When rivers go to court: The Anthropocene in organization studies through the lens of Jacques Rancière

Abstract

The overarching purpose of this article is to add to the theorization of the Anthropocene in organization studies by investigating how long-term planetary concerns can be better accounted for in organizing. To do so, the article draws on the scholarship of Jacques Rancière to show how the dichotomy of nature and culture shapes the dominant framings of organizing, and to outline premises for artistic, scholarly and political interventions into the status quo that could aid the process of making our entanglements with the geo-biophysical politically viable. The article concludes that the Anthropocene can add to a renewal of organizational and political decision-making processes through a radical rethinking of the liberal humanist separation of nature and culture and related concepts such as democracy and political subjecthood.

Organizing in the Anthropocene

“…For example, in 2008 Ecuador became the first country to protect the rights of nature in its constitution and New Zealand has granted legal personhood to a forest (Te Uruwera forest in 2014), a river (Whanganui River in 2017) and a mountain (Mount Taranaki in 2017). As Kalonaityte (2018) explores in her article in this Special Issue, this development could encourage more radical experimentation in challenging the foundational assumptions of our societies.…”

Waste as scats: For an organizational engagement with waste

“…Scatolism is an alternative imaginary that resists business as usual and points to the need for new forms of social—and material—organizations, forms that go beyond simpler ecological modernization solutions (after a classification by Wright et al, 2018). Promoting ethical concerns that encompass even materials, a more-than-human ethics of care as Beacham (2018) calls it, a scatolic approach to waste contributes to actually transcend the conventional separation of nature and culture, as Kalonaityte (2018) suggests the Anthropocene requires.…”

Ethics and Politics of Space for the Anthropocene

“…As a result, we have witnessed an increasing number of social-scientific studies that include more-than-humans in their inquiries and make much-needed efforts to find conceptualisations apt for thinking about how different earthly creatures could, and should, coexist and co-live as kin (e.g. Haraway, 2016;Kalonaityte, 2018;Lorimer, 2015;Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015;Tsing et al, 2017). Furthermore, the development of novel pedagogies (Jickling et al, 2018) and methods that enable the exploration of life and coexistence in a more-than-human world is underway (e.g.…”