What Global Crisis? How Local Businesses Notice Global Issues

Abstract

In an increasingly globalizing world, critical global issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemics have local impacts. Yet cues that signal global issues are often weak at a local level, and the issues are difficult to detect. The organizational attention literature has explored cues associated with local issues that are immediately salient; however, they have not considered the weak cues associated with global issues. This article studies how a locally-embedded organization detected global issues – e.g., climate change and its effects – that were not yet salient through its attention to local cues. It explores this relationship through a case study of LuxuryYak – a commercial enterprise on the Tibetan Plateau that weaves yak wool into textiles for the global luxury goods market. LuxuryYak embodies sustainable development in that it provides nomads with an economic livelihood within natural environment constraints. We collected data through a variety of qualitative data sources, including a three-month ethnography, 57 interviews, 45 informal discussions, and 2,000 pages from the company archives. This article shows that LuxuryYak was able to detect global issues locally through two key processes: deepening and broadening attention to cues over time and space. We analyzed the company's organizational practices and uncovered the attention mechanisms, providing new insights into the organizational attention literature.