Scaling Sustainability: Regulation and Resilience in Managerial Responses to Climate Change
| Author | George Burt,Martin Parker,Brendan Lambe,Helen Goworek,Mike Zundel,Chris Land,Mike Saren |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12295 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 29, 209–219 (2018)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12295
Scaling Sustainability: Regulation and
Resilience in Managerial Responses
to Climate Change
Helen Goworek, Chris Land,1George Burt,2Mike Zundel,3Mike Saren,
Martin Parker4and Brendan Lambe5
University of Leicester School of Business, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK, 1Anglia Ruskin
University, HROB, East Road, Cambridge CB1 1PT, UK, 2University of Stirling, Centre forAdvanced
Management Education, Stirling Management School, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK, 3University of
Liverpool, Management School, Chatham Street, Liverpool L69 7ZH, UK, 4University of Bristol, Senate
House, TyndallAvenue, Bristol BS8 1TH, UK, and 5De Montfort University, Faculty of Accounting and
Finance, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK
Corresponding author email: hg77@le.ac.uk
This paper introduces the special issue of the British Journal of Management on ‘Scaling
Sustainability: Regulation and Resilience in Managerial Responsesto Climate Change’,
providing an overview of the key issues in scaling sustainability, comprising an analysis
of the six papers in the special issue. We discuss the complexrelationship between micro,
meso and macro scales, in the context of organizations’, managers’ and consumers’ com-
plicity in the creation and intensification of climate-changing conditions. In networking
multiple sites into a ‘global’ scale, managers and organizations can lose sight of the sit-
uated, localized nature of the position from which they perform the global. We conclude
that a key factor in the capacity and speed at which local actions can be scaled up is
the connection of sustainability-related activities by intermediary organizations that can
generate resonance between multiple sites through association or alliance, rather than
imposing a single logic. Thus, more resilient approaches, which acknowledge the signifi-
cance of the interconnection between scales, arerequired to eectively scale sustainability
strategies upwards or downwards.
Introduction
In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’sEve
on record.Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good
old Global Warming that our Country, but not other
countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOL-
LARS to protect against. Bundle up! (Donald Trump,
Twitter, 28.12.2017 4:01pm; @realDonaldTrump)
The guest editorial team would like to express their
gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who provided
guidance for the authors of the papers in this special
issue. We would also like to thank the speakers and par-
ticipants at the British Academy of Management 2015
conference symposium and the Management and En-
vironmental Sustainability 2016 conference, both of
which focused on Scaling Sustainability, and led to the
development and publication of this special issue.
The adverse eects of global climate change
become increasingly dicult to ignore (Wright
and Nyberg, 2017): extreme weather spells cause
havoc in ever more rapid succession; atmospheric
concentration of CO2reached record levels in
2016 (World Meteorological Organization, 2017);
glaciers and ice caps recede and vanish; and so
do those animals and peoples who live o these
ecosystems. It has been estimated that200 years of
human activity will have fundamentally changed
the Earth’s climate by the end of the twenty-first
century to the same extent as the time since the
last Ice Age, thus impacting upon each continent
and at all levels of analysis in whichorganizational
scholars are interested (Howard-Grenville et al.,
2014).
C2018 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
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