Strategy and organization scholarship through a radical sustainability lens: A call for 5.0

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By their own account, Joel Baum, Royston Greenwood, and Dev Jennings (Baum et al., 2022) founded Strategic Organization 20 years ago to counter what they saw as a disturbing trend. Namely, they perceived that scholarship on strategy and scholarship on organization were becoming increasingly separate, leading to distinct journals, professional associations, and research agendas underpinned by different disciplines (economics vs sociology), and differentially dominant in different areas of the world. Believing that this increasing differentiation might lead to impoverished understanding of important phenomena, Strategic Organization's founding mission was to support convergence at the intersection of strategy and organization, bridging disciplines, methods, perspectives, and geographies.Since then, although Strategic Organization has grown and evolved, it has remained faithful to its founding mission as reflected in the content of regular issues, in the mix of intellectual backgrounds of our editors and editorial board, and in our special issue themes that inhabit and enrich the intersection between strategy and organization theory. These themes include, for example, "Strategic responses to institutional complexity" (Vermeulen et al., 2016); "Firms, crowds and innovation" (Felin et al., 2017); "Exploring the strategy-identity nexus" (Ravasi et al., 2020); "Temporal work: The strategic organization of time" (Bansal et al., 2022); "Categories and place: Identities, materiality and movements" (forthcoming) (David et al., 2020); "Research frontiers on the attention-based view of the firm" (forthcoming) (Ocasio et al., 2021); and "Impact driven strategy research for grand challenges" (deadline for submissions 30 November 2022) (Williams et al., 2022).The So!apbox Essay format is another long-standing tradition at Strategic Organization, launched in 2003 by the founding editors who described the format in their opening editorial as follows:A soapbox is a platform used by a self-appointed, spontaneous, or informal orator, or, more broadly, an outlet for delivering opinions. These editorial essays provide a forum in which interdisciplinary bridges can be built, methodological traditions discussed, and the field of strategic organization staked out. (Baum et al., 2003: 7) So!apbox essays have become a little longer over time (the word limit has shifted from 2500 to 6000 words), and varied in their orientation-some more phenomenon-oriented, some more theoretical, and some methodological-but they have tracked the field, continuously debating concepts, ideas, methods, and issues at the intersection of strategy and organization. Some have been collected together in So!apbox Debates around themes such as dynamic capabilities (2009), the

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

SO! Far, SO! Good: Strategic Organization at 20

Alexy¹,

Berchicci²,

Dowell³

et al. 2022

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“…Bansal and DesJardine (2014) emphasized the importance of sustainability. Recently, in a So!apbox Forum dealing with “strategy and organizational scholarship from a radical sustainability lens,” Jarzabkowski et al (2021: 449) issued a “call to arms” to organizational scholars to “open our thinking about the broader, interdependent systems within which organizations operate.”…”

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Context and how it matters: Mobilizing spaces for organization-community sustainable change

Bartunek¹,

Balogun

2022

There are growing expectations that organizations should contribute to the sustainability of our planet. These have increased recognition of relationships between organizations and their external communities and what they might accomplish together. However, such recognition does not extend to appreciation of the contextual dynamics inherent in organization-community relationships that affect their ability to reach common ground in their joint efforts. In this essay we explore how interpretive, relational, and spatial contextual features previously addressed within organizations play roles in joint organization-community sustainability efforts. We present an example of the multi-decade development of a local foods economy in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, that has been spearheaded by multiple communities and organizations. We show how an Appreciative Inquiry Summit, one of a set of large group interventions developed by Organization Development consultants, made use of the contextual characteristics we discuss to foster shared overarching logics that enabled collaboration. We conclude with a research agenda designed to explore how relational, interpretative and spatial contexts affect organization-community initiatives to accomplish sustainability, how planned change interventions might affect these contexts, and how such initiatives and their contexts unfold over time.

“…At the same time, there is a growing emphasis on developing strategy and organization theory that is impactful and contributes to solving grand societal challenges (Jarzabkowski et al, 2021). Academic funding bodies are increasingly emphasizing the need for rigorous academic research that is societally relevant.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Vaccines for COVID-19 appear to be available more easily in rich countries than poor ones. Managerial decision-making at the firm level is starting to consider the complexity of these interconnected issues and how to manage them strategically.At the same time, there is a growing emphasis on developing strategy and organization theory that is impactful and contributes to solving grand societal challenges (Jarzabkowski et al, 2021). Academic funding bodies are increasingly emphasizing the need for rigorous academic research that is societally relevant.…”

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confidence: 99%

Call for papers: Special issue of Strategic Organization: Impact Driven Strategy Research for Grand Challenges

2022

The urgency of grand challenges is clear. In the past twelve months, we have witnessed several interconnected global crises wreak havoc on communities around the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic is still looming despite national efforts to vaccinate all citizens and the long-term damage of the pandemic is yet to be seen. The COVID-19 pandemic struck during another global crisis-climate change. Despite scientific warnings over the past decades, climate action is still falling short of meeting deep decarbonization goals that will achieve globally agreed-upon climate targets. Furthermore, longer-standing challenges involving systemic racism have manifested through a series of hate crimes and Black Lives Matter protests. Poverty, inequality, gender-based discrimination, persecution of the LGBTIQ community, and labor exploitation are among the perennial issues which afflict humanity, and which are manifested within and beyond strategic organizations. Other environmental challenges such as rapid biodiversity loss have reached planetary proportions. Moreover, many of the challenges intersect. For example, climate change poses a particular threat to low-lying Pacific Island nations which are also subject to poverty in some cases. The poor and women are exploited in sweatshops in developing countries. Vaccines for COVID-19 appear to be available more easily in rich countries than poor ones. Managerial decision-making at the firm level is starting to consider the complexity of these interconnected issues and how to manage them strategically.At the same time, there is a growing emphasis on developing strategy and organization theory that is impactful and contributes to solving grand societal challenges (Jarzabkowski et al., 2021). Academic funding bodies are increasingly emphasizing the need for rigorous academic research that is societally relevant. For example, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK requests university submissions for impact cases which can affect 25% of the government funding for each institution thus providing universities with real financial incentives to promote impact cases. Researchers are rising to the challenge of combining research with impact by co-creating sustainability research with practitioners (Sharma and Bansal, 2020) and engaging in scientific activism .