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Sub-theme 06: [SWG] Organizing with Care and Response-ability: Performing and Communicating Organizational Responses in an Era of Poly-crisis.

Convenors:
Mie Plotnikof
Aarhus University, Denmark
Monica Nadegger
LMU, University of Munich, Germany
Joëlle Basque
University of TÉLUQ, Montreal, Canada

Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

In times of uncertainty fueled by shifting geo-politics and poly-crisis—intertwining crises of climate change, financial instability, warfare, anti-DEI politics, and surging inequalities across the globe—a turn to more caring and responsible responses is mushrooming in organization theory and practice (Fotaki et al., 2020; Just et al., 2021). Although often emerging in the margin, there is a rise in circular, degrowth organizing (Ehrnström-Fuentes & Biese, 2023; Miller et al., 2025), sustainable initiatives (Arjaliès & Banerjee, 2024; Daskalaki & Fotaki, 2017), and regenerative leadership and educational practices (Colombo et al., 2024; Plotnikof et al., 2025; Smolović Jones et al., 2025). In pursuit of different pathways to organizing social and environmental transformations, these efforts challenge neo-liberal ideologies, often inspired by critical ideas drawing on decolonial, feminist, indigenous and queer knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, however, there are no easy fixes. Hence, many of these efforts experiment—and struggle—to organize differently while trying to avoid ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) and green or diversity washing (Christensen et al., 2025; Plotnikof et al., 2022). To explore both potentials and challenges of such efforts, studies of organizational performativity and communicative constitution of organization (CCO) have foregrounded the (dis)organizing capacities of inherent paradoxes, struggles, and dilemmas (Basque et al., 2022; Vasquez & Kuhn, 2019). Importantly, rather than answering crises with crisis management responses and communication, these studies develop both deconstructive and affirmative concepts and approaches, with which to, for example, differentiate (Del Fa & Vásquez, 2019), diffract (Nadegger & Porzionato, 2025), and critically redress issues like window dressing (Christensen et al., 2017), matters of concern (Vásquez et al., 2018); gendering practices (Ashcraft, 2000; Basque, 2018; Plotnikof et al., 2025), and organizationality itself (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015). This advances insights into the daily precarious communication practices, negotiations, and matters of (dis)organizing differently, often underpinned by critical approaches and feminist ethics of care, although not always explicitly (Harris & Ashcraft, 2023).

With this call, we want to engage further with the hopes and troubles of (studying) more caring and responsible organizing. Inspired by early work of Tronto (1993) to ‘care for, about, and with’ and Haraway’s (1985) care for multiple agencies and later developments in matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), ethics of care materialize idea(l)s more pertinent than ever. These attune us to different modes of organizing, theorizing, and methodologizing based on relationality and multiplicity; asking us to revalue our caring relationships beyond the obvious, to become responsive to and responsible for multiple, unevenly privileged agencies (Cozza et al., 2025; Dobusch et al., 2025; Friedrich & Lüthy, 2025). This requires us to respond care-fully and ethically to all kinds of interdependent agencies, making it an inherently communicative endeavor of seeing, sensing, responding, and performing worlds with other non/humans (Huopalainen, 2022; Nadegger & Porzionato, 2025; Wickström et al., 2025). Relatedly, a promising potential is to engage in feminist, queer, or decolonizing approaches to rework praxis and vocabularies (Boncori, 2023; Dell, 2021; Kenney, 2024; McDonald, 2022; Nadegger et al., 2024), as that expands possibilities of performing and communicating organizational worlds differently, challenging what, how and with which affects we study such important phenomena.           

In this sub-theme, we explore the potentials and difficulties of performing and communicating organization in caring, responsible ways when responding to perpetual crisis. Moving beyond naïve romanticization, we aim to nurture ideas, approaches, and insights with curiosity and respect for the value of radically different and diverse modes of care-fully and ethically rethinking and regenerating organization practice and theory.

As part of the EGOS SWG 06, the sub-theme welcomes submissions based on a variety of theories, methodologies, and empirical sites. While not an exhaustive list, we hope to address questions such as:

  • How are organizational practice and theory—underpinned by caring and responsible ethics and politics—already materializing, regenerating, repairing (work)lives, communities, worldings?

  • What epistemologies, ontologies, methodologies, praxis, and modes of critique are needed to revision, rework, and become response-able in organizing livelihoods and work with care under perpetual crisis?

  • How are such approaches communicating and performing differently—ethically, responsibly, caringly—as opposed to “crisis management” communication for example? What kinds of relational, communicative understandings can challenge crisis discourses and foster different responses, modes of organizing, or theorizing?

  • Which new vocabularies, methods, engagements, (self)care practices matter to reformulate and regenerate value beyond managerial discourses?

  • Which historical, ethical, political, and knowledge roots challenge or inspire us to care responsibly and nurture response-ability, and how can organizational practice and theory respectfully learn from and (re)value those?

  • How can we theorize and develop practices informed by CCO or performative approaches, to broaden and nurture caring, responsible collectives, organizations, and societies?

  • How can we—as scholars and educators—engage in communicating, performing, embodying, and circulating practices, ethics, and politics of care and response-ability so needed in times of perpetual crisis and warfare?

References
  • Ashcraft, K. L. (2000). Empowering ‘professional’ relationships. Management Communication Quarterly, 13(3), 347–392. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318900133001
  • Arjaliès, D.-L., & Banerjee, S. B. (2024). ‘Let’s go to the land instead’: Indigenous perspectives on biodiversity and the possibilities of regenerative capital. Journal of Management Studies, 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13141
  • Basque, J. (2018). I feel lucky. M@n@gement, 21(3), 1083–1085.
  • Basque, J., Bencherki, N., & Kuhn, T. (Eds.). (2022). Routledge handbook of the communicative constitution of organization. Routledge.
  • Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
  • Boncori, I. (2023). Researching and writing differently. Bristol University Press.
  • Christensen, L. T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2017). License to critique: A communication perspective on sustainability standards. Business Ethics Quarterly, 27(2), 239–262.
  • Christensen, J. F., Just, S. N., & Schwarzkopf, S. (2025). Productive tensions of corporate pride partnerships: Towards a relational ethics of constitutive impurity. Journal of Business Ethics, 198(2), 345–363.
  • Colombo, L. A., Moser, C., Muehlfeld, K., & Joy, S. (2024). Sowing the seeds of change: Calling for a social–ecological approach to management learning and education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 23(2), 207–213.
  • Cozza, M., Carreri, A., & Poggio, B. (2025). Ethics of engagement in research practices: Response-ability in organization and management. Routledge.
  • Del Fa, S., & Vásquez, C. (2019). Existing through differantiation: A Derridean approach to alternative organizations. M@n@gement, 22(4), 559–583.
  • Dobusch, L. [Leonhard], & Schoeneborn, D. (2015). Fluidity, identity, and organizationality: The communicative constitution of Anonymous. Journal of Management Studies, 52(8), 1005–1035.
  • Dobusch, L. [Laura], Leybold, M., & Dobusch, L. [Leonhard]. (2025). Parrying diversity-hostility and ethical dilemmas of organizing inclusion. Journal of Business Ethics. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-025-06103-9
  • Daskalaki, M., & Fotaki, M. (2017). The neoliberal crisis: Alternative organizing and spaces of/for feminist solidarity. In A. Pullen, N. Harding & M. Phillips (Eds.), Feminists and queer theorists debate the future of critical management studies (Vol. 3, pp. 129–153). Emerald Publishing Limited.
  • Dell, K. (2021). Rongomātau – ‘sensing the knowing’: An Indigenous methodology utilising sensed knowledge from the researcher. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 1–11.
  • Dobusch, L., Plotnikof, M., & Wenzel, M. (2025). Reviewing is caring! Revaluing a critical, but invisibilized, underappreciated, and exploited academic practice. Organization. Advance online publication.
  • Ehrnström-Fuentes, M., & Biese, I. (2023). The act of (de/re)growing: Prefiguring alternative organizational landscapes of socioecological transformations. Human Relations, 76(11), 1739–1766.
  • Fotaki, M., Islam, G., & Antoni, A. (2020). The contested notions and meaning of care: An overview. In M. Fotaki, G. Islam, & A. Antoni (Eds.), Business ethics and care in organizations (pp. 3–21). Routledge.
  • Friedrich, J., & Lüthy, C. (2025). Tending to the particular: Navigating tensions around principles of alternativity through an ethics of care. Journal of Management Studies. Advance online publication.
  • Haraway, D. (1985). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Sociological Review, 80, 65–107.
  • Harris, K. L., & Ashcraft, K. L. (2023). Deferring difference no more: An (im)modest, relational plea from/through Karen Barad. Organization Studies, 44(12), 1987–2008.
  • Huopalainen, A. (2022). Writing with the bitches. Organization, 29(6), 959–978.
  • Just, S. N., De Cock, C., & Schaefer, S. (2021). From antagonists to allies? Exploring the critical performativity of alternative organization. Culture & Organization, 27(2), 89–97.
  • Kenney, S. C. (2024). Kaleidoscopic inquiries: Queering approaches to organizational diversity work. Management Communication Quarterly. Advance online publication.
  • McDonald, J. (2022). Queering CCO scholarship: Examining communication as constitutive of (hetero) normative organizations and organizing. In J. Basque, N. Bencherki, & T. Kuhn (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of the communicative constitution of organization (pp. 180–194). Routledge.
  • Miller, E. M., Patala, S., & Ovaska, J.-P. (2025). Forging the future: Reconfiguring value chains through circular economy meta-organizing. Organization & Environment, 38(2), 227–256.
  • Nadegger, M., Leybold, M., & Kenney, S. C. (2024). ‘Your very existence goes against our community guidelines’: Interrogating norms of contributorship through poetic speech acts on Instagram. Organization Studies, 45(12), 1795–1821.
  • Nadegger, M., & Porzionato, M. (2025). Flooding lagoons, melting mountains: Exploring diffractive analysis for a communicative engagement with extra/linguistic materializations. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 20(2), 175–193.
  • Plotnikof, M., Sandager, J., & Pors, A. S. (2025). Governing inclusive STEM futures? Gendered performativity of governance efforts to promote STEM to future women workers. Scandinavian Journal of Management. Advance online publication.
  • Plotnikof, M., Muhr, S. L., Holck, L., & Just, S. N. (2022). Repoliticizing diversity work? Exploring the performative potentials of norm-critical activism. Gender, Work & Organization, 29(2), 466–485.
  • Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Smolović Jones, O., Smolović Jones, N., & Carroll, B. (2025). Spacing leadership with Greta Thunberg: A materializing ‘story-so-far’. Organization Studies, 46(6), 827–855.
  • Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.
  • Vásquez, C., Bencherki, N., Cooren, F., & Sergi, V. (2018). From ‘matters of concern’ to ‘matters of authority’: Studying the performativity of strategy from a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) approach. Long Range Planning, 51(3), 417–435.
  • Vásquez, C., & Kuhn, T. (Eds.). (2019). Dis/organization as communication. Routledge.
  • Wickström, A., Kangas-Muller, L., Lafaire, A. P., & Soini, A. (2025). Centering the dialogicity of care: A posthuman exploration of the politics of liveability in alternative organizing. Organization Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406251357834


Mie Plotnikof is Associate Professor at Aarhus University in Copenhagen, DK. Her research engages with the politics and performativity of organizational discourses, norms of difference, intersecting inequalities, and power-resistance dynamics, often in educational and care work contexts. She has published in outlets such as 'Organization'; 'Gender, Work & Organization'; 'ephemera'; 'Scandinavian Journal of Management', and 'Organization Studies'. Beyond research and teaching, Mie engages with society through various collaborations and public debates. She was co-initiator of a sexism petition in Danish academia in 2020 resulting in two books and an award-winning knowledge site: www.sexismedu.dk.
Monica Nadegger is a post-doctoral researcher at LMU University of Munich, Germany and the MCI - The Entrepreneurial School, Austria. Her research is guided by CCO (communicative constitution of organization) and feminist new materialist perspectives with a focus on materiality, resistance and alternative organizing and adopts nonrepresentational, auto/ethnographic, and post-human approaches such as diffraction, speculative fabulation, or rhythmanalysis. Monica’s research has been published in 'Organization Studies', 'Organization', 'Culture & Organization', 'Annals of Tourism Research', 'Journal of Sustainable Tourism', 'Leisure Studies' and several book chapters.
Joëlle Basque is a Professor of Organizational Communication and Methodology at Université TÉLUQ in Montréal, Canada. She is the initiator and co-editor of the 'Routledge Handbook of the Communicative Constitution of Organization'. Her work has been published in 'Organization Studies', 'M@n@gement', and various edited volumes. Her research interests include identity from a communicative perspective, the role of founder figures in legacy management, and resistance practices addressing gender inequities in academia.