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To confront the climate crisis requires fundamental system change in order to break the convention of relentless economic exploitation of nature. In this Special Issue we extend understanding of the opportunities for an organizing perspective on sustainability in order that organization studies might contribute more effectively to the challenges of organizing sustainably. This organizing perspective is particularly sensitive to (1) a variety of forms and practices of sustainable organizing in different societal spheres and on different levels, (2) the social institutions, logics and value systems in which these forms and practices are embedded, (3) the power and politics of promoting (or blocking) sustainable organization, and (4) the ways in which work, voice, participation, and inclusion are organized and contribute to developing societal capabilities. These features formed the basis of our original call for papers and we review selected literature on sustainability, including the contribution of organization studies and the articles in this Special Issue, through this organizing perspective. In so doing we identify four key themes of a future research agenda that builds from the foundations of existing research and addresses key current limitations in both theory and practice: sustainability requires social justice; connecting local and global scale shifts; democratizing governance; and acting collectively. We conclude with some implications for our own scholarship in organization studies if we are to meet the twin challenges of the need for new theorizing in combination with devising practically relevant support for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is general agreement across the world that human-made climate change is a serious global problem, although there are still some sceptics who challenge this view. Research in organization studies on the topic is relatively new. Much of this research, however, is instrumental and managerialist in its focus on ‘win-win’ opportunities for business or its treatment of climate change as just another corporate social responsibility (CSR) exercise. In this paper, we suggest that climate change is not just an environmental problem requiring technical and managerial solutions; it is a political issue where a variety of organizations – state agencies, firms, industry associations, NGOs and multilateral organizations – engage in contestation as well as collaboration over the issue. We discuss the strategic, institutional and political economy dimensions of climate change and develop a socioeconomic regimes approach as a synthesis of these different theoretical perspectives. Given the urgency of the problem and the need for a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy, there is a pressing need for organization scholars to develop a better understanding of apathy and inertia in the face of the current crisis and to identify paths toward transformative change. The seven papers in this special issue address these areas of research and examine strategies, discourses, identities and practices in relation to climate change at multiple levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the work of Norbert Elias, this paper argues that attention to the historical and ‘figurational’ context of organization studies is necessary in order to understand the impact of its scholarship on management practice and public policy. This perspective is used to question conventional wisdom about the ‘failings’ of the organization studies field. In particular, attention is paid to (1) questioning the argument that the impact of organization studies is limited by its pluralism; (2) related paradigm incommensurability debates; (3) challenging other supposed limitations of the field, such as a tendency toward ‘fads and fashions’. In addition, it is argued that high impact may be associated with fields that have low control, and that single overarching strategies may be ineffective in raising impact. In presenting such argument, emphasis is placed on the significance of the dominant logics of governance of particular historical eras. In so doing, the paper draws attention to the need to consider the ethical and political questions raised by attempts to increase impact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we trace the compounding and escalation of frames to try and encompass the reality of climate change. These frames capture significant aspects, revealing new contours and extreme organizational challenges. However, what if climate change is unframeable? We locate three ontological dimensions of climate change – its unboundedness, incalculability and unthinkability – that make this case. This means that climate change is not a problem that organizations can encompass, divide or draw lines around – some 'thing' that can be recuperated into existing institutional, infrastructural and interpersonal frameworks. Instead, it is calling forth forms of organization without any precedent. We argue that the philosophy of speculative realism, specifically the work of Quentin Meillassoux, reveals climate change as a new World for which we do not have categories. We deploy Meillassoux's concepts which are non-human and rational to think through what climate change is ontologically. Meillassoux's work is characterized as the reintroduction of the old philosophical idea of the absolute, and we use it as a possible way to overcome the equivocal status of climate change without succumbing to despondency and passivity. Rather than a negative, overwhelming threat, climate change gives us what we call a bleak optimism: the realization that climate change has already happened, and that human civilization must learn how to die in a way that is a creative and just foreclosure of the Earth's organizational forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is increasingly being recognized as a serious threat to dominant modes of social organization, inspiring suggestions that capitalism itself needs to be transformed if we are to ‘decarbonize’ the global economy. Since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, carbon markets have emerged as the main politico-economic tools in global efforts to address climate change. Newell and Paterson (2010) have recently claimed that the embrace of carbon markets by financial and political elites constitutes a possible first step towards the transformation of current modes of capitalist organization into a new form of greener, more sustainable ‘climate capitalism.’ In this paper, we argue that the institutionalization of carbon markets does not, in fact, represent a move towards the radical transformation of capitalism, but is better understood as the most recent expression of ongoing trends of ecological commodification and expropriation, driving familiar processes of uneven and crisis-prone development. In this paper, we review four critical Marxist concepts: metabolic rift (Foster, 1999), capitalism as world ecology (Moore, 2011a), uneven development and accumulation through dispossession (Harvey, 2003, 2006), and sub-imperialism (Marini, 1972, 1977), developing a framework for a Marxist analysis of carbon markets. Our analysis shows that carbon markets form part of a longer historical development of global capitalism and its relation to nature. Carbon markets, we argue, serve as creative new modes of accumulation, but are unlikely to transform capitalist dynamics in ways that might foster a more sustainable global economy. Our analysis also elucidates, in particular, the role that carbon markets play in exacerbating uneven development within the Global South, as elites in emerging economies leverage carbon market financing to pursue new strategies of sub-imperial expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address debate about social constructionism and critical realism by examining current concerns relating to the carbon economy, climate change and related ecological issues. At the same time, we consider the implications of our discussion for processes of governance. Following an introduction, we present three varied sets of argument by ourselves as Editors. We then conclude the paper by briefly introducing each of the papers included in this Themed Section. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Action on climate change continues to be hampered by vested interests seeding doubt about science and the need to reduce carbon emissions. Using a qualitative case study of local climate adaptation to sea level rise, we show how climate change science is translated into a self-referential theory focused on property prices. Our analysis develops two mechanisms – enablement and theorization – to explain the relationship between theory performativity and power within a process of translation. This contributes to (1) the performativity debate by showing how the constitution of power relations shapes theory performativity; (2) theories of power, by tracing the ways in which certain actors are able to enrol others and impact the authority of particular theories, and (3) processes of translation by developing mechanisms for following the ways in which power and theory performativity interact. We conclude by arguing that a performative understanding of how power shapes beliefs is central to combating the failure to address climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a book review titled "Exploring the Potential of Documentary in Organization Research." The review discusses two documentaries, "Burning" and "A Fire Inside," which focus on the Australian 'Black Summer' bushfires of 2019 and early 2020. The author explores how these documentaries can contribute to research on extreme contexts and grand challenges, and emphasizes the importance of integrating more 'videographic' data in studies. The review analyzes the narrative storylines of the documentaries and suggests that they can inspire organizational scholars to connect macro and micro levels of the 'Black Summer' tragedy and to pay attention to the role of knowledge in anticipation and resilience. The author concludes by highlighting the potential of documentaries as a source of secondary data and as a method for involving participants in research projects. [Extracted from the article]

Regardless of the enormous risks to humanity, the three-decades-long international effort to administer sustainability has seen an intensifying process of governance privatization, coupled with a failure to reduce global emissions. Bridging neo-institutional and business-class theories, I examine the mobilization of a class-wide coalition of major transnational corporations on a long-term institutional project to shape environmental governance in the mold of a private, market-based institutional logic. Drawing from analyses of the structure, discourse, and activities of the transnational business association World Business Council for Sustainable Development circa 1990–2010, I show how the WBCSD unites the CEOs of some of the largest transnational corporations into a cohesive leadership group, mobilizes the corporate resources they command, and coordinates global-scale, durable institutional creation work. The project's purpose is to crowd out the state-based logic of environmental governance, thus restricting the development of market-incongruent sustainability organizing. The article contributes to the understanding of societal-level, large-scale institutional work by examining the key agency of business classes in such work, the organization of large-scale work through multifaceted projects, and its orientation to set institutional logics through diverse creation of institutional forms that embody the logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a tentative section in the journal called "Counterpoint from the Field." It notes that the section provides audiences opportunities to comment on papers published within the issue. It also cites the potential of article review to impact future decisions in the field of organization studies. Moreover, it cites the worthiness of the topic of climate change to be highlighted in counterpoint.

Despite more than fifteen years of high level efforts led by the United Nations to broker a binding agreement on emissions reduction, negotiations at every annual meeting have failed to establish a global agreement, mainly due to significant disagreements between industrialized and developing countries over differentiated responsibilities in reducing emissions. In this paper I describe my experiences as a participant-observer at the 17th United Nations Climate Change summit held in Durban, South Africa, during December 2011. I provide a critical analysis of the political economy of climate change and discuss power dynamics between market, state and civil society actors as well as the shifting geopolitics that mark the emergence of China and India as major players in the climate change arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prior research often categorizes corporate environmental responses on a spectrum that ranges from reactive to proactive. Such research subordinates the role of time, yet time is central to organizational responses to environmental issues such as climate change. In this paper, we study five oil and gas firms and inductively develop a framework of corporate responses to climate change that explicitly acknowledges the role of time. The framework identifies two categories of corporate responses grounded in different temporal perspectives: focused and integrated. We discuss the implications of this categorization for research on corporate environmentalism and time in organizational theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the framings and identity work associated with professionals’ discursive construction of climate change science, their legitimation of themselves as experts on ‘the truth’, and their attitudes towards regulatory measures. Drawing from survey responses of 1077 professional engineers and geoscientists, we reconstruct their framings of the issue and knowledge claims to position themselves within their organizational and their professional institutions. In understanding the struggle over what constitutes and legitimizes expertise, we make apparent the heterogeneity of claims, legitimation strategies, and use of emotionality and metaphor. By linking notions of the science or science fiction of climate change to the assessment of the adequacy of global and local policies and of potential organizational responses, we contribute to the understanding of ‘defensive institutional work’ by professionals within petroleum companies, related industries, government regulators, and their professional association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So colleagues, comrades: to institutionalize, management scholars of the world, unite! The debate about the relevance of management scholarship is not new ([4]). How then can we as management scholars organize ourselves better to collectively achieve more relevance with our research?. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one about the organizational impact of disruptive climate patterns and the evolving global and local policy, another about the critical and theoretical approaches to understand the societal response to climate change, and organizational strategies to address climate change.

In his writing, Lenin addresses what he perceived to be the most urgent and pressing issues for his cause, a clarity of purpose that we could certainly learn from today when many are invested in the production of ever more tedious micro-contributions. This, then, is my practical suggestion for how we address the complexity escalation in organization studies: we should all try to be a bit more Leninist, 'not to return to Lenin, but to (...) I retrieve the same impulse i in today's constellation' ([7], p. 11, emphasis added). Thus, we find Lenin popping up in academic and political discourse not because his ideas are popular or his works widely accepted, but because he formulated one of the most enduring questions in political theory: I What Is To Be Done?. [Extracted from the article]

The separation between an 'inside' and 'outside' of organizational politics has become untenable in a rapidly changing political landscape, where people engage in environmental activism in many different domains. To understand contemporary environmental activism, we situate ourselves empirically within an energy utility, Ordalia [pseudonym], a large corporation active across Europe and heavily criticized by external activists for its carbon emitting operations. By merging Rancière's method of equality and notion of 'partaking' with literature on prefiguration in social movements, we analyse everyday green actions pursued by Ordalia's employees, which we conceptualize as 'prefigurative partaking'. By focusing on six characterizing themes of prefigurative partaking – aspirational, individual, professional, critical, loyal and communal – we have found that employee activism is incremental, horizontal and boundaryless. We discuss these findings in relation to recent calls for more fruitful exchanges between social movement theory and organization studies, arguing that Rancière's conceptualization of politics can help us study actions that span civil society and business. This complements and expands our understanding of environmental activism as a dispersed set of actions that can take place anywhere, and hence also at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite scientific consensus on the need to rapidly decarbonize economic systems to limit global warming, the exploitation of fossil fuels continues unabated. This begs the question, why do we continue down this path? We argue that one reason is the way in which fossil fuel expansion is temporally framed. In this article, we examine the disputed development of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas ('fracking') in the United Kingdom. Through analysis of a series of public inquiries conducted by the UK Government we show how industry, government and NGOs have engaged in a framing contest in debating the future of fracking. The findings show how the framing of fossil fuel development was solidified over time through processes of certainty, simplicity and familiarity. We contribute by: (a) showing how actors mobilize temporality in constructing persuasive and actionable frames; (b) developing a theory of how frames gain temporal portability – a chronology between a dominant past and a recognized future; and (c) providing an alternative theory of short-termism in explaining the path leading us to a dangerous climate changed future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the centre of the undeniably contentious debates about climate change lies the question of authority: Which voices will be heard and, thus, who will influence policy, activism, and scientific inquiry? Following high-profile errors found in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Dutch Parliament sought to achieve ‘balance’ in these debates by bringing together climate scientists and skeptics for a set of online discussions. Using both communication and dialectical theorizing, we explore the organizing of authority around climate change in the Netherlands. We locate dialectical tensions and discursive positions of diverse actors in the debate, examining the communication practices by which actors sought to resolve tensions as part of three authoritative moves: bridging, (de)coupling, and resisting. The combination of these authoritative moves failed to engage with – and therefore could not resolve – the sources of the underlying dialectical tensions. We build on these insights to suggest contributions to the climate change debate and theory on authority in organization studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study highlights significant discrepancies between CO2 market design and the actual operation of CO2 markets. Our findings are based upon an empirical investigation undertaken in the context of the European Emissions Trading Scheme between January 2009 and May 2010. CO2 markets are examined from a practice-based perspective in which actors are engaged in exchange, representational and normalizing practices. Discrepancies between the actual and intended CO2 market practices are explained using the concepts of framing, overflowing and regulatory capture. We argue that the design of the European Emissions Trading Scheme has been influenced in such a way that it does not actually challenge market participants to reduce their CO2 emissions. In this way, the study challenges the near universal reliance upon CO2 markets as the primary policy mechanism for mitigating climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A defining characteristic of the emergence of new organizational landscapes is that information is not just being used as a tool by organizations, as it is more usually understood, but also as a weapon in a ‘war of position’. As organizations seek to influence public perception over emotive issues such as climate change, conflict at the ideational level can give rise to information warfare campaigns. This concerns the creation and deployment of often ideologically infused ideas through information networks to promote an organization’s interests over those of its adversaries. In this article, we analyse the ways in which ExxonMobil and Greenpeace employ distinctive informational tactics against a range of diverse targets in their dispute over the climate change debate. The purpose of this article is to advance the neo-Gramscian perspective on social movement organizations as a framework for understanding such behaviour. We argue that information warfare is likely to become common as corporations and non-governmental organizations are increasingly sensitive to their informational environment as a source of both opportunity and possible conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on institutional change generally pertain to the agency-structure paradox or the ability of institutional entrepreneurs to spearhead change despite constraints. In many complex fields, however, change also needs cooperation from numerous dispersed actors with divergent interests. This presents the additional paradox of ensuring that these actors engage in collective action when individual interests favor lack of cooperation. We draw on complementary insights from institutional and regime theories to identify drivers of collective institutional entrepreneurship and develop an analytical framework. This is applied to the field of global climate policy to illustrate how collective inaction was over- come to realize a global regulatory institution, the Kyoto Protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]