Colleagues: With gratitude to our Special Editors, we are delighted that the September issue of Organization & Environment focuses on the role of place in sustainability. The abstracts follow:
Kourula, A., Georgallis, P., Henriques, I., & Mair, J. (2024). Introduction to the Special Issue on the Role of Place in Sustainability: Key Trends and Agenda for Future Research. Organization & Environment, 37(3), 363-375. https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266241283157
his editorial reviews key themes, trends, and assumptions of organizational research on place and sustainability and introduces the special issue on the "Role of Place in Sustainability." While recent theorizing has often emphasized global issues such as grand challenges, planetary boundaries, and climate change, this special issue revisits the local by focusing on the role of place in sustainability. We discuss trends and subdomains of research on place and sustainability and identify key assumptions at the interplay between global and local perspectives. Instead of advocating for universal solutions or exclusively context-specific approaches, we highlight the concept of "senses of place," emphasizing the connections among diverse notions of place and intrinsic links to these locations. We demonstrate how the four insightful articles featured in this special issue provide a broader dialogue on place and sustainability. Finally, we outline a research agenda that identifies underexplored themes in place-based sustainability studies.
Yu, H. (2024). Sense of Place and Sustainable Development: The Case of a Tibetan Luxury Enterprise. Organization & Environment, 37(3), 376-407. https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266231226143
This study investigates how sense of place guides organizational sustainable development practices. Despite global phenomena, sustainable development challenges such as poverty and climate change are locally experienced and require local actions. Sense of place, which focuses on local phenomena, offers rich potential to understand organizations and sustainable development practices. This article presents an in-depth case study of Norlha Textiles, an enterprise implementing sustainable development practices in a nomadic village on the Tibetan Plateau. I apply an ethnographic approach to data collection through 3 months of fieldwork. I identified two forms of sense of place: emotional attachment and functional dependence, which can be disembodied from or embodied in the biophysical place. Then, I theorized organizational sustainable development practices in three pathways: maintaining, developing, and transforming place. This study advances organization studies on sense of place and sustainable development.
Fohim, E., Cartel, M., & Kella, C. (2024). Making Sustainable Places Through Spaces: Role Identity Expansion and Imagination in a Swiss Urban Planning Committee. Organization & Environment, 37(3), 408-439. https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266241233600
The transition toward sustainable cities has garnered significant attention from governments, policymakers, and researchers. Mirroring these developments in the academic world, organizational researchers are investigating sustainable placemaking and identifying the conditions that favor such a vital process. Building on a case study of an urban planning committee in the Swiss town of St. Gallen, this research studies how spaces (temporary social settings that enable the negotiation of new ideas) can initiate sustainable placemaking. The interplay between the expansion of space members' role identities and their imagination of sustainable places is essential to sustainable placemaking. Generalizing these findings, our process model sheds light on the mutual constitution between imagination and role identity expansion inside spaces. The model makes two contributions to the organizational literature: (i) it highlights the importance of role identity expansion in sustainable placemaking processes through spaces and (ii) it discloses the interplay of imagination and identity expansion in spaces.
Baileche, L., Marais, M., & Palpacuer, F. (2024). Tensions Between Local Embeddedness and Scaling up: Insights from Grassroots Sustainability Initiatives in the Renewable Energy Transition. Organization & Environment, 37(3), 440-465. https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266241238730
Although grassroots initiatives in the renewable energy transition are flourishing, their embeddedness in local contexts challenges their capacity to spread their impact on a broader scale. Certainly, while scaling up has been described as difficult to combine with local embeddedness, little is known on the specific nature of the tensions involved in combining the two. Studying a federation of citizen renewable energy (RE) cooperatives in the south of France, we show that the engagement in a scaling-up process at a regional level generates three main kinds of tensions associated with specific dimensions of local embeddedness: natural, cultural, and political. We emphasize how these dimensions are likely to be threatened when the federation engages the cooperatives in a rapid scaling-up dynamic in which the drive to industrialize projects and find funding is dominant. We acknowledge the effects of these tensions on grassroots sustainability initiatives and collective organizing processes.
Rahman, S., Nguyen, N. T., & Slawinski, N. (2024). Regenerating Place: Highlighting the Role of Ecological Knowledge. Organization & Environment, 37(3), 466-494. https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266231220081
As many local places globally suffer from ecological and social decline, sustainability research increasingly recognizes the critical importance of studying organizational efforts toward regenerating local communities and ecosystems. This emerging research, however, overlooks the role of ecological knowledge, that is, place-based understanding of the processes and functions of the ecosystems in which organizations operate. As such, we ask "How do organizations harness ecological knowledge to advance the regeneration of local places?" Through an inductive study of nine certified organic farming organizations on Vancouver Island, Canada, we find that organizations engage in three cyclical and closely interlinked practices of identifying, acquiring, and applying ecological knowledge which together enhance their organizational performance while contributing to regenerating the local social-ecological systems. Our empirically grounded model of leveraging ecological knowledge contributes to research on sustainability and place, and to studies of regeneration, by uncovering the specific practices that enable firms to develop place-based regenerative solutions.
Mike
Michael V. Russo
Charles H. Lundquist Professor of Sustainable Management
Editor-in-Chief, Organization & Environment
Lundquist College of Business
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403