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.
Solutions to climate change have been academically criticized for their continued economic growth, managerialism and lack of real politics. In comparison, the IPCC's socioeconomic assessments of climate change have accentuated the ethical implications of their own policy recommendations. Our analysis of ten IPCC reports shows a turn from a claimed non-political position in human-induced climate change to an outspoken ethical position in climate-induced disasters. We argue that a professionalization of climate ethics is sought through ecological reason, specifically by calls for resilience to foster adaptable subjects. This neoliberal position leans on a problematization of vulnerable subjects' resistance to social adaptation, underpinned by an aim to redirect resistance towards physical disasters to stimulate climate adaptation. Conclusively, climate ethical mastery is formed by detailed elaborations of how the vulnerable subject should not only subsume to ecological reason, but also ethically embrace physical threats and dangers as if productive of life supportive qualities.
Biopolitics, traditionally understood as management of the human population, has been extended to include nonhuman animal life and posthuman life. In this article, we turn to literatures that advance Foucauldian biopolitics to explore the mode of government enabled by the dog of the US presidential family -the First Dog called Bo Obama. With analytical focus on vitalisation efforts, we follow the construction of Bo in various outlets, such as the websites of the White House and an animal rights organisation. Bo's microphysical escapades and the negotiation thereof show how contemporary biopolitics, which targets the vitality of the dog population, is linked to seductive neoliberal management techniques and subjectivities. We discuss 'cuddly management' in relation to Foucauldian scholarship within organisation and management studies and propose that the construction of Bo facilitates interspecies family norms and an empathic embrace of difference circumscribed by vitalisation efforts that we pinpoint as 'doggy-biopolitics'.
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