Call for Papers

The interconnected sustainability challenges, including the climate, biodiversity, and plastics crises, demand rethinking organizations’ relationship with the natural environment. These crises are non-linear, unfold across scales, and involve complex social-ecological system dynamics, highlighting the challenge of the task (Williams et al., 2021). Meeting this challenge requires organizing in ways that account for organizations’ inherent ‘ecological embeddedness’ (Whiteman & Cooper, 2000, 2011) and overcoming the human-nature divide in organization studies (Ergene & Calás, 2023; Good & Thorpe, 2020).
 
This sub-theme encourages submissions that theoretically and empirically explore the new and emerging ways of organizing with nature. Organizations have historically shielded themselves from or sought to control nature (Gond & Nyberg, 2017). However, recently, organizations have started engaging differently with nature, seeking inspiration for novel, creative ways of organizing more sustainably. Some organizations strive to decouple organizational practices from the natural environment by reducing their extraction of natural resources to a minimum, an example being circular approaches to organizing (Corvellec et al., 2022), while others seek to reconnect with the natural environment, as exemplified by emergent regenerative practices in agriculture (Regeneration International, 2017), or even revive the natural environment through purposive interventions in ecosystems, for instance, by investing in nature-based solutions (Vidal et al., 2023).

At the same time, organizations seek to conceptualize and quantify their relationship with nature, for instance, through the development of novel measurement frameworks and reporting initiatives, such as Science-Based Targets for Nature, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures or the UK’s Biodiversity Net Gain framework. What other emergent forms of organizing with nature exist, and how can we theorize them?
 
Some promising analytical lenses that submissions may engage with include (1) the dynamics of social-ecological systems, (2) the interplay between temporal and spatial scales, and (3) more-than-human approaches.
 
(1) Social-ecological systems

Recently, organizational scholars have started drawing on ecological theories and concepts such as social-ecological systems, complex adaptive systems, and resilience to advance approaches that view organizations as embedded within complex systems rather than reacting to or managing the external environment (Howard-Grenville & Lahneman, 2021; Williams et al., 2021). This calls for understanding processes that ripple unpredictably across scales and may manifest as nonlinear shifts. For example, the functioning and resilience of ecosystems are related to both fast- and slow-moving variables that collectively shape the dynamics of social-ecological systems (Williams et al., 2021). These theories also foreground the material and biophysical dimensions of organizing, drawing attention to cross-scale interactions between the social and the ecological (Howard-Grenville & Lahneman, 2021).

 
(2) The interplay between temporal and spatial scales

Considering the dynamics of organizing with nature, it is necessary to understand how actors make sense of and translate temporal and spatial scales and their interplay in concrete organizing efforts (Bansal et al., 2018; Bowen et al., 2018; Nyberg et al., 2022). Regarding the temporal scale, research consistently shows how organizations prioritize the short term over the long term (Slawinski & Bansal, 2012). Even when companies pursue long-term sustainability objectives, they are often normalized into short-term-oriented business as usual (Wright & Nyberg, 2017). Rather than considering the short- vs. long-term as a trade-off, recent research suggests that they are mutually constitutive, which draws attention to how companies may translate distant future sustainability targets into short-term action (Feddersen et al., 2024; Schultz, 2022).

Regarding the spatial scale, research shows how some processes in the natural environment are of such large or small scale that they escape organizational attention (Bansal et al., 2018). Whereas collaborative action may allow resolving smaller-scale issues, larger-scale issues call for novel forms of collective action (Bowen et al., 2018). However, spatial scale matters not only in grasping, responding to, and adapting to ecological processes but also when seeking to improve the state of the natural environment. For example, some nature-based solutions (Vidal et al., 2023) actively rely on natural cycles and cross-scale effects to scale local interventions across ecosystems.

(3) More-than-human approaches

To attend to the biophysical and situated dimensions of organizing with nature, scholars point to the promise of more-than-human approaches (Ergene et al., 2021; Ergene & Calás, 2023; Good & Thorpe, 2020). Inspired by New Materialism, these studies adopt a flat ontology and follow situated interactions between heterogeneous human and non-human actors to see how they become related in organizing processes. Pursuing such relational approaches may allow overcoming the dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (Good & Thorpe, 2020) and help uncover how ‘naturecultural’ more-than-human entanglements cut across scales (Ergene & Calás, 2023).

In this sub-theme, we welcome qualitative, quantitative, and conceptual submissions engaging with these and other theoretical approaches and might explore, for instance, some of the following questions:

• What are empirical examples of novel, emergent ways of organizing with nature (e.g., regenerative practices, circular approaches, nature-based solutions), and how can we theorize them?

• How does organizing attune to nature's rhythms and cycles, which Hofmeister (1997) termed ‘nature’s temporalities’?

• How do organizations seek to conceptualize and quantify their relationship with nature, for instance, through novel measurement frameworks and reporting initiatives (e.g., Science-Based Targets for Nature, Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures or the UK’s Biodiversity Net Gain framework), and to which effects?

• How can we advance an ‘ecologically embedded’ understanding of organizing by disentangling its dimensions (Baudoin & Arenas, 2023)?

• How may we attend to small-scale and large-scale environmental processes (Bansal et al., 2018; Bowen et al., 2018) as well as cross-scale effects, for instance, by mobilizing concepts from ecological science (Howard-Grenville & Lahneman, 2021; Williams et al., 2021)?

• How can we be attentive to the interplay between temporal and spatial scales, for instance, by employing concepts such as ‘space-time’ or ‘the trace’ (Nyberg et al., 2022)?

• How can we account for the temporalities of heterogeneous, more-than-human actors and their interplay (Ergene et al., 2021), for instance, by distinguishing between the ‘epochal’ and ‘processual’ dimension of ‘material temporality’ (Hernes et al., 2021)?

• How can we engage more-than-human entanglements in collective action (Ergene et al., 2021; Ergene & Calás, 2023)?

• How can we avoid ‘constructing natural and socioeconomic environments as discrete entities from the beginning’ so that ‘much of the ensuing analytical work be oriented toward reconstructing their connectivity – when they were never really disconnected’ (Good & Thorpe, 2020: 375)?

References

• Bansal, P., Kim, A., & Wood, M.O. (2018): “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Importance of Scale in Organizations’ Attention to Issues.” Academy of Management Review, 43 (2), 217–241.

• Baudoin, L., & Arenas, D. (2023): “‘Everyone Has a Truth’: Forms of Ecological Embeddedness in an Interorganizational Context.” Journal of Business Ethics, 185 (2), 263–280.
• Bowen, F.E., Bansal, P., & Slawinski, N. (2018): “Scale matters: The scale of environmental issues in corporate collective actions.” Strategic Management Journal, 39 (5), 1411–1436.
• Corvellec, H., Stowell, A.F., & Johansson, N. (2022): “Critiques of the circular economy.” Journal of Industrial Ecology, 26 (2), 421–432.
• Ergene, S., Banerjee, S.B., & Hoffman, A.J. (2021): “(Un)Sustainability and Organization Studies: Towards a Radical Engagement.” Organization Studies, 42 (8), 1319–1335.
• Ergene, S., & Calás, M.B. (2023): “Becoming Naturecultural: Rethinking sustainability for a more-than-human world.” Organization Studies, 44 (12), 1961–1986.
• Feddersen, J., Koll, H., & Geraldi, J. (2024): “The Temporality of Project Success: Vindeby, the World’s First Offshore Wind Farm.” Project Management Journal, 55 (2), 167–186.
• Gond, J.-P., & Nyberg, D. (2017): “Materializing Power to Recover Corporate Social Responsibility.” Organization Studies, 38 (8), 1127–1148.
• Good, J., & Thorpe, A. (2020): “The Nature of Organizing: A Relational Approach to Understanding Business Sustainability.” Organization & Environment, 33 (3), 359–383.
• Hernes, T., Feddersen, J., & Schultz, M. (2021): “Material Temporality: How materiality ‘does’ time in food organizing.” Organization Studies, 42 (2), 351–371.
• Hofmeister, S. (1997): “Nature’s Temporalities: Consequences for Environmental Politics.” Time & Society, 6( 2–3), 309–321.
• Howard-Grenville, J., & Lahneman, B. (2021): “Bringing the biophysical to the fore: Re-envisioning organizational adaptation in the era of planetary shifts.” Strategic Organization, 19(3), 478–493.
• Nyberg, D., Ferns, G., Vachhani, S., & Wright, C. (2022): “Climate Change, Business, and Society: Building Relevance in Time and Space.” Business & Society, 61 (5), 1322–1352.
• Regeneration International (2017): What is Regenerative Agriculture? https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Regen-Ag-Definition-2.23.17-1.pdf.
• Schultz, M. (2022): “The strategy–identity nexus: The relevance of their temporal interplay to climate change.” Strategic Organization, 20 (4), 821–831.
• Slawinski, N., & Bansal, P. (2012): “A Matter of Time: The Temporal Perspectives of Organizational Responses to Climate Change.” Organization Studies, 33 (11), 1537–1563.
• Vidal, A., Martinez, G., Drion, B., Gladstone, J., Andrade, A., & Vasseur, L. (2023): Nature-based Solutions for Corporate Climate Targets. Views regarding the corporate use of nature-based solutions to meet net-zero goals. Gland: IUCN; https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2023-032-En.pdf.
• Whiteman, G., & Cooper, W.H. (2000): “Ecological Embeddedness.” Academy of Management Journal, 43 (6), 1265–1282.
• Whiteman, G., & Cooper, W.H. (2011): “Ecological Sensemaking.” Academy of Management Journal, 54 (5), 889–911.
• Williams, A., Whiteman, G., & Kennedy, S. (2021): “Cross-Scale Systemic Resilience: Implications for Organization Studies.” Business & Society, 60 (1), 95–124.
• Wright, C., & Nyberg, D. (2017): “An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual.” Academy of Management Journal, 60 (5), 1633–1661.
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