organizational Studies

In this chapter, we discuss the use of narrative fiction and semi-fiction in organizational research and explore the strengths and weaknesses of these alternative approaches. We begin with an introduction reviewing the existing literature and clarifying what we mean by fiction and semi-fiction. We then present and discuss examples of fiction and semi-fiction focusing on how these approaches can be used in organizational research. We argue that fiction is more useful as a source of data and as a way of representing theory to an audience. Semi-fiction, on the other hand, provides a novel approach to the production and representation of theory. In both cases, researchers face a number of challenges, but also gain access to new and powerful techniques for developing insights into organizational topics

Sustainability as a team sport

__Abstract__ Making sense of climate change and understanding the impact that changing earth systems will have on business globally is one of the aims of the Centre for Eco-Transformation. Finding credible management solutions to these immense challenges is another

Business Strategies for Transitions towards Sustainable Systems

This paper develops a strategic perspective for business to address persistent sustainability issues by contributing to the innovation of societal systems. Sustainability issues at the level of societal sectors or domains cannot be addressed by single organizations but require co-evolutionary changes in technology, economy, culture and organizational forms. We present the case of transition management in the Netherlands – an approach combining systems analysis with new modes of governance to influence the direction and speed of structural changes towards sustainability – and the activities of two firms working in this new context. From the two specific cases we conceptualize business strategies at different levels to advance sustainable development

Radical Innovation for Sustainability: The Power of Strategy and Open Innovation

Sustainability oriented innovation continues to garner increasing attention as the answer to how firms may improve environmental and/or social performance while simultaneously finding competitive advantage. Radically innovating new products and services to replace harmful market incumbents is central to this thesis, yet studies to date have found it to be a highly expensive process with high degrees of uncertainty and risk. Extant research however has largely neglected to examine the details of the actual product innovation process itself and has under appreciated the influence of corporate strategic context. Our paper addresses this gap in the literature through an in-depth case study of a sustainability oriented innovation process for a radical new product within a multinational life sciences company, DSM. Our findings identify five critical organizational practices through which strategic direction has enabled the innovation process: technology super-scouting throughout the value chain, search heuristics that favor radical sustainability solutions, integration of sustainability performance metrics in product development, championing the value chain to build demand for radical sustainability oriented product innovation, and harnessing the benefits of open innovation

The Tsunami’s CSR Effect: MNEs and Philanthropic Responses to the Disaster

This paper contributes to the literature on CSR and International Business by linking firm internationalization to corporate philanthropy. Considering the 2004 Tsunami disaster as a highly relevant case of an international societal issue, we analyze the characteristics of the corporate response to the disaster among Fortune Global 500 firms. We find that home region, degree of internationalization, firm size and profitability most strongly influenced the propensity of firms to donate as well as the value of their donations

Social Enterprise Emergence from Social Movement Activism: The Fairphone Case

Effectuation theory invests agency - intention and purposeful enactment - for new venture creation in the entrepreneurial actor(s). Based on the results of a 15-month in-depth longitudinal case study of Amsterdam-based social enterprise Fairphone, we argue that effectual entrepreneurial agency is co-constituted by distributed agency, the proactive conferral of material resources and legitimacy to an eventual entrepreneur by heterogeneous actors external to the new venture. We show how in the context of social movement activism, an effectual network pre-committed resources to an inchoate social enterprise to produce a material artefact because it embodied the moral values of network members. We develop a model of social enterprise emergence based on these findings. We theorize the role of material artefacts in effectuation theory and suggest that, in the case, the artefact served as a boundary object, present in multiple social words and triggering commitment from actors not governed by hierarchical arrangements