Call for Papers – Special Issue 2018 Scaling Sustainability: Regulation and Resilience in Managerial Responses to Climate Change
| Date | 01 July 2016 |
| Published date | 01 July 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12183 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 27, 672–674 (2016)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12183
British Journal of Management
Call for Papers – Special Issue 2018
Scaling Sustainability: Regulation and Resilience
in Managerial Responses to Climate Change
Paper submission deadline: 1 December 2016
How can the global problem of climate change be connected to the actions of individuals and organisa-
tions? This special issue builds on the topic of a symposium within the British Academy of Management
2015 Sustainable and Responsible SIG track, which comprised a chaired panel discussion focusing on how
scaling can contribute to future business and management research on sustainability. We invite a broad
range of theoretical and empirical contributions focussing on the scaling of sustainabilityinitiatives, con-
necting supra-national regulation, sponsoredby inter-governmental bodies, via regional, community, and
organisational projects, to localised and individual activities. Discussions may explore forms of sustain-
ability across dierent levels of analysis, examining the hinge elements articulating the movement and
translation of action between scales, but we also encourage investigations of how we can understand the
movements of action across scales, for example: from individual activism to organisational change; from
intergovernmental regulationt o community action; from community action to regional and national ini-
tiatives; and from organisational action to institutional change. We also invite explorations of how re-
searchers understand the mechanisms and processes that enable environmental sustainability initiatives
to move between scales, as well as deriving practical implications for the management of sustainabil-
ity across scales and how these may be translated into sustainability-driven managerial initiatives across
scales.
The adverse eects of global climate change become increasingly dicult to ignore. While climate
change deniers wage ideological campaigns against the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence
and the repeating images of floods, storms and droughts, it seems that the frequency and ferocious
devastation brought about by such events can no longer be disregarded or marginalised into insurance
risk calculations. Business, management and organisation studies are complicit in the creation and
intensification of these conditions, adding ever-new possibilities to let goods, finances, and guilt circulate:
from carbon markets, emissions regulations and targets set by national governments and supra-national
NGOs already impacting on the global organisation of production to the proliferation of ever-new
organisational configurations whose characteristics no longer correspond to the demands and governing
influence of production or commerce, but to global tax loopholes. New technologies in the green
industries, as well as more contentious practices like fracking, not only present investment and growth
opportunities in an otherwise moribund economic context, but are located at an interesting intersection
of scales, transecting the individual entrepreneur or dealer, organisational strategies and environmental
audits, governmental regulation, and transnational pressures from NGOs and social movement pressure
groups.
Despite being faced with this ecological complexity, much of the popular discourse on sustainability
remains focussed on single levels of analysis;a ‘bag of tricks’ thrown at individual symptoms in ignorance
of the wider patterns that connect the world of living things (Bateson, 1972: 439). This, coupled with
the persistent idea that markets are animated by ‘choices’, makes it only consistent to conclude that it
© 2016 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
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