Business as Unusual: Preserving Radical Ecological Criticism While Scaling Up Biodynamic Production

Abstract

Although prior research suggests that ambitious corporate efforts at addressing ecological concerns are likely to become business as usual, little is known about how radical approaches to ecology can be mobilized within organizations. Using the economies of worth framework, we analyse the coexistence of reformative and radical critiques from the ‘green world’ and how they relate to other approaches to the common good within organizations, with the aim to explore how ‘ecological radicality’ can be embedded and maintained within organizations. The unique case of a biodynamic small farming business confronted with the pressures to increase its scale of production enabled the identification of two mechanisms explaining the maintenance of ecological radicality: ‘inspiring ecological embeddedness’ and ‘eco-systemically networking stakeholders’. Our results advance organizational studies by theorizing how the normative foundations of ecological radicality can be maintained through these two social mechanisms, by showing how nature’s materiality is directly involved in the management of tensions related to ecological concerns, and by documenting ‘green connexionism’ as an organizational response to ecological challenges.