Becoming Naturecultural: Rethinking sustainability for a more-than-human world

Abstract

The Earth is facing extraordinary ecological crises resulting from human impact on the planet. Meanwhile, a growing body of research studies the relationship of organizations with the natural environment but often overlooks anthropocentrism: the premise of human superiority over nature. Unfortunately, this human exceptionalist premise is the crux of the ecological crisis that cannot be overlooked any longer. To address this discrepancy in the literature, we claim that an ontological shift is necessary. Drawing from feminist new materialisms and Deleuzian relational ontologies, we develop becoming naturecultural, a material-discursive assembling process of more-than-human and more-than-capitalist entanglements. To illustrate the analytical value of becoming naturecultural, we engaged in empirical work at an organic cotton t-shirt supply chain and conducted a multi-sited fieldwork with affective ethnographic methodologies. Working with the data collected, we narrated a human de-centered case study fostering critical but affirmative inquiries about sustainability from a non-anthropocentric relational ontology. At the end we discuss two implications for organizational sustainability research: thinking with and writing with becoming naturecultural. They facilitate moving beyond critiques of anthropocentrism and articulating affirmative possibilities for organization studies in and for the Anthropocene.

Conceptualising Sustainability as the Pursuit of Life

“…Central to this debate is therefore the call for recognition and integration of other-often underrepresented and undervaluedtraditions, knowledge systems, and perspectives on the relationships between humans and nature. These include those held by individuals from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and especially different indigenous populations around the world (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021;Salmon et al, 2022;Whiteman & Cooper, 2000) as well as those of women (Braidotti, 2019;Ergene et al, 2018;Sjåfjell et al, 2022;Tallberg et al, 2022), children (Jeurissen & Keijzers, 2004;Walker, 2017), and, critically, also animals, plants and the physical natural environment, sometimes also defined as nonhuman and more-than-human entities (Beacham, 2018;Ergene & Calás, 2023;Kalonaityte, 2018;Kortetmäki et al, 2022;Lliso et al, 2022;Soga & Gaston, 2021).…”

“…• How do we achieve ecological (and social) restoration and resilience (Folke et al, 2016;Wieland, 2021; Specifically, scholars have long called for a shift in our assumptions about the world at large away from an exclusively human-centric view, particularly of the generalised and biased kind arguably reflected in much of anthropocentric research and thinking, and towards an ecocentric view in which nature sits at the heart of theorising (Banerjee, 2003;Ergene & Calás, 2023;Ergene et al, 2021;Heikkurinen et al, 2016). In this understanding, nature is argued to be endowed with properties that exist independent of social construction by humans (Purser et al, 1995).…”

“…Key examples include transdisciplinary forms of deep engagement , interpretivist approaches (Gould et al, 2019), and ethnographies (Whiteman & Cooper, 2000). Moreover, to better recognise the interrelated nature of parts and wholes, especially of humans and organisations within the flows and systems of the natural environment, calls for increased use of systems (King, 1995;Starik & Rands, 1995) and relational thinking including socialecological network analysis have led to growing adoption in sustainability sciences (Eyster et al, 2023;Fazey et al, 2020;Sayles et al, 2019), but remain far from mainstream in business and management research (Bansal et al, 2021;Edwards et al, 2021;Ergene & Calás, 2023;.…”

Matter and Method: The Quest for a New‐Materialist Methodology in Management Studies

“…This paper discusses the methodological implications of embedding sociomateriality (the entanglement of the discursive and the material) in the study of management and organizations, as several scholars (e.g. Ergene and Calás, 2023;Harding, Gilmore and Ford, 2022;Orlikowsky, 2006Orlikowsky, , 2007Orlikowsky, , 2010Orlikowski and Scott, 2008;Scott and Orlikowski, 2014) urge us to embrace new materialism in order to produce new knowledge that recognizes the contribution of material things in shaping management practices. Sociomateriality implies that the material and the social are entangled and actively shape organizational (and everyday) life (Gherardi, 2017).…”

“…Bryant and Wolfram Cox, 2014;Calás and Smircich, 2023;Cooren, 2020;Fotaki, Metcalfe and Harding, 2014;Harding, Gilmore and Ford, 2022;Hultin and Introna, 2019) are increasingly engaging with new materialism and posthumanism to contribute to the rethinking of the relationship between human beings, work and organizational objects and the environment (Parmiggiani and Mikalsen, 2013). This impetus is due to the sway of Artificial Intelligence (AI), technological advancement and ecological threats on management and organizations, and the subsequent calls for morethan-human approaches to research (Ergene and Calás, 2023). These approaches consider more-than-human influences on the phenomenon studied, and not only include the role of animals, organisms or objects, but encompass much more, such as the climate, geography, ecosystems, politics, health systems and so on.…”