21667: Organizing with Nature: Four Perspectives

The interconnected climate and biodiversity crises, necessitate reevaluating organizations’ relationship with the natural environment. These crises are non-linear, unfold across scales, and involve complex social-ecological system dynamics, underscoring the task’s difficulty (Williams et al., 2021). Addressing this challenge requires organizing in ways that recognize organizations’ inherent ‘ecological embeddedness’ (Whiteman & Cooper, 2000, 2011) and bridging the human-nature divide in organization studies (Ergene & Calás, 2023; Good & Thorpe, 2020). Historically, organizations have shielded themselves from or sought to control nature (Gond & Nyberg, 2017). Recently, however, organizations have begun engaging with nature differently, aiming to decouple their practices from, reconnect with, or revive nature (Feddersen et al., 2024). This PDW invites submissions that theoretically and empirically explore new and emerging ways of organizing with nature. The PDW helps authors further develop their work-in-progress through presentations and roundtables by scholars that have recently advanced research on organizing with nature from five different perspectives: (1) beyond the organization-nature divide (Good & Thorpe, 2020), (2) reassembling more-than-human actors (Nadegger, 2023; Nadegger & Wegerer, 2024), (3) scale and scaling (Colombo et al., 2024), and (4) connecting business strategy to biodiversity (Unter et al., 2023).

The PDW is designed as an on-site and in-person workshop. The first part will be open to everyone, while the second part will require submission of a proposal/abstract (max. 200 words). In the first part, panelists will introduce four perspectives on organizing with nature, based on their recent scholarly contributions to the management and organization research community. During the second part, there will be one roundtable per perspective, and participants will spend 30 minutes on two roundtables of their choice. Each participant will have the opportunity to be involved in 2 roundtables. There will be one to two roundtable hosts for each roundtable to facilitate the discussion, which will combine brief feedback on participant abstracts and identify themes for future work and collaboration.