Dear colleagues,

The CMS organising committee has just announced an extended deadline of 
15 Dec for all CMS streams.
http://www.organizzazione.unina.it/cms7/

Let me therefore use this opportunity to remind you of Stream 16
http://www.organizzazione.unina.it/streams/16.pdf

Encountering Sustainability: Development, Capital and Alternative Futures

Stream 16 at the 7th International Critical Management Studies 
Conference, Naples, 11-13 July 2011


The term ‘sustainability’, which emerged from the debates over 
sustainable development in the late eighties and early nineties, can be 
found everywhere these days – in corporate annual reports, in government 
policies, in community organizations’ missions statements, in speeches 
of national and world leaders, in the business press and in the media. 
It seems as if no annual shareholder meeting, advertising campaign or 
world summit goes by without reference to sustainable business practices 
and sustainable development goals. One could therefore say, perhaps, 
that we have seen the emergence of a new hegemony of sustainability, 
involving a particular regime of corporate, state and civil society 
actors. Yet, ‘sustainability’ can also be seen as the quintessential 
‘empty signifier’, as the term means different things to different 
people and institutions, involving an array of different historical 
trajectories and struggles. Hence, encountering ‘sustainability’ first 
of all needs to involve the realization that the term is not fixed, as 
it is being deployed by different actors for different ends and 
purposes. The second thing to realize is that the heightened interest in 
all things green and sustainable occurs amidst the unbroken discourse of 
sustained economic growth that has now enmeshed most parts of the world, 
with many emerging economies proudly showing off double figure growth 
rates. This has sparked a renewed race for the control over commodities, 
from coal to uranium, from wood to soya, and from bauxite to palm oil. 
Is it a surprise that corporations involved in the production and trade 
of commodities and raw materials have outperformed other sectors at most 
stock exchanges? Yet, mega projects such as open pit mining, tar sand 
oil production and soya and eucalyptus monocultures are often sold under 
the banner of ‘sustainable development’, involving a nexus of national 
and multilateral institutions (e.g. national governments, economic 
development banks, international financial institutions as well as the 
United Nations), national and international non-governmental 
organisations (NGOs)
and other civil society actors (e.g. WWF, Oxfam, etc.) as well as the 
practices of a plethora of professionals (technocratic or otherwise) who 
are actively engaged in the construction and reconfiguration of this 
progressively imperializing reality.

Another feature to be considered is the fact that the discourse of 
‘sustainability’ remains firmly rooted in the tradition of Western 
thought, which dehistoricizes and marginalizes cosmovisions of non- 
Western cultures. Postcolonial scholarship from Africa, Asia and Latin 
America has critiqued the prevalence of Western thought that expresses 
forms of cultural and economic differences by disaggregating histories, 
transforming differences into hierarchies and by naturalizing these 
representations, reproducing asymetrical relations of power. 
Postcolonial theory and criticism explores alternative epistemologies, 
subjectivities and modes of representation that can enable critiques of 
neocolonial modes of ‘sustainability’ while promoting dialogues between 
diverse epistemic, ethical and political projects and valuing 
alternative voices and peoples. Around the globe alternative voices and 
organizations are confronting the myth of development and refusing its 
version under the rubric of ‘sustainability’. Communities facing the 
brunt of development are
resisting and proposing alternatives. Almost everywhere these movements 
have been triggered by socio-environmental conflicts and popular 
struggles for environmental justice, mainly in contexts where large 
scale projects generate risks and damages for the most vulnerable 
groups. Hence, many civil society actors, including indigenous and 
women’s groups, actively resist hegemonic discourses of ‘sustainability’ 
while formulating their own discourses and material practices of 
sustainable development.

In this stream, we invite papers that can help to foster an alternative 
understanding of ‘sustainable development’ in order to reconsider the 
concept, practice and its conditions of possibility. The broad content 
area of submissions to the stream may cover (but is not limited to) one 
or more of the following:
- What are the discursive entry-points for sustainable development?
- What are the concepts, assumptions and practices – institutional or 
otherwise – that give shape to the current policies and practices 
connected to ‘sustainable development’?
- What is the role played by market forces, political interventions, 
international agreements, and national environmental regulation in order 
to promote and implement policies and
projects associated with ‘sustainable development’?
- What is the meaning of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainability’ 
in their relation to profitability, accumulation, corporate governance, 
and corporate strategies like eco-
efficiency?
- What is the way ‘sustainability’ is being researched and taught in 
business and administration schools and its relation to corporate 
political and market strategies for seeking public legitimacy, 
‘reputational value’, premium green markets, and regulatory restraint?
- What are the institutional and professional practices that make 
possible the practice of sustainable development as policy (scientific, 
development, economic)?
- What is the interface between science and policy? What is the 
discursive framing of science in recent environmental policies and treaties?
- What is the nexus of institutions and practices that support and 
sustain the discourse of ‘sustainability’?
- How are the actions, policies and practices of multilateral 
organizations, like the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World 
Bank and the like, connected to the ‘turn’ towards ‘sustainability’?
- How is state sovereignty being reconfigured by global environmental 
politics?
- What are the mechanisms of association between State actors, 
multinational corporations and NGOs in the development and legitimation 
of mega-projects aimed at the exploitation of natural resources, such as 
oil and gas exploration and production and open pit mining?
- What is the meaning of increased military presence and humanitarian 
occupations in many parts of the world and their relation to the control 
of energy resources, water and natural biodiversity? What impact does 
the ‘securitization’ of environmental crises such as climate change 
have, involving the mobilization of national security and military 
structures for planning and response?
- What role do carbon markets and climate finance play in climate change 
mitigation, and what are their impacts on people and communities in both 
the South and the North?
- How can we critically evaluate environmental and sustainability 
reporting in accounting and non-financial reporting practices?
- How are discourses of ‘sustainable development’ entering into the 
socio-environmental struggles and conflicts emerging in Latin America, 
Africa, Asia and elsewhere?
- How are local communities and indigenous communities encountering 
and/or resisting development initiatives targeted at ‘sustainable 
development’ and the environment?
- What are the alternative notions about how life and economic 
production can be sustainably organised that are emerging from 
indigenous women popular struggles?

Submission Instructions:
Abstracts (maximum 1000 words, A4 paper, single spaced, 12 point font) 
should be submitted to [log in to unmask] by 15 December 2010.

Stream convenors:

Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Management and Associate Dean (Research) 
at the College of Business, University of Western Sydney. His research 
interests include corporate social responsibility, sustainability, the 
political economy of climate change, postcolonialism and Indigenous 
ecology. He has published widely in these areas in international 
scholarly journals. He is the author of Corporate Social Responsibility: 
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Edward Elgar). He serves on the 
editorial board of several journals and is a Senior Editor at 
Organization Studies. Contact: [log in to unmask]

[Lead convenor] Steffen Böhm is Reader in Management at the University 
of Essex. He holds a PhD from the University of Warwick. His research 
focuses on critiques of the political
economy of organization and management. He was a co-founder of the 
open-access journal ephemera: theory & politics in organization 
(www.ephemeraweb.org), and is co-founder and co-editor of the new 
open-access publishing press MayFlyBooks (www.mayflybooks.org) as well 
as Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 
(www.interfacejournal.net). He has published three books: Repositioning 
Organization Theory (Palgrave), Against Automobility (Blackwell) and 
Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets (Mayfly). 
Contact: [log in to unmask]

Vanessa Chio is an Associate Professor of Management and Director of the 
Undergraduate Program at the Milgard School of Business at the 
University of Washington Tacoma. Her
research interests include globalization and knowledge transfers, 
sustainability and the UN Global Compact, and gender, diversity and 
pedagogy. She takes an interdisciplinary approach in her research, 
drawing on insights from critical sociology, cultural and social 
anthropology, and postcolonial studies. Her publications include 
Malaysia and the Development Process: Globalization, Knowledge Transfers 
and Postcolonial Dilemmas (2005) and the co-edited volume, 
Organizations, Markets and Imperial Formations: Towards an Anthropology 
of Globalization (2009). Contact: [log in to unmask]

David L. Levy is Chair of the Department of Management and Marketing at 
the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Director of the Center for 
Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness. His research 
examines corporate strategic responses to climate change, the growth of 
the clean energy business sector, and the emergence of carbon disclosure 
as a form of governance. He also studies strategic contestation over the 
governance of controversial issues in the context of global production 
networks. He has published and lectured widely on these topics. He edits 
Climate Inc. (http://climateinc.org), a blog devoted to intelligent 
discussion of business and climate change. Contact: [log in to unmask]

Maria Ceci Misoczky coordinates the subject area of organization studies 
of the postgraduate administration program at the Federal University of 
Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brazil), where she works as a professor 
and researcher. Her research interests include the organization of 
social struggles, focusing on socio-environmental conflicts and 
anti-capitalist movements in Latin America. Contact: [log in to unmask]


____________________________________________

Dr Steffen Boehm
Reader in Management
Essex Business School
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ UK
Rm 5NW.4.4
Tel. +44(0)1206 87 3843
www.essex.ac.uk/ebs/staff/profile.aspx?ID=727
www.essex.ac.uk/ebs/ngoclinic
www.interfacejournal.net
www.mayflybooks.org