Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

This sub-theme aims to convene scholars working at the intersection of multimodality and sustainability, take stock of current insights, identify gaps worth filling, and chart bold directions for future research. Organizing for sustainability is among the most pressing challenges facing post-industrial societies. Since its more systematic introduction to organizational studies (Davison et al., 2012; Meyer et al., 2013), multimodal research has sparked a vibrant and growing body of work on sustainability (e.g., Barberá-Tomás et al., 2019; Höllerer et al., 2013; Lefsrud et al., 2020; Shao & Janssens, 2022). Scholars have explored the diverse modes (e.g., visual, material, spatial, verbal, numeric) through which sustainability is not only represented but also actively performed within and across organizations. To further systematize this research agenda, we suggest an integrative approach as recently introduced by Toraldo and colleagues (2025), that is, to understand organization research as inherently multimodal, from envisioning to conducting and disseminating research. This implies a variety of interconnected angles connecting sustainability research and multimodality. 

First, it involves exploring the multimodal cues by which sustainability issues appresent themselves (i.e., how they attain presence), and how actors perceive and process them. Such a perspective focuses on how issues are perceived not only through pure cognition, but also through sensory and aesthetic sensibilities (e.g., Cartel et al., 2022; Holm & Beyes, 2022), and with which consequences. For instance, some types of pollution form “giant toxic lakes you can see from space,” of which organizations can display powerful images (Lefsrud et al., 2020). Similarly, climate change manifests through sensory cues: the smell of bushfires, the sound of rain, the haze of smoke, which organizations may interpret as signals of heightened risk and translate into multimodal forms, including numerical metrics (e.g., insurance premiums or real-estate valuations) and discursive framings (Cartel et al., 2025). This emerging approach highlights how situated multimodal cues not only mediate organizational responses to sustainability challenges, but also researchers’ engagement with them.

Second, multimodality comes into play when researchers examine the various traces (Boxenbaum et al., 2018) that organizations produce when developing, communicating, and enacting sustainability practices. Studies have focused on showing how organizations use visual and material artifacts to interpret, legitimize, and frame sustainability issues (Christiansen, 2018; Kassinis & Panayiotou, 2018). Research on sustainability imaginaries further reveals their deeply multimodal nature (Roux-Rosier et al., 2018), and that multiple semiotic modes may also signify utopian myths that legitimize organizational fields as agents capable of shaping radically different sustainability futures (Burø & Christiansen, in press). Here, multimodality also has organizational consequences, such as facilitating decision-making, building trust, fostering learning, energizing teams (Barberá-Tomás et al., 2019), and empowering communities (Svejenova & Christiansen, 2018).

Third, multimodality is present in the very ways in which we conduct and communicate (sustainability) research. While this perspective is still nascent in organization research, recent work has suggested that multimodality grants access to elusive forms of knowledge (Toraldo et al., 2018), that multimodal expression matters for theorization (Kuric & Höllerer, 2025), and that multimodal forms of publishing may enhance impact and learning (Jancsary & Lehtonen, 2026). Beyond a better understanding of sustainability as a phenomenon, multimodality therefore also provides enhanced opportunities for doing research on sustainability.

While these perspectives intersect meaningfully, scholarship on the multimodality of sustainability remains fragmented. Ontological questions persist: How do modalities of sustainability crafted by organizations relate to multimodal situational cues that organizations interpret? Do certain cues resist or lend themselves to organizational representations and with what consequences for sustainability organizing? Theoretical approaches to multimodality also vary, with much underutilized potential for mutual learning. Crucially, certain modes, such as scent (e.g., Islam et al., 2016; Riach & Warren, 2015), sound, and touch, are still underexplored, even as new methodologies emerge to investigate their organizational relevance (e.g., Jones et al., 2025; Toraldo et al., 2018). To unlock the full potential of multimodality for sustainability organizing, a more integrative conversation is needed.

We invite conceptual, empirical, and methodological papers that investigate lines of questioning including—but by no means limited to—the following:

• How do the multimodality of distinct contexts (both natural and human-made) and/or the ways in which nature signals health or decline enable and constrain the ways in which organizations interpret and respond to sustainability challenges?

• How do organizations acknowledge and use modes such as smell, taste, sound, or touch to engage with sustainability issues, and how do these modes interact with more thoroughly researched modes such as visuals and material artifacts?

• How do different modes feed into the temporality—past, present, and future—of sustainability organizing (e.g., utopias and collective images of the future creating organizational responses in the present)?

• What are promising alternative theories and methodologies that support a more nuanced and diverse appreciation of multimodality in the context of organizational sustainability research?

• How might organizational scholars conduct and disseminate research in ways that get closer to the inherent multimodal character of sustainability challenges and organizational responses?

• Barberá-Tomás, D., Castelló, I., de Bakker, F. G. A., & Zietsma, C. (2019). Energizing through visuals: How social entrepreneurs use emotion-symbolic work for social change. Academy of Management Journal, 62(6), 1789–1817. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2017.1488
• Boxenbaum, E., Jones, C., Meyer, R. E., & Svejenova, S. (2018). Towards an articulation of the material and visual turn in organization studies. Organization Studies, 39(5–6), 597–616. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618772611
• Burø, T., & Christiansen, L. H. (in press). Tech will save us: The semiotic construction of utopian myth. Organization Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406261432836
• Cartel, M., Grant, D., & Nyberg, D. (2026). Media review: Home and climate risk. Organization Studies, 47(7), 1131–1134. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406251390169
• Cartel, M., Kibler, E., & Dacin, M. T. (2022). Unpacking “sense of place” and “place-making” in organization studies: A toolkit for place-sensitive research. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 58(2), 350–363. https://doi.org/10.1177/00218863221090305
• Christiansen, L. H. (2018). The use of visuals in issue framing: Signifying responsible drinking. Organization Studies, 39(5–6), 665–689. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618759814
• Davison, J., McLean, C., & Warren, S. (2012). Exploring the visual in organizations and management. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 7(1), 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465641211223528
• Höllerer, M. A., Jancsary, D., Meyer, R. E., & Vettori, O. (2013). Imageries of corporate social responsibility: Visual recontextualization and field-level meaning. In M. Lounsbury & E. Boxenbaum (Eds.), Institutional logics in action, Part B: Research in the sociology of organizations (Vol. 39, Part B, pp. 139–174). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X(2013)0039b018
• Holm, D. V., & Beyes, T. (2022). How art becomes organization: Reimagining aesthetics, sites and politics of entrepreneurship. Organization Studies, 43(2), 227–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840621998571
• Islam, G., Endrissat, N., & Noppeney, C. (2016). Beyond “the eye” of the beholder: Scent innovation through analogical reconfiguration. Organization Studies, 37(6), 769–795. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840615622064
• Jancsary, D., & Lehtonen, M. J. (2026). Strong multimodality and graphic articles in management learning and education: Towards more relevance, inclusivity, and engagement. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 25(2), 261–281. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2024.0180
• Jones, J., Jung, J., Smith, A., & Cardon, M. (2025). Seeing together: Photovoice as a visual participatory approach to amplify marginalized voices. Organization Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406251381010
• Kassinis, G., & Panayiotou, A. (2018). Visuality as greenwashing: The case of BP and Deepwater Horizon. Organization & Environment, 31(1), 25–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026616687014
• Kuric, I., & Höllerer, M. A. (2025). Theorization as a prerequisite for diffusion: How and why multimodal expression matters. Academy of Management Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2023.0193
• Lefsrud, L., Graves, H., & Phillips, N. (2020). “Giant toxic lakes you can see from space”: A theory of multimodal messages and emotion in legitimacy work. Organization Studies, 41(8), 1055–1078. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840619835575
• Meyer, R. E., Höllerer, M. A., Jancsary, D., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2013). The visual dimension in organizing, organization, and organization research: Core ideas, current developments, and promising avenues. Academy of Management Annals, 7, 489–555. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2013.781867
• Riach, K., & Warren, S. (2015). Smell organization: Bodies and corporeal porosity in office work. Human Relations, 68(5), 789–809. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726714545387
• Roux-Rosier, A., Azambuja, R., & Islam, G. (2018). Alternative visions: Permaculture as imaginaries of the Anthropocene. Organization, 25(4), 550–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508418778647
• Shao, K., & Janssens, M. (2022). Who is the responsible corporation? A multimodal analysis of power in CSR videos of multinational companies. Organization Studies, 43(8), 1197–1221. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406211044891
• Svejenova, S., & Højgaard Christiansen, L. (2018). Creative leadership for social impact. In C. Jones & M. Maoret (Eds.), Frontiers of creative industries: Exploring structural and categorical dynamics (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 55, pp. 47–72). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20180000055003
• Toraldo, M. L., Islam, G., & Mangia, G. (2018). Modes of knowing: Video research and the problem of elusive knowledges. Organizational Research Methods, 21(2), 438–465. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428116657394
• Toraldo, M. L., Jancsary, D., Höllerer, M. A., Meyer, R. E., & Mangia, G. (2025). How to break the mold: Re-imagining multimodal organization and management studies. Organization. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084251396788