Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Last year’s EGOS Colloquium theme marked a notable shift: a recognition that organizing has never belonged solely to humans. It urged us to take seriously the entanglements through which more-than-human others participate—materially and politically—in the “games of organization.” Building on that momentum, this subtheme deliberately turns toward animals, as living, sentient beings caught in dense webs of organizational power, extraction, care, surveillance, and cohabitation. We ask how organizations shape and constrain animal lives, how animals shape organizational practices and imaginaries, and how human/animal (dis)entanglements expose the uneven spaces of domination and emancipation that structure our contemporary worlds. From ant colonies and elephant-organized societies to the global meat industry and algorithmic wildlife management, animals inhabit and are organized through systems of play, discipline, exploitation, and survival. While organizational scholarship has examined how humans collaborate or compete, it has neglected how nonhuman animals are recruited into, transformed by, or resist the rules of human organization.

This sub-theme invites critical engagement with the political, ethical, ontological, and epistemological stakes of “playing with” animals in organizational settings. Drawing on the emerging field of Animal Organization Studies (Tallberg & Hamilton, 2022)and critical posthumanist scholarship, we explore how organizational practices structure human–animal relations and, in turn, how animals could unsettle and reconfigure the very categories. If the 2027 EGOS Colloquium theme challenges us to “re-write the rules of organization,” then this very subtheme invites us to question: who is allowed to play, under what conditions, and at what cost? What do we learn when the games of management and consumption hinge on the silenced and disciplined lives of other species?

This subtheme draws on scholarship that rethinks organizing through critical, feminist, and posthuman lenses (Tallberg et al., 2022). Feminist traditions foreground vulnerability, care, embodiment, and relationality (Huopalainen et al., 2025). Critical perspectives also interrogate the organizational violence (Arnold & Costas, 2024)produced by extractive growth, the disciplining of bodies, and the intersectional production of hierarchies across species lines (Huopalainen & Jammaers, 2024; Jammaers, 2023; Sayers, 2016; Wadham, 2021; Wiart, 2026). Further, empowering radical change efforts, this sub-theme not only develops theoretical expansions in how animals become governed within organizations, illuminating the frictions, resistances, and forms of agency and solidarities (De Freitas et al., 2026)but also focuses on how practical efforts of human/animal separation are advocated and reduced in practice (Whelan & Gond, 2016).

We invite contributions that explore how animals are organized through cages and contracts, breeding regimes and surveillance systems, that is, through forms of disciplinary power that mirror human ones (Foucault, 2008). Animals are also present in our workplaces, influencing human work such as in meat factories (Hamilton & McCabe, 2016)or tasked with conducting work themselves (Blattner et al., 2019; Coulter, 2016). These reveal “biopolitical games” of life and death (Asdal et al., 2017; Skoglund & Redmalm, 2017)that appear through the governance of populations, the optimization of productivity, and the normalization of suffering. At the same time, we invite contributions that examine how animal “play”—from the roughhousing of wolves to the mimicry and camouflage of cephalopods—offers new theoretical, empirical paths to study alternative ways of organizing (Vijay et al., 2025).
Taken together, these perspectives invite us to recognize organizing as an ongoing negotiation and dialogue (Wickström et al., 2025)among species, where power, agency, and survival are contested and shared in complex ways. Overall, we invite scholars to reflect on what Management and Organization Studies might become when we take the ethical, political, and imaginative possibilities of multispecies worlds seriously. We are, therefore, equally interested in submissions that address multispecies organizing as a broader theme and consider this sub-theme as an opportunity to “play” with our concepts to imagine how to organize “multispecies livability” and inclusivity (Tallberg et al., 2025).

Potential contributions include, but are not restricted to, the following questions and themes:

• How are animals included or excluded from human organizational games across differing organizational settings and sectors?
• How do organizations/organizing govern animal life and generate new regimes of (in)visibility, value, and violence?
• Can animal play and multispecies relations disrupt anthropocentric notions of organization, leadership, cooperation, or creativity?
• How do capitalist games of extraction, consumption, and spectacle (e.g., factory farming, zoos, wildlife and domesticated animal tourism, and “pet” industries) reproduce species hierarchies and necrocapitalist organizational practices?
• What forms of critical, emancipatory organizational theory become possible when animals are treated as co-players rather than instruments of play?
• How might posthuman, Indigenous, and decolonial perspectives help us reimagine the rules of organization toward more-than-human ethics of care, interdependence, and resistance?

Potential Topics:

• Animal labor and the politics of play; from racehorses to lab mice to influencer “pets”: how is animal play commodified and controlled?
• Colonial “games” of conservation: the organizational politics of “saving” species while controlling Indigenous ecologies.
• Animal disputes and conflicts in organizing (e.g., “pests” or introduced species)
• Advancing business ethics for nonhuman inclusivity: challenges, paradoxes, and potentials of traditional and new theories.
• Resistance and refusal: animal escapes, refusals to perform, or affective disobedience as political acts.
• Interspecies governance: multispecies management systems and the ethical dilemmas they pose.
• Methodological “play”: experimental and critical methods (autoethnography, multispecies ethnography, and speculative fiction).

• Arnold, P., & Costas, J. (2024). Control through violence: A situational analysis of embodied practices of violence in a refugee reception centre. Organization Studies, 45(3), 409–431. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406231208372
• Asdal, K., Druglitrø, T., & Hinchliffe, S. (Eds.). (2017). Humans, animals and biopolitics: The more-than-human condition. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315587639
• Blattner, C. E., Coulter, K., & Kymlicka, W. (Eds.). (2019). Animal labour: A new frontier of interspecies justice? (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846192.001.0001
• De Freitas, N., Picard, H., & Barros, M. (2026). Death and suffering at the animal sanctuary: Enacting a politics of interspecies solidarity between ethics of entanglement and forbearance. Journal of Business Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-026-06328-2
• Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics (M. Senellart, F. Ewald, & A. Fontana, Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594180
• Hamilton, L., & McCabe, D. (2016). “It’s just a job”: Understanding emotion work, de-animalization and the compartmentalization of organized animal slaughter. Organization, 23(3), 330–350. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508416629448
• Huopalainen, A., & Jammaers, E. (2024). “Making the unimaginable imaginable?” The power of artmaking in understanding animal vulnerabilities and “humanimal” relationality in Organization Studies. Organization, 32(6), 841–860. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084241238584
• Huopalainen, A., Satama, S., & Tallberg, L. (2025). Aesthetic encounters, canines, and care: New multispecies methodological avenues in organizational and business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 203, 241–257. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-025-06035-4
• Jammaers, E. (2023). On ableism and anthropocentrism: A canine perspective on the workplace inclusion of disabled people. Human Relations, 76(2), 233–257. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267211057549
• Sayers, J. G. (2016). A report to an academy: On carnophallogocentrism, pigs and meat-writing. Organization, 23(3), 370–386. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508416629454
• Skoglund, A., & Redmalm, D. (2017). “Doggy-biopolitics”: Governing via the First Dog. Organization, 24(2), 240–266. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508416666938
• Tallberg, L., García-Rosell, J.-C., & Haanpää, M. (2022). Human–animal relations in business and society: Advancing the feminist interpretation of stakeholder theory. Journal of Business Ethics, 180(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04840-1
• Tallberg, L., & Hamilton, L. (Eds.). (2022). The Oxford handbook of animal organization studies. Oxford University Press.
• Tallberg, L., Huopalainen, A., & García-Rosell, J.-C. (2025). Beyond anthropocentrism: A call to action for multispecies inclusivity. Business & Society, 64(7), 1263-1268. https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503241271254
• Vijay, D., Berkowitz, H., Huybrechts, B., Audebrand, L. K., Barros, M., & Fotaki, M. (2025). Another world is possible—it is already here: A review and research agenda on alternative organizing. Academy of Management Annals. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2024.0102
• Wadham, H. (2021). Relations of power and nonhuman agency: Critical theory, Clever Hans, and other stories of horses and humans. Sociological Perspectives, 64(1), 109–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121420921897
• Wiart, L. (2026). Neoliberal conservation and the corporate governance of biodiversity: A multispecies intersectional critique of offsetting. Journal of Business Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-026-06300-0
• Wickström, A., Kangas-Müller, 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