Fueling Climate (In)Action: How organizations engage in hegemonization to avoid transformational action on climate change

Abstract

This study examines how organizations avoid the urgent need for transformational action on climate change by engaging in a hegemonization process. To show how this unfolds, we draw from Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, focusing on the case of BP and its engagement with the climate change debate from 1990 to 2015. Our study takes a longitudinal approach to illustrate how BP defended its core business of producing and selling fossil fuel products by enacting three sequential hegemonization strategies. These included: adopting new signifiers; building ‘win-win’ relationships; and adapting nodal points. In doing so, we demonstrate how hegemonic construction enables organizations to both incorporate and evade various types of stakeholder critique, which, we argue, reproduces business-as-usual. Our study contributes to organization studies literature on hegemony by highlighting how the construction of hegemony operates accumulatively over an extended period of time. We also contribute more broadly to conversations around political contests and the natural environment by illustrating how the lack of effective climate responses is shaped by temporal dynamics.

Climate Change, Business, and Society: Building Relevance in Time and Space

“…Indeed, the trace illuminates hierarchical and dualistic differences between self/we and the Other (see Rhodes, 2016), and between the boundaries that separate global North over South, man over woman, and human over animal. This is important not only in challenging the prioritization of privileged actors as "legitimate stakeholders" (Phillips, 2014), but also in recognizing that forgotten "stakeholders" can retaliate and cause reputational damage by publicly shaming firms over their environmental and social destruction (Ferns et al, 2021).…”

“…Against this, a more critical scholarship on climate change and business has emerged within the broader field of management and organization studies, which questions assumptions of a “win–win” relationship between business and environmental outcomes, and highlights how the economics of capitalism is a key driver of the climate crisis (Wright & Nyberg, 2015). This critical scholarship focuses on issues, such as the limits to “sustainable development” (Banerjee, 2003); climate change denial (Hoffman, 2011); corporate political activity and fossil fuel “hegemony” (Ferns & Amaeshi, 2021; Levy & Egan, 2003; Nyberg et al, 2013); the limits of market-based responses to climate change (Böhm et al, 2012); and the broader implications of living within “planetary boundaries” (Whiteman et al, 2013). These scholars, echoing many of the same concerns voiced by early critical work on business-natural environment relations (Gladwin et al, 1995; Purser et al, 1995; Shrivastava, 1995), warn of the futility of relying on the same thinking that has contributed to the planetary crisis in the first place.…”

From negative to positive sustainability performance measurement and assessment? A qualitative inquiry drawing on framing effects theory

“…Other elements of PSP could lie in the creation and sharing of knowledge that yields mutual benefits (Lombardi & Laybourn, 2012). Such benefits or added value can be regarded as an active progression to both sustainable development and sustainability transformation (Ferns & Amaeshi, 2019; Schaltegger & Burritt, 2014).…”

Unfairness in Society and Over Time: Understanding Possible Radicalization of People Protesting on Matters of Climate Change

“…Looking at the climate context of the last decade, past injustices that protesters face may involve specific cases in which they or their group members were wronged, such as violent confrontations with the police (see Baker, 2010;Wahlström, 2011;Diprose et al, 2017;De Moor, 2018). Moreover, we expect protesters' perceptions to be affected by the occurrence of alleged immoral developments through time, such as national governments' alleged awareness of the harmful effects of their actions on the planet and its inhabitants (like their role in the fossil industry) already since the 1990s (from then on the IPCC reports were repeatedly published), and their continued denial and evasion of scientists' warnings (Jäger and Riordan, 1996;Bolin, 2007;Ferns and Amaeshi, 2021).…”