British Journal of Management Special Issue 2018 Call for papers
Scaling Sustainability:
Regulation and Resilience in Managerial Responses to Climate Change
How can the global problem of climate change be connected to the actions of individuals and organisations? This special issue builds on the topic of a symposium within the British Academy of Management 2015 Sustainable and Responsible SIG track, which comprised a chaired panel discussion focusing on how scaling can contribute to future business and management research on sustainability. We invite a broad range of theoretical and empirical contributions focussing on the scaling of sustainability initiatives, connecting supra-national regulation, sponsored by inter-governmental bodies, via regional, community, and organisational projects, to localised and individual activities. Discussions may explore forms of sustainability across different levels of analysis, examining the hinge elements articulating the movement and translation of action between scales, but we also encourage investigations of how we can understand the movements of action across scales, for example: from individual activism to organisational change; from intergovernmental regulation to community action; from community action to regional and national initiatives; and from organisational action to institutional change. We also invite explorations of how researchers understand the mechanisms and processes that enable environmental sustainability initiatives to move between scales, as well as deriving practical implications for the management of sustainability across scales and how these may be translated into sustainability-driven managerial initiatives across scales.
The adverse effects of global climate change become increasingly difficult to ignore. While climate change deniers wage ideological campaigns against the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence and the repeating images of floods, storms and droughts, it seems that the frequency and ferocious devastation brought about by such events can no longer be disregarded or marginalised into insurance risk calculations. Business, management and organisation studies are complicit in the creation and intensification of these conditions, adding ever-new possibilities to let goods, finances, and guilt circulate: from carbon markets, emissions regulations and targets set by national governments and supra-national NGOs already impacting on the global organisation of production to the proliferation of ever-new organisational configurations whose characteristics no longer correspond to the demands and governing influence of production or commerce, but to global tax loopholes. New technologies in the green industries, as well as more contentious practices like fracking, not only present investment and growth opportunities in an otherwise moribund economic context, but are located at an interesting intersection of scales, transecting the individual entrepreneur or dealer, organisational strategies and environmental audits, governmental regulation, and transnational pressures from NGOs and social movement pressure groups.
Despite being faced with this ecological complexity, much of the popular discourse on sustainability remains focussed on single levels of analysis; a ‘bag of tricks’ thrown at individual symptoms in ignorance of the wider patterns that connect the world of living things (Bateson, 1972: 439). This, coupled with the persistent idea that markets are animated by ‘choices’, makes it only consistent to conclude that it is down to the individual consumer to engage in more sustainable lifestyle choice: reduce the amount you consume; reuse what you already have; and recycle what cannot be reused (Jones, 2010). Individual managers and employees are called upon to become ‘climate champions’ and ‘climate citizens’ to effectuate changes within their organisations (Swaffield & Bell, 2012). At the meso-level, corporations and public bodies are called upon to become more sustainable, demanding that climate change becomes a key issue in the formulation of strategy and practice (Benn et al., 2014). At the macro-level, national governments and trans-national bodies like the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seek to regulate the production of carbon and pace, if not reduce, the impacts of climate change. Connecting, distorting, accelerating or disrupting these various levels of analysis are complex, cross-scale phenomena such as carbon markets, fluid social movements, and networks of climate scientists and activists.
In terms of climate change, there is a clear mandate for considering how notions of individual and collective decisions are reflected at each level of analysis and how actors can drive change through each level. Rather than focussing on just one level of analysis, this special issue seeks to explore the connections and movements between them by working with the concept of scales, adopted from human geography (see Spicer, 2006; Adger, 2005). Whilst recognising that scale has been subject to widespread debate, with some commentators critiquing the concept for its implicit structuralism and arguing for a flatter ontology of space (Marton et al., 2005; Jonas, 2006; Springer, 2014), we suggest that a greater attention to the scale of action, and action across scales, can contribute to a deeper analysis of responses to climate change and enhance our understanding of the potentials for sustainability. In this, we would like to locate the idea of scales not only in terms of spatial, or even temporal, scales, but also in terms of institutional scales, ranging from relatively micro-social, sub-cultural scales, through meso-level organisational scales, to more macro-social and field level scales. As such we are interested in how institutional scales might be used as a model for locating and analysing managerial sustainability initiatives and discourses.
Indicative topics are:
· Developing and implementing sustainable and eco-investment strategies within and across scales
· Facilitating sustainable consumption and supply chains at varying organisational scales
· Developing performance management/measurement across scales to reduce climate change impacts
· The impact of action across scales in not-for-profit organisations on climate change
· Adapting organisational behaviour within or across scales to address climate change
· Analysing environmentally sustainable marketing strategies at the institutional scale
· Exploring the impact of environmental management systems and processes across scales
Potential contributors are encouraged to contact any one of the guest editors with enquiries.
Paper Submission
Authors should ensure they adhere to the journal guidelines which are available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1467-8551/homepage/ForAuthors.html Submissions should be uploaded to the BJM ScholarOne Manuscripts site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/bjm by 1st December 2016 (midnight UK time). Authors should select ‘special issue paper’ as the paper type, ensure they answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘Is this submission for a special issue’ and enter the title of the special issue in the box provided.
References
Adger, W.N., Arnell, N.W. and Tompkins, E.L. (2005) ‘Successful adaptation to climate change across scales’, Global Environmental Change, 15: 77-86.
Bateson, M.C. (1972) Our Own Metaphor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Benn, S., Dunphy, D. and Griffiths, A. (2014) Organizational Change for Corporate Sustainability, 3rd Edition. Abingdon: Routledge.
Jonas, A. (2006) ‘Pro scale: further reflections on the ‘scale debate’ in human geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(3): 399-406.
Jones, C. A. (2010) ‘The subject supposed to recycle’, Philosophy Today, 54(1): 30-39.
Marston, S.A., Jones, J.P. and Woodward, K. (2005) ‘Human geography without scale’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30: 416–32.
Spicer, A. (2006) ‘Beyond the convergence-divergence debate: The role of spatial scales in transforming organizational logic’, Organization Studies, 27(10): 1467-1483.
Springer, S. (2014) ‘Human geography without hierarchy’, Progress in Human Geography, 38(3): 402-419.
Swaffield, J. and Bell, D. (2012) ‘Can ‘climate champions’ save the planet? A critical reflection on neoliberal social change’, Environmental Politics, 21(2): 248-267.
Guest Editors
Helen Goworek, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK:
Brendan Lambe, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK:
Chris Land, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK:
Martin Parker, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK:
George Burt, Centre for Advanced Management Education, University of Stirling, UK:
Mike Saren, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK:
Mike Zundel, Management School, University of Liverpool, UK: