CALL FOR PAPERS

The Environmental Challenge: Exploring Practises of the Past, Present and Future

Sub theme for:
The 6th Critical Management Studies Conference, July 13th-15th 2009
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Convenors:
Katarina Buhr, Uppsala University
Steffen Böhm, University of Essex
Andrew J. Hoffman, University of Michigan


Environmental issues have once again been brought into the public spotlight fuelling an interest in studies of the political, economic, organizational and institutional activities that emerge to address them. Whereas a great deal of recent attention has been directed towards climate change, the environmental challenge we face arguably spans a significantly larger scope. Other global, regional and local environmental issues are indeed subject to calls for urgent action including water scarcity, biodiversity loss, fisheries collapse, toxic pollution, waste management and ecosystem destruction. Managerial capitalism has undoubtedly led to an overexploitation of common environmental goods over the past few centuries, and the global environmental crisis seems to now enter a crucial stage, triggering immense public interest and scrutiny. 

One starting point for the critical analysis of this challenge is to ask the question of how we got to this point in the first place - what societal processes and actions have underpinned the development of the destructive and constructive approaches to the environment we are witnessing today? This is the question of history: the history of the relationship between the environment, culture and policy; the history of movements and ideologies such as environmentalism or capitalism; and the history of environmental destruction as well as the political, corporate and technical responses that have emerged to address it. Present institutions build on the past and in the face of the seemingly monumental task of creating a truly sustainable way of living on earth, it seems sensible to ask first what underlying mechanisms in society that have constrained and allowed for change. This would entail philosophical reflections about the role of 'the environment' in modernity.

While this stream encourages historical, philosophical and theoretical perspectives of this kind, we also invite more practical approaches to tackling the contemporary environmental crises. Environmental subjects are often interrelated, touching on a great variety of cross-disciplinary and cross-policy areas, implicating many societal, political, economic and cultural issues. They activate questions of equality, equity, accountability, transparency and responsibility, not least between developed and developing countries, North and South, provoking action within and among a wide range of organizations, including corporations and their trade associations, governments, international, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, protest and campaign groups and other civil society actors, as well as large scale social movements. 

As the interest in understanding this environmental challenge increases, scholars across the social sciences are struggling to read across similar empirical phenomena and theoretical developments. In our view, it is crucial to commit ourselves to this inter-disciplinary work and explore the manifold and intriguing tangential points between different perspectives. We propose a platform to bring together scholars working in all areas of the social sciences to consider questions relating to political, economic, organizational and institutional issues of the environmental challenge, presenting both conceptual and empirical papers, and using both qualitative and quantitative methods. 

In line with the tradition of the Critical Management Studies Conference, it is also important to us to help constitute normative perspectives of 'what is to be done' about this environmental challenge we are facing. We therefore not only invite papers that discuss and critique the institutional constraints in tackling this challenge, the lack of political will and corporate inaction or 'greenwash' - we are also interested in the future: what existing responses and alternative initiatives offer a promising avenue towards sustainability? 

Potential contributors might want to consider one of the following topics:

*	Transnational environmental governance spanning public and private spheres
*	Environmental policy diffusion and national variations
*	Sustainability and environmentalism in government, corporations, non-governmental organizations and civil society
*	Critiques of contemporary environmental practices and policies
*	Histories of environmental destruction and the role of management
*	Pre-decision processes in environmental governance
*	Political economy of environment and management
*	Resistances and environmental social movements
*	Histories and futures of environmental critiques and possibilities of responses
*	Capitalism and the commodification of the environment and pollution
*	The global dimension: environmental inequalities between North and South
*	Organizational sociology of emerging environmental markets
*	What is sustainable and low-impact management and organization?
*	Cases of alternative forms of management and organization

These suggestions should not be seen as exclusive as they cover only some of the topics that contributors to the stream might want to consider.


Submissions

Abstract of no more than 1000 words are accepted until November 1st 2008 and should be submitted to Katarina Buhr ([log in to unmask]).

For further information please visit the conference website at http://group.wbs.ac.uk/cms2009


About the Convenors

Katarina Buhr is a PhD Candidate at the Department for Business Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden, where she is part of a research group on transnational governance. Her doctoral dissertation addresses the inclusion of aviation into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme from a neo-institutional perspective and is due in the autumn of 2008. katarina.buhr at fek.uu.se

Steffen Böhm is Senior Lecturer and Environment Officer at the School of Accounting, Finance and Management at the University of Essex, UK. His research interests include the political economy of management and organization, and he has recently focused on the global inequalities between South and North. He is co-founder and member of the editorial collective of the open-access journal ephemera: theory & politics in organization (www.ephemeraweb.org), and co-founder and co-editor of the new open publishing press mayflybooks (www.mayflybooks.org). He has recently published two books: Repositioning Organization Theory (Palgrave) and Against Automobility (Blackwell). steffen at essex.ac.uk

Andrew J. Hoffman is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan; with joint appointments at the Ross School of Business and the School of Natural Resources & Environment.  He is also Associate Director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. Andy has published 7 books and over 70 articles/book chapters on sustainability and business. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT, awarded jointly by the Sloan School of Management and the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Ajhoff at umich.edu