Dear colleagues,
Apologies for cross-posting.
Please consider submitting to Stream 18: Ecological Crises and Regeneration at the upcoming International Critical Management Studies Conference (ICMS 2025). The conference will take place from 18-20 June at Manchester Metropolitan University and you can find the full call for papers below.
Please send your abstract (max. 1,500 words) to both Friederike Döbbe (fd534@bath.ac.uk) and Manuel F. Ramirez (manuel.ramirez@liverpool.ac.uk) by no later than 31st January 2025. Feel free to contact us beforehand if you have any questions.
Best wishes,
Friederike Döbbe, Manuel F. Ramirez and Steffen Böhm on behalf of the ECO Network
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Stream 18: Ecological Crises and Regeneration (full call for papers)
Convenor Team
On behalf of the ECO Network:
Steffen Böhm, University of Exeter (UK), S.Boehm@exeter.ac.uk
Friederike (Fritzi) Döbbe, University of Bath, School of Management (UK),
fd534@bath.ac.uk
Manuel F. Ramirez, University of Liverpool (UK), manuel.ramirez@liverpool.ac.uk.
Call for Papers
In a world fraught with ecological crises (Steffen et al., 2015), regeneration (Hahn & Tampe, 2021) is an important research avenue amidst calls for organising with nature (Feddersen et al., 2023). Building on prior research on organising in the Anthropocence (Wright et al., 2018), organisation scholars have emphasised the need to reconnect their discipline with nature (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021; Ergene et al. 2021) to overcome the human–nature dualism (Ergene & Calás, 2023; Ferns, 2024). In practice, these propositions are also reflected in some alternative forms of organising (Dahlman et al., 2014; Parker et al., 2014) that foreground nature (Roux-Rosier et al., 2018). Given that our current path leads to an inhospitable world (IPCC, 2018), with a possible new mass extinction (Kolbert, 2014; cf. Mitchell, 2024), could regeneration give us a second chance? Humanity shares this Earth with millions of species and is the result of millions of species evolving for millions of years. Already the Earth has gone through five mass extinctions, ice ages, unbearable heat, and life has bounced back-it has regenerated (Barnosky et al., 2011). In this beautiful auto-generative system, regeneration might allow us to slow, stop, and regenerate what we are currently destroying.
Nature regenerates-in time and if species' extinction can be avoided. After impactful natural catastrophes which burn forests, sweep lands, erase coastlines, and change geography, life returns and re-inhabits those places, usually having to adapt again to the new geographical configurations. However, humanity should not harness regeneration. Control-the search for subjugation-has been at the root of a tremendous force of nature destruction. And it has been fear of and anger at nature that has led humanity to seek to control it (see Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002). What is needed is not more control-not more management-but a liberation of the powers of regeneration in nature. Nature needs to be freed from the yoke of human domination.
Critical Approaches to Regeneration
In this stream, we make a call to researchers willing to engage in critical approaches to the regeneration of nature. But how to do this? Can and should humanity tap into these regenerating powers? And who is this subject-humanity-who thinks can stop its destructive impulses and instead align with nature's regeneration? How and by whom is nature's regeneration advocated, resisted or even threatened? With which rights and knowledge can humans endeavour to regenerate nature? Which visions of regeneration to follow? And how to overcome the forces that have led the World into so much destruction in the natural systems?
Importantly, the tormented relationship between (westernised) humanity and nature is not the complete story. There are current and historical examples of people living in nature without destroying it (e.g., Böhm, Bharucha, & Pretty, 2014; Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2022). What can be learnt from these current and historical perspectives about living in harmony with nature? Can the large swaths of westernised civilization be influenced by these regenerative perspectives? And how to establish dialog between these different voices?
CMS and Regeneration
Finally, this ICMS conference is about the regeneration of CMS. Is CMS experiencing a similar phenomenon to the ecological crises? Following this analogy, what is nature or the Earth for CMS? Is it its critical ability? Its connection to the social and the planet? What are the crises plaguing CMS? Some scholars have argued that one of these crises is how CMS has failed to change the World (e.g., Clegg, Kornberger, Carter, & Rhodes, 2006; Spicer, Alvesson, & Kärreman, 2009; Zanoni, Barros, & Alcadipani, 2023). Taking the analogy of the ecological crises, it would seem that CMS has bought into the productivist ethos of capitalism and enshrined publication, creating and overflow of article production that few read, fills our attention span, but which has little impact in improving humanity's ways of living and its relationship with the Earth (Fleming, Olaison, Plotnikof, Pors, & Pullen, 2022; Parker, & Racz, 2020). Life-the embodied life-has been largely abandoned. How can CMS scholars learn from nature's regeneration to regenerate CMS itself? How can the connection of some peoples to nature inspire CMS scholars to reconnect with the World they want to change? And what lessons can be learnt from the current failure of addressing the ecological crises so as not to fail in the regeneration of CMS?
We look forward to your paper submissions at the intersection of organisation studies, ecological crises, and regeneration. Submissions can be empirical, conceptual or methodological in nature. Possible questions to address include but are certainly not limited to:
- Organising with nature as a phenomenon of interest (e.g., rewilding and restoration projects) across different empirical settings (multilateral bodies, governments, businesses, communities, etc.).
- Discourses and imaginaries of restoration, rewilding, and/ or renewal to address ecological crisis.
- Nature as a guiding principle for alternative organising across different sectors.
- Studies on the commercialisation and marketisation of nature.
- Studies on the ontological politics of restoring, rewilding and renewing.
- Emotional perspectives on regeneration and regenerative efforts.
- Responsibility constructions and contestations around projects aimed at regenerating, rewilding or restoring.
- Philosophical perspectives on the human-nature divide and regeneration.
- Being nature and knowing nature: Methodological, epistemological and ontological perspectives.
- Indigenous perspectives on nature and their relationship to western understandings of nature.
Submission Process
Please send your abstract (max. 1500 words) to both Friederike (fd534@bath.ac.uk) and Manuel (manuel.ramirez@liverpool.ac.uk) by no later than 31st January 2025. Feel free to contact us beforehand if you have any questions.
Founding members of ECO
Pilar Acosta, Ecole Polytechnique, France.
Steffen Böhm, University of Exeter, UK.
Friederike Döbbe, University of Bath, UK.
Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes, Hanken School of Economics, Finland.
Seray Ergene, University of Rhode Island, USA.
Daniel Nyberg, University of Queensland, Australia.
Mario Pansera, Universidade de Vigo, Spain.
Manuel F. Ramirez, University of Liverpool, UK.
References
Banerjee, S. B., & Arjaliès, D.-L. (2021). Celebrating the end of enlightenment: Organization theory in the age of the anthropocene and Gaia (and why neither is the solution to our ecological crisis). Organization Theory, 2(4), 26317877211036714.
Barnosky, A. D., Matzke, N., Tomiya, S., Wogan, G. O., Swartz, B., Quental, T. B., … & Ferrer, E. A. (2011). Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?. Nature, 471(7336), 51-57.
Böhm, S., Bharucha, Z. P., & Pretty, J. (Eds.). (2014). Ecocultures: Blueprints for sustainable communities. Routledge.
Clegg, S. R., Kornberger, M., Carter, C., & Rhodes, C. (2006). For management?. Management Learning, 37(1), 7-27.
Dahlman, S., du Plessis, E. M., Husted, E., Kandathil, G., Shanahan, G. What is alternative organization? Theorizing counter-hegemonic dynamics. Call for papers: Special issue of Organization. Organization. https://journals.sagepub.com/pbassets/cmscontent/ORG/Organization%20Alternative%20Organizations_Special%20Issue%20CfP-1719547951.pdf
Ehrnström-Fuentes, M. (2022). Organising in defence of life: The emergence and dynamics of a territorial movement in Southern Chile. Organization, 29(1), 155-177.
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., Williams, A., & Nyberg, D. (2024). Sub-theme 70: Organizing with nature: Systems, scale, and more-than-humans. EGOS 2025 Call for papers. https://www.egos.org/jart/prj3/egos/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1721760205556&subtheme_id=1701662511946
Ferns, G. (2024). For what it's earth: Transcending the human–nature dualism through "deep nature connection". Business & Society, 0(0), https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503241271312
Fleming, P., Olaison, L., Plotnikof, M., Pors, J. G., & Pullen, A. (2022). Crawling from the wreckage. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 22(3), 1-20.
Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T. W., & Noeri, G. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
IPCC (2018). Global Warming of 1.5°: an IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva.
Kolbert, E. (2014). The sixth extinction: An unnatural history. A&C Black. Mitchell, A. (2024). Revenant Ecologies: Defying the Violence of Extinction and Conservation. U of Minnesota Press.
Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V., & Land, C. (2014). The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization. Routledge.
Parker, S., & Racz, M. (2020). Affective and effective truths: Rhetoric, normativity and critical management studies. Organization, 27(3), 454-465.
Roux-Rosier, A., Azambuja, R., & Islam, G. (2018). Alternative visions: Permaculture as imaginaries of the Anthropocene. Organization, 25(4), 550-572.
Spicer, A., Alvesson, M., & Kärreman, D. (2009). Critical performativity: The unfinished business of critical management studies. Human relations, 62(4), 537-560.
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I.,
Bennett, E. M., … & Sörlin, S. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223), 1259855.
Wright, C., Nyberg, D., Rickards, L., & Freund, J. (2018). Organizing in the anthropocene. Organization, 25(4), 455-471.
Zanoni, P., Barros, M., & Alcadipani, R. (2023). Celebrating 30 years of Organization: Epistemic pluralism, caring for our community and politics of hope. Organization, 30(6), 1179-1187.
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Manuel Ramirez
University of Liverpool
LIVERPOOL, United Kingdom
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