Organizing degrowth: The ontological politics of enacting degrowth in OMS

Abstract

As degrowth notions begin to gain traction within business schools and organization and management studies (OMS), this paper draws on Science and Technology Studies to interrogate the ontological politics of enacting degrowth in this relatively new context. We argue that the ‘degrowth multiple’ is a boundary object which takes on different forms as it circulates among different epistemic communities and within their respective boundaries, institutional arrangements, practices, and agendas. We investigate this empirically to elucidate how degrowth is being enacted within the OMS epistemic apparatus, revealing three set of practices characterizing extant OMS-degrowth engagements: stabilizations, reconfigurations, and projections. These motivate a subsequent discussion of the ontological politics unfolding through degrowth performances in OMS, its transformations (t)herein, and degrowth’s wider enrollment within the OMS epistemic apparatus. We thus contribute a reflexive intervention to organizing degrowth such that it remains a politically actionable concept across multiple contexts, and avoids becoming uncritically black-boxed, fetishized, and/or diluted by diverging cross-boundary enactments.

Redefining Success in Organizing Towards Degrowth

“…Degrowth-minded sustainability transition thus needs to be considered utopian in a process-oriented sense (Kallis and March, 2015), as a continuous and critical self-reflection and a strive towards greater inclusion, justice, and fairness (Anguelovski et al, 2020;Dengler and Lang, 2022). In this light, the present article aims to contribute to the emerging literature on organizing from and for degrowth (Barlow et al, 2022;Vandeventer and Lloveras, 2020;Hinton, 2021;Nesterova, 2020;Lloveras et al, 2018;Schmid, 2018) in zooming at the fundamental role of care ethos in the postgrowth metamorphosis, and sustainability transition.…”

Accounting for Plural Cognitive Framings of Growth and Sustainability: Rethinking Management Education in Latin America

“…Alternative discourses such as post-growth have remained marginal within management and organization studies, except for noteworthy exceptions (e.g., Vandeventer & Lloveras, 2021 ). Post growth approaches, although non-monolithic, share common concerns to acknowledge tensions inherent to sustainable development (Gudynas, 2011 ), change socio-ecological values and rethink the nature of prosperity (Fournier, 2008 ), and re-imagine economic arrangements in light of planetary boundaries (Demaria et al, 2013 ).…”

Beyond the technology-centric and citizen-centric binary: Ontological politics of organizing in Translation of the Smart City Discourse in India

“…We attend to the crucial but currently discounted roles of non-humans and the everyday process of organizing, with an emphasis on the uncertainties in the translation of SC discourse, in order to challenge the stabilized identities of currently centerstaged actors, namely, the citizen and technology agents. To do this, we mobilize Actor-Network Theory (ANT) sensibilities that consider human and non-human actants-those who act and are acted upon-as semiotically equivalent and their participation in the material processes of organizing as symmetrical (Blok et al, 2019;Czarniawska, 2017;Jensen and Sandström, 2020;Michael, 2016;Styhre and Brorström, 2021;Vandeventer and Lloveras, 2021).…”