Organization Theorizing for Sustainability: Un-making People and Nature Exploitable

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the current status of sustainability research in management and organization studies is insufficient in providing necessary analytic tools to scrutinize the practices of contemporary organizations. In particular, the prevailing competition centered worldview carried by normalized particular political-economic premises, prevents us from seeing contradictions in intentions of our theories. As an example, here I engage with a specific frame, the natural resource-based view, as it explicitly brings focus to social and environmental issues. My critical engagement reveals that despite the genuine concerns for sustainability, the political-economic and ontological assumptions of this frame make us see nature and people as resources to be exploited. Looking for a way out for being able to think otherwise, here I provide a discussion on feminist ecological perspectives and propose alternative analytic concepts that enable us re-tuning our lenses. Specifically, these analytic concepts offer a focus on the material processes of everyday life and bring attention to well-being of natural and cultural ecologies. Drawing from my multi-sited ethnographic research, I also illustrate the value of these analytic concepts with empirical examples, presenting moments of possibility for un-making people and nature exploitable.