13216: Place-Based Organizing with Nature: The What, How, and Why of Place in Organization-Nature Relations

Finalist for the OMT Division Best Symposium Award

Examples have shown that attention to place is essential for developing solutions to tackle social-ecological crises, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and social conflict and inequalities. Organizing with nature, to integrate nature into organizational processes rather than to control, utilize, and exploit it as resources (e.g., Dentoni, 2024; Ergene, Banerjee, & Hoffman, 2021; Howard-Grenville & Lahneman, 2021), is thus not universal but place-based and requires organizations to have ecological knowledge of a place (Kourula, Georgallis, Henriques, & Mair, 2024; Rahman, Nguyen, & Slawinski, 2024). Place, a multidimensional concept, refers to “a built or natural landscape, possessing a unique geographical location, invested with meaning” (Shrivastava & Kennelly, 2013: 84) and is “shaped by, and further shape(s), people’s everyday social life and interactions” (Dacin, Zilber, Cartel, & Kibler, 2024: 1192). From the lens of organization-nature relations, a place is material, already organized with nature, and continuously constituted through actors, both human and other-than-human, interacting with one another through time. Despite some scholarly attempts in this direction, there remains a lack of understanding of how organizations can better acknowledge their deep entanglement with nature in a place and identify place- based approaches toward sustainable organizing in their local environment (Kourula et al., 2024; Shrivastava & Kennelly, 2013). With the occasion of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2025 to be outside of North America and in Copenhagen for the first time, this panel symposium aims to draw our scholarly attention toward place- based organizing with nature. The symposium invites a joint conversation between the panelists and audience to collectively do phenomenon-based theorizing that “leverages real-world phenomena as inspiration or motivation for theory development or refinement” (Fisher, Mayer, & Morris, 2021: 632), which can be then “applied in specific contexts of practice” through engaged scholarship (Van De Ven & Johnson, 2006: 803). Together, we will critically examine the what, how, and why of place as organizations incorporate nature into their organizational processes.