Climate change represents the grandest of challenges facing humanity. In the space of two centuries of industrial development, human civilization has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans with devastating consequences. Business organizations are central to this challenge, in that they support the production of escalating greenhouse gas emissions but also offer innovative ways to decarbonize our economies. In this paper, we examine how businesses respond to climate change. Based on five in-depth case studies of major Australian corporations over a 10-year period (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015), we identify three key stages in the corporate translation of climate change: framing, localizing and normalizing. We develop a grounded model that explains how the revolutionary import of grand challenges is converted into the mundane and comfortable concerns of "business as usual." We find that critique is the major driver of this process by continuously espousing the tensions between the demands of the grand challenge and business imperatives. Our paper contributes to the literature on business and the natural environment by identifying how and why corporate environmental initiatives deteriorate over time. More specifically, we highlight the policy limitations of a reliance on business and market responses to the climate crisis.We would like to thank Jennifer Howard-Grenville for her outstanding editorial guidance, and the three anonymous referees for their constructive feedback in helping to develop this paper. We would also like to thank members of the University of Sydney and University of Newcastle Business Schools for their input on earlier versions of the paper. ABSTRACTClimate change represents the grandest of challenges facing humanity. In the space of two centuries of industrial development, human civilization has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans with devastating consequences. Business organizations are central to this challenge, in that they support the production of escalating greenhouse gas emissions but also offer innovative ways to decarbonize our economies. In this paper, we examine how businesses respond to climate change. Based on five in-depth case studies of major Australian corporations over a 10-year period (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015), we identify three key stages in the corporate translation of climate change: framing, localizing and normalizing. We develop a grounded model that explains how the revolutionary import of grand challenges is converted into the mundane and comfortable concerns of "business as usual." We find that critique is the major driver of this process by continuously revealing the tensions between the demands of the grand challenge and business imperatives. Our paper contributes to the literature on business and the natural environment by identifying how and why corporate environmental initiatives deteriorate over time. More specifically, we highlight the policy limitations of a...

Climate change discourse permeates political and popular consciousness, challenging the ecological sustainability of our economic system and the business models that underpin it. Not surprisingly climate change has become an increasingly divisive and partisan political issue. While a growing literature has sought to address how business organizations are responding to climate change, the subjective perceptions of managers on this issue have received less attention. In this article we contribute to an understanding of the dynamic interaction between identities and organizations, by showing how sustainability managers and consultants balance tensions and contradictions between their own sense of self and the various work and non-work contexts in which they find themselves. Based on a qualitative, social constructivist method, we examine how these individuals develop different identities in negotiating between conflicting discourses and their sense of self. We explore how these different identities arise, interact and inform responses to climate change in different settings, and then demonstrate how individuals seek to overcome conflicts between identities in constructing a coherent narrative of themselves and their careers. In doing so, the article highlights how identity work is central to the micro-political enactment of business responses to climate change, and how, for some, the climate crisis provides an impetus for personal reinvention as a moral agent of change.

Studies of corporate citizenship have considered how corporations shape the delivery of basic rights. While liberal commentators argue that corporations can act as protectors of citizenship rights where state regulation is lacking, more radical commentators claim that corporations seek to obstruct the rights of citizens. In this article we build on theories of hegemony to argue that corporate citizenship can be more fruitfully understood as an attempt to incorporate citizenship activities in order to benefit corporate agendas. To explore how this process plays out, we examine how companies have sought to influence the political debate over climate change in Australia. Through analysis of corporate documents, media coverage and interviews with senior managers, we identify how corporations use practices of campaigning and exemplifying to build a common identity with citizens and synchronize corporate and citizen interests. This involves the recasting of citizens as active constituents, responsible consumers, ethical employees and ecopreneurs. Through this process, citizenship becomes increasingly incorporated within the value creating activities of corporations.

In responding to climate change, organizations navigate in an increasingly volatile emotional milieu in which feelings of fear, anxiety, hostility and anger shape public debate. In this article, we explore how corporations have responded to the broader 'emotionology' surrounding climate change. Our focus is on the role of corporate sustainability specialists as intermediaries, or 'emotionology workers', acting between broader social debates and local organizational contexts. Through analysis of interview and documentary data from major Australian corporations we explore both the activities of these individuals in translating and shaping climate change emotionology within their organizations, and how they manage their own emotionality in this work. We find that sustainability professionals are key agents in the design and implementation of a positive emotionology of climate change as a challenge and opportunity for corporate action. However, these activities result in tensions and contradictions for these individuals in reconciling their own emotional engagement with climate change and the negative impact of corporate activities on the environment. Our analysis contributes to an understanding of the roles and activities of 'emotionology work', as well as broadening the concept of 'emotion work' to include those involved in promoting broader social change in organizational settings.

We examine how call-center employees draw on opposed discourses to understand the purpose and consequences of performance measurement as workplace surveillance. Sometimes the workers saw performance measurement as a legitimate and impartial managerial tool serving the interests of everyone in the organization (e.g. by exposing free-riding, etc.). Other times, they saw performance measurement as intrusive and oppressive; imposed on them by managers who, as agents of employers, used it to serve a narrow set of interests (e.g. by intensifying work, etc.). Our analysis depicts how employees used an ironical process of predicate logic to develop flexible meaning-making strategies to cope with the apparent conflicts in meaning that arose from the two opposed discourses. We conclude by developing a three step method for the practical analysis of such ironical situations of competing discourses that facilitates our ability to reconsider and reconfigure meaning in more useful ways.