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

Corporate philanthropic responses to emergent human needs:the role of organizational attention focus

Research on corporate philanthropy typically focuses on organization-external pressures and aggregated donation behavior. Hence, our understanding of the organization-internal structures that determine whether a given organization will respond philanthropically to a specific human need remains underdeveloped. We explicate an attention-based framework in which specific dimensions of organization-level attention focus interact to predict philanthropic responses to an emergent human need. Exploring the response of Fortune Global 500 firms to the 2004 South Asian tsunami, we find that management attention focused on people inside the organization (employees) interacts with both attention for places (countries in the tsunami-stricken region) and attention for practices (corporate philanthropy in general) to predict the likelihood of charitable donations. Our research thus extends beyond the prevailing institutional perspective by highlighting the role of attention focus in corporate responsiveness to emergent societal issues

A lot of icing but little cake?:taking integrated reporting forward

Integrated reporting has fast emerged as a new accounting practice to help firms understand how they create value and be able to effectively communicate this to external stakeholders. While insightful experiences from the early-adopters of integrated reporting start to accumulate, the development of the field and how integrated reporting may be successfully implemented remains challenging and contested. Several issues are still controversial with no consensus reached on the central purpose about integrated reporting. This paper relies upon a qualitative approach to accomplish two objectives. First, we provide a review of the embryonic academic literature in the integrated reporting field in order to summarize extant knowledge. Second, in response to a gap in the literature on managerial perceptions concerning integrated reporting, we present the sensemaking approaches of three key experts impacting integrated reporting practices at the global level using semi-structured interviews. Our findings suggest that experts perceive the field to be fragmented and believe that most companies currently have weak understanding of the business value of integrated reporting. The experts give insights into how they perceive the field to be progressing despite challenges and on where they see improvements in the diffusion of practices in integrated reporting. Our study contributes to this special issue by reframing the existing implementation challenges of integrated reporting into promising and inclusive research opportunities that align the priorities of both academia and business

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

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

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

Towards a balanced view of Arctic shipping : estimating economic impacts of emissions from increased traffic on the Northern Sea Route

The extensive melting of Arctic sea ice driven by climate change provides opportunities for commercial shipping due to shorter travel distances of up to 40% between Asia and Europe. It has been estimated that around 5% of the world’s trade could be shipped through the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in the Arctic alone under year-round and unhampered navigability, generating additional income for many European and East Asian countries. Our analysis shows that for Arctic sea ice conditions under the RCP8.5 emissions scenario and business restrictions facing shipping companies, NSR traffic will increase steadily from the mid-2030s onwards, although it will take over a century to reach the full capacity expected for ice-free conditions. However, in order to achieve a balanced view of Arctic shipping, it is important to include its detrimental environmental impacts, most notably emissions of short-lived pollutants such as black carbon, as well as CO2 and non-CO2 emissions associated with the additional economic growth enabled by NSR. The total climate feedback of NSR could contribute 0.05% (0.04%) to global mean temperature rise by 2100 under RCP8.5 (RCP4.5), adding $2.15 trillion ($0.44 trillion) to the NPV of total impacts of climate change over the period until 2200 for the SSP2 socio-economic scenario. The climatic losses offset 33% (24.7%) of the total economic gains from NSR under RCP8.5 (RCP4.5), with the biggest losses set to occur in Africa and India. These findings call for policy instruments aimed at reducing emissions from Arctic shipping and providing compensation to the affected regions