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Abstract

The overarching purpose of this article is to add to the theorization of the Anthropocene in organization studies by investigating how long-term planetary concerns can be better accounted for in organizing. To do so, the article draws on the scholarship of Jacques Rancière to show how the dichotomy of nature and culture shapes the dominant framings of organizing, and to outline premises for artistic, scholarly and political interventions into the status quo that could aid the process of making our entanglements with the geo-biophysical politically viable. The article concludes that the Anthropocene can add to a renewal of organizational and political decision-making processes through a radical rethinking of the liberal humanist separation of nature and culture and related concepts such as democracy and political subjecthood.

Keywords

Anthropocene climate change dissensus Earth system environmental politics geological turn Jacques Rancière organizing resistance social change

Introduction

The Anthropocene as a proposed term for a new geological epoch, superseding the Holocene, means that Anthropos, or humanity as a collective, acting as a geological agent on planetary scale, is now interfering with the functioning of the Earth system¹ (Steffen et al., 2015). In many significant regards, the planetary shift of which the term Anthropocene alerts us has already happened, and even in the most optimistic scenarios pertaining to the state of the Earth at the end of the 21st century, we will still need to live with and make sense of its consequences. Thus, the urgency to address the Anthropocene is, at least in part, driven by the serious consequences changes in the Earth system threaten to bring to human societies. However, the complexity and scale of the anthropogenic impact on the Earth system seems to be difficult to fully incorporate into existing policy frameworks, wherein short-term socio-economic preoccupations are continuously prioritized (Clark and Yusoff, 2017; Levy and Spicer, 2013). As Last (2017) puts it, this leaves humanity ‘geophysically active but politically passive’ (p. 163).

Growing awareness of humanity’s unprecedented geo-biophysical² impact on a planetary scale is also reflected in the recent calls for organization studies scholars to investigate the future of organizations on a warmer planet (Howard-Grenville et al., 2014), to pay closer attention to issues regarding social change and climate democracy (Wittneben et al., 2012), and to explore the relationship between the social and the geological in order to contribute to a radical rethinking of organizing (Wright et al., 2013). Moreover, the Anthropocene as a vantage point suggests that such a radical rethinking would require theorizing beyond the dichotomy of culture and nature, central for Modernity and liberal humanist tradition, and thus challenging the prevailing understanding of politics, society and economy (Clark and Yusoff, 2017; Hamilton et al., 2015; Latour, 2017).

Given these broad concerns, the overarching purpose of this article is to add to the theorization of the Anthropocene in organization studies by investigating how geo-biophysical concerns can be reattached to organizing. More specifically, I draw on the scholarship of Jacques Rancière in order to show how the dichotomy of nature and culture enables the exclusion of the natural world and planetary concerns in predominant modes of organizing. Furthermore, I postulate a way of moving beyond the separation of nature and culture, opening up for scholarly contributions and political interventions that could help transform the field of available political and organizational possibilities. In order to give empirical depth to the theoretical arguments of the article, I use illustrative case of opposition to fossil fuel extraction.

Explicit theoretical engagements with the Anthropocene and the Earth system are new to the field of organization studies (Gosling and Case, 2013; Whiteman et al., 2013; Wright and Nyberg, 2015). However, existing research suggests that we need to go beyond the dominant short-term, market-oriented and socio-economic organizational and political focus in order to fully address our geo-biophysical impact (Banerjee, 2008; Böhm et al., 2012; Buhr, 2012; Levy and Spicer, 2013; Wittneben et al., 2012; Wright and Nyberg, 2015). In consequence, a growing number of critical scholars are arguing for a re-structuring of the political economy in order to accommodate both our dependence on and negative impacts on the Earth, with proposals, for example, for more sustainable forms of capitalism (Jackson, 2016; Newell and Paterson, 2015), circular economy (Pearce and Turner, 1990; Stahel, 2016) or eco-socialist forms of governance (Angus, 2016; Smith, 2016). This article argues that critical engagements with the Anthropocene can add to theoretical and political renewal of the status quo. In order to do this, radical rethinking of the liberal humanist separation of nature and culture, and related concepts such as democracy, progress and personhood are required. Here, the scholarship of Jacques Rancière (1998, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010) is particularly useful. While Jacques Rancière is not a theorist of the Anthropocene, his work is a distinct development of political theory beyond liberal humanism and the dichotomy of nature and culture. Thus, the contribution of this article is twofold: to show how these dichotomies shape the dominant framings of organizing, and to outline premises for artistic, scholarly and political interventions into the status quo, which could aid the process of making our entanglements with the geo-biophysical politically viable.

This article is organized as follows. First, I discuss the implications of theorizing Anthropocene in organization studies and outline the research problem this article addresses. Second, I introduce two key concepts from Jacques Rancière’s scholarship as a way to theorize the relationship between organizing and the Anthropocene. Third, I present an empirical example, based on the case of opposition to fossil fuel extraction, in order to illustrate the applications and contributions of Rancière’s framework. The article ends with a discussion and conclusions.

Theoretical framework

The Anthropocene and organization studies

The recognition that we are now in the geological epoch of the Anthropocene casts many of the debates on the human environmental impact, the climate change and the Earth in a new light. The Anthropocene emphasizes the need to continue to research and theorize phenomena such as climate change as an expression of human geo-biophysical capacity, as it also calls for a sharp break from the liberal humanist assumptions many contemporary debates of environmental degradation and global warming rest on. More specifically, the Anthropocene brings with it three major implications for scholarly inquiry. First, it indicates that the natural history of Earth and the social history of mankind are intimately intertwined, despite differences in time upon which they typically unfold (Chakrabarty, 2009). Second, it implies the need to go beyond a narrow focus on the climate change, toward a systemic understanding of the planet as a set of interconnected systems, thresholds and boundaries, which humanity has either crossed or is crossing, putting the Earth system into a radically new state (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2011). And third, it suggests that many of the foundational concepts of our societies, such as agency, freedom, reflexivity and autonomy, stemming from the liberal humanist view that ascribes sovereignty to rationality and human intellect over the natural world and the body are in a need of being taken apart and radically rethought (Hamilton et al., 2015).

The conceptual shift that the Anthropocene calls for challenges the traditional firm-centered preoccupations of management and organization scholars and practitioners (Banerjee, 2002; Bansal and Hoffman, 2012; Jermier, 2013; Prasad and Elmes, 2005). As Prasad and Elmes (2005) note, the topics of nature and environment moved from a position of systematic neglect among management practitioners and scholars into the management mainstream as recently as during the late 1990s and early 2000s, in part due to the special issues in Academy of Management Review (Starik and Rands, 1995) and Academy of Management Journal (Starik and Marcus, 2000). Since, growing societal pressure to acknowledge the environmental impact of corporate activities has resulted in the invention of a wide range of corporate ‘greening’ activities under the banners of Corporate Environmentalism, Environmental Management and Corporate Social Responsibility (Banerjee, 2011; Bowen and Aragon-Correa, 2014; Nyberg et al., 2013). However, corporate attempts to engage in sustainable business have been critiqued for lacking systematic and thorough evaluation based on scientifically grounded measures of their geo-biophysical impact (Banerjee, 2011) and for advocating voluntary action as the driver of social change only to the extent that it privileges firm growth and profitability (Nyberg and Wright, 2012). In a similar vein, research on organizing and global warming, with particular focus on carbon emissions and the fossil fuels industries, suggests that concerns with global warming have generated a new set of corporate initiatives and concepts such as carbon disclosure; yet, the overall effect of such initiatives, from the point of view of release of CO₂ into the atmosphere, seem to have little substantial effects in stopping or significantly reducing it (Wittneben et al., 2012).

Thus, concerns with the natural world and the future of the planet appear to be continuously assimilated into the value regime of capitalism through a process of de-politicization, that is, smoothing over radical forms of critique, related to potential dangers and long-term implications of corporate geo-biophysical impact and the unequal distribution of political rights and influence (Böhm et al., 2012; Wright and Nyberg, 2015). For example, the lack of decisive action regarding CO₂ emissions appears to be impaired by privileging the short-term economic interests and hopes for market innovations in the dominant socio-political imaginaries concerning fossil fuels (Lefsrud and Meyer, 2012; Levy and Spicer, 2013; Wright et al., 2012: 2012). In this regard, if geo-biophysical agency of humanity is, as Dalby (in Johnson et al., 2014: 442) formulates it, ‘[…] what industrial capitalist humanity is now making in its carbon fuel powered global economy’, numerous scholars suggest that adequate responses to it are unlikely to be created within the confines of the prevailing socio-economic order, at least not without considerable interventions (Angus, 2016; Banerjee, 2008; Newell and Paterson, 2015; Wittneben et al., 2012; Wright et al., 2013; Wright and Nyberg, 2015).

A growing number of critical scholarly contributions propose either a reformation or a radical restructuring of the global economy in order to better accommodate planetary concerns (Angus, 2016; Newell and Paterson, 2015; Smith, 2016; Stahel, 2016; Wright and Nyberg, 2015). While the exact details of what such a reformation would entail vary between different authors, recurrent themes are more sustainable resource use, de-growth, changed consumption patterns and service-oriented economy. Other scholars remind us that the future of the planet demands more of us than just balancing the carbon emission books, because the changing Earth is and will be impacting different populations unequally, increasing the polarization between the elites and the already disadvantaged groups (Böhm et al., 2012; Klein, 2015). Typically, the proposed paths to instituting change are large-scale interventionist public policies and/or activism (Wittneben et al., 2012; Wright and Nyberg, 2015). Yet, the question is how issues pertaining to the planet could be properly represented politically and if the public would be interested in sacrificing immediate socio-economic benefits for the future generations.

The Anthropocene with its long-term timescales and multi-systemic approach may seem a further challenge to instituting policies that accommodate both short-term socio-economic and long-term planetary interests. However, it can also serve as a point of departure for a radical political and conceptual renewal. Such a renewal could take place by problematizing conceptual categories and policy constructs which have their roots in the liberal humanist tradition, and permeate our organizational and political lives. In line with Hamilton’s et al. (2015) argument, these concepts appear to be inadequate to make sense of the Anthropocene in at least two interconnected respects: they rely on a sharp separation of nature and culture, and they encourage decision-making on a short-term temporal scale. Thus, the insertion of geo-biophysical concerns into social theory in general and organization theory in particular would require working with hybrid entities—comprising human and geo-biophysical elements—and extending decision-making timeframes to incorporate events unfolding on intergenerational and geo-biophysical temporal scales. Moreover, such rethinking would have to take place vis-à-vis existing categories and concerns, and timeframes, placing emphasis on the process through which it could enter broader discussions and debates.

Thus, this article takes its point of departure in the overarching question of radically rethinking conceptual premises for and the process of inserting geo-biophysical concerns into social theory and practice. To do so, the article draws on the scholarship of Jacques Rancière. While Rancière (1998, 2004, 2006, 2009,2010) is not a scholar of the Anthropocene, at the heart of his scholarship lies a concern with emancipatory politics and social change. More specifically, Rancière focuses on the process through which the historically excluded can assert their rights vis-à-vis the state and demand recognition and equality. Here, we must be careful not to succumb to the temptation to think of nature and culture as two separate domains, assuming that Rancière’s scholarship is only on the politics of various human groups. Rather, his scholarship is a particular addition to a long tradition of critique of liberal humanism and its narrow definitions of political subjecthood, allowing theorization of both human and non-human political subjects. For example—as shown by feminist, critical race and postcolonial scholars—women, non-white and indigenous populations have historically been excluded from the public and political domains precisely because they were deemed to belong to the domain of nature, not culture (Beasley, 1999; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Gandhi, 1998). In other words, such critical traditions call for embodied and embedded forms of personhood and political agency, including human entanglements with the non-human, as illustrated by development of concepts such as the cyborg (Haraway, 1985; Wark, 2015) and the posthuman (Cohen et al., 2016: 2016; Lykke and Braidotti, 1996) or the theorization beyond the dichotomies of for example, nature and culture (Latour, 1993; Povinelli, 2016), human and animal (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; Haraway, 1989), subject and object (Rose, 2007) and human and machine (Suchman, 2007). Rancère’s scholarship extends this line of reasoning by pointing toward concrete ways liberal humanist limitations can be overcome and new—and hybrid—political subjects made a part of the policy-making and broader political debates.

The strength of Rancière’s conceptual framework lies in that it has the potential to incorporate many different constructs of non-dichotomous political subjecthood, which is particularly relevant in relation to the planetary scale of the Anthropocene. Moreover, Rancière’s scholarship puts a particular emphasis on the process through which new forms of political subjecthood can gain broader visibility and political valence, contributing to the question of activism, justice and democracy under the conditions of Anthropocene. Thus, in the next section, I provide an outline of two key concepts from Rancière’s scholarship and discuss them in close relationship to the Anthropocene, followed by an illustrative example of how Rancière’s framework can be applied to policy framings of and opposition to unconventional oil and gas extraction methods.

Looking at the Anthropocene through the lens of Jacques Rancière

The relevance of Rancière’s scholarship for the Anthropocene lies in his work on emancipatory politics and social change. As the literature overview in the previous section suggests, decisive collective action regarding the anthropogenic impact on the planet is often obstructed by socio-political framings, or imaginaries, that privilege short-term socio-economic gains and the maintenance of the status quo (Levy and Spicer, 2013). Moreover, while the Anthropocene alerts us of the intertwined relationship between humanity and the Earth system, they tend to be treated as two separate sets of considerations within policy framings. In this regard, Rancière’s scholarship provides a set of concepts through which such delimitations can be rendered visible and alternative modes of political intervention and subjecthood can be theorized. More specifically, the concepts that will be introduced in this section are the order of the police and politics. The order of the police is Rancière’s (1998, 2004, 2009, 2010) term for the underlying structure of collective decision-making, and on a deeper level, also those guiding assumptions which inform dominant imaginaries, framings and policies. Politics, in turn, is the process through which new political subjects gain visibility and political legitimacy.

The first of Rancière’s concepts I draw on is the order of the police, which can be applied to analyze any institutionalized decision-making process, both on organizational and governmental levels (Rancière, 2004). The order of the police strives to maintain the institutionalized social order—and a general consensus on the viability of the order itself—through division of times, spaces, tasks, roles and social positions. Moreover, the order of the police defines and distributes legitimate forms of visibility, speech and participation in the decision-making through separation and exclusion. For example, in a representative democracy, the governing of the nation is done by political parties and professional politicians, and to some extent by courts and state authorities. Everyone else’s participation is not only limited through the space-time of elections and lawsuits, but also conditioned on being recognized as a legal person with legal capacity, which typically applies to adult citizens and formalized organizations.

The concept of the order of the police is particularly important in relation to the Anthropocene, as it brings to our attention a large number of entities and populations, such as the future generations or vanishing species, which have no formal status and thus no legitimate claims in the decision-making processes. In consequence, they can be easily sidestepped for the benefit of other higher-valued or more pressing issues and stakeholders. On a conceptual level, the categories and constructs behind our legal frameworks and notions of personhood remain strongly influenced by liberal humanism, which separates and elevates mind over body and culture over nature, also separating and elevating our everyday cultural, social and economic concerns over our long-term geo-biophysical impact on the planet.

The apparent separation and exclusion of our geo-biophysical impact from our everyday preoccupations resonates with Rancière’s (2010) observation that the order of the police produces an excluded, supplementary part of that community that is allotted no legitimate position of visibility within it. In this regard, the Anthropocene is an excellent illustration of how such a supplementary part is produced through exclusion, as every governmental and corporate decision that does not take the anthropogenic impact of our socio-economic actions into consideration also allows such impact to continue to accumulate. And even if the excluded part can be brought to the public attention by spokespeople or experts, the spokesperson role itself, as Rancière (2004) suggests, is a product of the order of the police. This spokesperson role is rooted in a hierarchy of topics and modes of production within which only certain groups are allotted time, space and culturally legitimate modes of expression to produce statements and artifacts that are viewed as representative or otherwise significant for the collective. In our societies, the role of spokesperson or expert is typically assigned to scientists, artists and authors, as a reflection of our valorization of culture and intellect. Thus, celebrity campaigns, for example, for the plight of the polar bears might alert us of the melting polar ice, but as long as they take place within the a priori established framework of political possibilities, they do not amount to what Rancière refers to as politics.

The second of Rancière’s concepts I employ is his notion of politics. Politics, in contrast to the order of the police, is a very particular act of disagreement or dissensus with the order of the police that arises ‘[…] when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part’ (Rancière, 1998: 11). The emphasis here is on the word institution, in the sense of constituting and asserting a new political subject that is otherwise not recognized by the order of the police. In effect, the political subject that Rancière (2004) envisions exceeds those conceptual and legal categories that separate and exclude:

Politics exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted, a supernumerary subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, and functions in a society. (p. 51)

In this regard, Rancière (2010) points to a need to think across and beyond categories that delimit our understanding of who and what may possess the capacity to act as a legal political subject. Moreover, from Rancière’s point of view, there is a fundamental tension between sympathizing with or protesting on the behalf of the excluded, which he views as belonging to the domain of phône, or noise and affect, and making politically valid or judicially legal claims, which he names the domain of logos, or legitimate speech. Making noise is important for politics, but noise alone is insufficient to achieve change. This tension is reflected in the contemporary debates on the Anthropocene wherein human geo-biophysical agency in its full spectrum figures primarily in the Earth scientists’ reporting, yet is without proper representation in the legal domain. Without proper political representation, the reports from climate scientists and environmental experts evoke affective responses from the public, such as protest, climate anxiety, passionate pleas of either hope or action, or other emotionally laden reactions, similar to the case of emotionology as described by Wright and Nyberg (2012).

Thus, the conditions that Rancière sets up for a political act are very specific. A political act is defined by political claims on behalf of collective causes and new political subjects that transcend the taken-for-granted divisions and categories of the order of the police. From this point of view, the politics of disagreement can play out in several forms, either as noise, or as litigation. One form would be insurrectionist movements that gather diverse groups under one banner, as, for example, the recent protests in Australia against the Adani coal mine (Cooper, 2017). Another form would be scholarly, literary and artistic work that engages with and subverts categorization, underpinning the order of the police, as, for example, ‘We are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene’ exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.³ A third form of politics would be a process of litigation, demanding legal rights and recognition of personhood for previously unrecognized entities, which I explore in more detail in the next section on legal opposition to fossil fuel extraction. Or as Rancière (2003) formulates it:

Politics in general … […] is about the very configuration of the visible and the relation of the visible to what can be said about it. (p. 3)

In the case of the Anthropocene, such a view of politics suggests that it is not possible to fully accommodate the planetary concerns within the order of the police. Many of our collective actions are both embedded in the geo-biophysical and generate a geo-biophysical trace, impacting the Earth system. Therefore, our relation to the Earth system is not one consideration among others, but a supplementary part of all our actions. Certainly, suggestions to evaluate corporate activities using natural scientific measures of our geo-biophysical impact is a step in this direction (Banerjee, 2011). However, within the current policy framework, we usually only capture a fraction of our current and future impacts on the planet; attempts to go beyond these scattered fragments would require a radical change in how we understand and perceive our world, also in legal and policy terms.

The recasting of the field of political alternatives and possibilities can also be represented through artistic, literary and scholarly work, which Rancière (1998, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010) himself explores in many of his works. Moreover, in line with his notion of a heterogeneous political subject, Rancière (2004) suggests such work of representation would require challenging those conceptual categories that would otherwise delimit our way of speaking and thinking. As discussed earlier, intellectual production is problematic because it is typically elevated and highly valued, yet separated from both domains of nature and direct interventions into policy. Thus, truly subversive works of art, literature and scholarship would risk eradicating those elevated platforms of artists and scholars that give them access to visibility. In other words, giving a central role to that which is culturally devalued and politically excluded risks casting the work of such a spokesperson as artistically or scientifically compromised. However, scholars, authors and artists who are willing to take these risks can contribute to the political reframing of the Anthropocene. To illustrate the usefulness of Rancière’s concepts of police and politics in theorizing the Anthropocene, the next section outlines examples of both artistic and legal political acts that have attempted to reconfigure the field of visibility and political subjecthood vis-à-vis Canadian and US policies regarding unconventional extraction of fossil fuels.

Illustrative example: opposing fossil fuel development

In this section, the case of unconventional extraction of fossil fuels, such as hydraulic fracturing of oil and shale gas and tar sands processing, is used as an empirical illustration of how Rancière’s framework can be deployed to engage with issues, associated with the Anthropocene. More specifically, the case of unconventional extraction technologies serves as an example of the socio-political framing of those human enterprises that bring with them geological, chemical and climatic effects on several scales, ranging from dangers to the surrounding communities to increased risks of seismic activity in the region and further greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, as these technologies are met by considerable protest, the case also includes examples of resistance that resonate with Rancière’s notion of politics and political art.

The illustrative example of fossil fuel extraction is used here in line with Costas and Fleming’s (2009) suggestion that such illustrations first and foremost add empirical depth to the development of concepts and novel theoretical directions. Thus, it is not so much an in-depth analysis of the fossil fuels industry as such, as it is a discussion of how typical justifications for the perpetuation of this industry can be understood as the order of police, which distributes and delimits the socio-political framing of the alternatives to fossil fuel extraction. More importantly, if the Anthropocene implies a sharp break from the conceptual separation of human and natural domains in contemporary policy, the two examples of resistance outlined below provide concrete illustrations of how deeply entrenched this separation is, and how disagreement and reconfiguration of the legal and conceptual divisions, which Rancière views as central to politics, can play out in real life settings.

Hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’ is a prime example of hitherto unconventional oil and natural gas extraction technologies, used to exploit otherwise difficult-to-access fossil fuel reserves (Jackson et al., 2014). These technologies involve hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, followed by an injection of chemicals to enable the gas and oil to flow to the surface in order to access natural gas and oil formations within otherwise low-permeable rock formations. The dangers of fracking are many, such as water and air pollution, greenhouse emissions, seismic activity (even in areas with previously little or no such previous activity otherwise), destruction of ecosystems and negative impacts on surrounding communities, as fracking tends to be an invasive large-scale operation, often taking place ‘literally in people’s backyards’ (Jackson et al., 2014). However, these dangers are typically presented vis-à-vis economic benefits of increased oil and gas production, together with the notion that fracking is ‘the lesser evil’ when compared to coal (Jackson et al., 2014). Typically, governments in countries that allow unconventional fossil fuel extraction such as fracking present unconventional oil and gas extraction as a fast lane to cheap and stable energy supply, increased jobs and revenues, framed in a quantifiable short-term perspective (Nyberg et al., 2017). At best, the immediate risk reduction for local communities through technological innovation is presented as the key issue in the debate, with only a passing mention of the long-term and large-scale issues concerning fracking’s planetary impacts through, for example, seismic activity, ecosystem disruption and greenhouse gas emissions (Jackson et al., 2014). Thus, as Nyberg et al. (2017) suggest, fracking is legitimized by economic impact and immediate socio-economic trade-offs as a distinct temporal framing and a hierarchy of priorities, downplaying negative impacts for human settlements, environment, and the planet.

The debates surrounding fracking and other fossil fuel developments provide a tangible example of how the continuation of negative human impact on the planet and its many constitutive systems is legitimized through the order of the police, that is, institutionalized hierarchic division of positions, arguments, time, tasks and roles. Ultimately, the task of deciding how to weigh different propositions for and against unconventional fossil fuel extraction methods such as fracking is in the hands of the government. And the debate at the level of government tends to delimit the space-time of concern to the immediate safety of those populations that are directly affected, putting that in relation to the short-term socio-economic gains of the region and the nation. The short-term focus is also likely to be influenced by the fairly short mandate periods creating pressure for the governing parties to show fast and quantifiable results (Jackson et al., 2014; Nyberg et al., 2017).

One of the central problems that the example of unconventional fossil fuels extraction illustrates is the lack of adequate legal and conceptual terminology that could support alternative political framings of the relationship between human societies and the planet, for example, by incorporating both the immediate effects on the ecosystems but also geo-biophysical impacts on a longer time scale. What we can see in the current policy framings is the separation of natural and human worlds, wherein nature on any scale, be it local, national or planetary, is continuously treated only in terms of measurable and immediate utility to human societies. Moreover, these policy framings also operate through a temporal exclusion of time-scales that stretch beyond a few years into the future, making it difficult to make legitimate political claims on behalf of, for example, future generations. Thus, even if scientific evidence from the Earth sciences supports the notion of entanglements between human societies and the Earth system with its many constituents on several different time scales, these concerns are not leading to any decisive political action.

However, unconventional fossil fuel extraction is also generating considerable protest from many different stakeholders, ranging from local populations, not seldom overrepresented by indigenous groups that have their settlements in the affected areas, to environmental activists and concerned members of the civil society. And if we wish to extend the concept of disagreement to the natural world, the affected species, ecosystems and landscapes tend to respond negatively, and can be seen as (in their own way) disagreeing. However, much of this disagreement plays out on the level of phône, or noise and affect, to use Rancière’s (2004, 2010) terminology, as the protest at best stalls government attempts to pass a policy or implement a decision, or delays the building of dams and pipelines that are important for keeping the oil and gas business running smoothly. However, alongside protest which makes ‘noise’, there are examples of resistance against the fossil fuels industry that play out in the legal domain of logos. Below, I present two examples of such resistance.

The first example concerns a recent lawsuit, filed in 2017 on the behalf of Colorado River ecosystem for personhood rights (Turkewitz, 2017). While the gas and oil industry has not been named as the exclusive driving cause for the lawsuit, it nevertheless figures in the context of the lawsuit and the problems associated with the Colorado River. Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, three states connected to the water supply of the Colorado River ecosystem, are also home for the hydraulic fracturing industry, working to access large deposits of oil and gas. In 2014, a storage tank broke and leaked 178 barrels of crude oil into the river, adding to the fears regarding the toxicity of the water supply and the risks of future oil leaks (D’Alessandro, 2014; Mangmeechai et al., 2014). Moreover, the environmental group behind the lawsuit, Deep Green Resistance, is involved in supporting indigenous protest again the construction of pipelines by the tar sands and shale gas industry in the region. While the case was swiftly dismissed by the US District Court, it nevertheless led to national and international news coverage and questioning of the legal view of nature as property under the law. An ecosystem with personhood rights would have rights similar to those of a corporation, making it possible for it (through appointed custodians) to make legal claims and to be inserted into policy-making processes. On a conceptual level, granting personhood rights to an ecosystem is a very tangible way of challenging the nature—culture divide in contemporary policy framings, not merely because an ecosystem becomes a legal person, but also because its boundaries are essentially unclear and could include local human settlements, species, and other biological and geological entities and formations, operating on multiple time scales. While one single lawsuit, even a successful one, does not automatically resolve many of the issues associated with the flourishing of the ecosystems in the contemporary world, it changes the relation of forces at play and enables a continuous process of litigation over rights, compensation, and protection.

The second example of politics of disagreement in the legal domain brings us to the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, and the connecting Northern Gateway Pipeline. Issues, associated with existing and proposed pipeline construction in the region include massive oils spills, governmental permissions to build on unsurrendered First Nations’ land, negative impacts on the surrounding ecosystems and the suspicion that toxic chemicals are already leaking into Alberta’s groundwater (Taylor, 2014).⁴ In this particular case, artist Peter von Tiesenhausen grew tired of developers interested in building a pipeline across his land (Keefe, 2014). Thus, using a legal countermove, he claimed legal copyright over a white picket fence in the vicinity of the projected pipeline, arguing that it was a piece of art. The copyright, which the fence was granted, effectively stopped any further inquiries on the behalf of the pipeline constructors. As the artist himself notes, it is a little unclear where the boundary of the artwork goes. The fence is clearly connected to the land on which it stands, possibly also to the vegetation surrounding it, while he himself adds a small section to the fence each year to extend the fence in space as well as in time. In this regard, the artistic authorship and the legal rights supporting it are deployed to act politically, and through that act accomplish a reconstitution of the relationship between art, as highly valorized expression of culture, and nature, which has solely property status in the eyes of the law. Moreover, this example also illustrates the thoroughly hierarchical nature of the categorization that underpins our relationship to culture and nature, reflected in the contemporary policy and legal framework. Clearly, it is not the fence itself that carries any particular value. Rather, it is the authorship of the artist that is protected by copyright laws for the duration of the artist’s life and at least 50 years beyond. These time frames are much longer than those deployed by governments when drafting policies regarding the geo-biophysical impact of the fossil fuel industry.

Thus, these empirical examples of fossil fuel extraction illustrate how the limitations of contemporary policy framings regarding human geo-biophysical impact together with the politics that challenge them can be theorized with the help of Rancière’s framework. While Rancière does not actually suggest that politics must be theorized as strictly limited to the legal domain, particularly not in relation to artistic and scholarly interventions, his framework nevertheless suggests that societal change requires engagement with conceptual and legal principles that organize that society. This has significant implications for our understanding of organizing in response to the Anthropocene which I discuss in more detail in the next section.

Discussion

The case of opposition to fossil fuel extraction illustrates the distinct contributions that Rancière’s framework brings to scholarly engagements with the Anthropocene in organization studies. Rancière’s concept of the order of the police provides a theoretical basis for rendering visible those institutionalized assumptions and decision-making structures through which our entanglements with the Earth system are largely excluded from policy-making and organizing. Furthermore, Rancière’s concept of politics provides a distinct set of premises for crafting out political, scholarly and artistic interventions that subvert these delimitations and exclusions. Finally, Rancière’s framework opens up for the broader and more speculative debates regarding the potential renewal of our organizational and political lives in the Anthropocene by radically rethinking the philosophical foundation of Modernity and liberal humanism.

As the illustrative example of fossil fuel extraction suggests, the order of the police is a useful concept to identify the delimitations and separations that place the Earth system, humanity’s geo-biophysical capacity together with populations with little political influence, future generations, other species, ecosystems and geological formations partially or fully outside of the decision processes on the organizational and governmental levels. While existing research supports the observation that corporations and governments continue to prioritize short-term economic targets over long-term planetary initiatives (Levy and Spicer, 2013; Nyberg et al., 2017; Wittneben et al., 2012), Rancière’s scholarship offers a possibility to develop this line of critique in organization studies with a particular focus on the temporal frames and the liberal humanist dichotomous view of nature and culture. The order of the police can serve as a framework for a detailed investigation of delimitations in the decision-making procedures through, for example, a short-term time perspective, distinct arenas for decision-making, a particular distribution of roles for representing various standpoints and established criteria on what qualifies as an issue. This line of inquiry bears relevance for making sense of constraints to engaging with long-term planetary concerns in governmental policies, corporate activities and even various forms of activism that privilege our socio-economic preoccupations, for example, the Divestment movement.⁵

In addition to the outlining of delimitations, Rancière’s concept of politics points to the premises for scholarly, artistic and political interventions that could transform the field of available possibilities. Typically, existing research on anthropogenic impact on the planet either provides us with accounts of why short-term, market-oriented solutions do not work or proposes alternative socio-economic systems that might address these issues differently (Angus, 2016; Banerjee, 2008; Böhm et al., 2012; Lefsrud and Meyer, 2012; Newell and Paterson, 2015). Aside from market solutions, other available methods of change we have are large-scale government policies, which would require a considerable mobilization of voters. However, a critical stance to liberal humanism means questioning the view that Anthropocene is an issue of knowledge and the assumption that the public would demand an alternative social order if only they understood that the planet is at risk. From this point of view, there are two major limitations to this idea. Individual citizens are not exempt from the burden of short-term socio-economic preoccupations, making long-term sustained protest difficult. And, under the conditions of the Anthropocene, unlike all previous politic struggles, a significant majority of the voters is expected to be willing and capable to either vote for or protest on the behalf of future generations and the planet. In this regard, a provocatively Rancièrian response would be to ask if we really transform the field of possibilities by making decisions, good or bad, on the behalf of stakeholders and entities with no actual representation in the deliberation of such decisions. Rather, Rancière’s view of politics suggests that change within the existing socio-economic system requires attributing sovereignty and political agency to those entities that currently lack political representation altogether.

The Earth and nature have so far been legally protected only as property under the law, and thus subjected to human struggles over nature, typically on the dimension of exploitation versus conservation. However, 2017 has been a significant year in the struggle for river ecosystem rights, with Yamuna and Ganges in India as well as Whanganui in New Zealand successfully gaining personhood rights (Kothari et al., 2017). While the tangible outcomes of these legal victories are not yet clear, an ecosystem with legal rights gains power to assert claims that are not always aligned with the dominant interests of humans or the notion of ownership and management. Moreover, an ecosystem represents a supernumerary entity with unclear boundaries pertaining to its constituting elements, which could include human settlements. Ecosystems with legal personhood rights could therefore potentially change human affiliation within the broader field of politics. Similarly, the victories of rivers could encourage further political and legal experimentation with previously unrecognized political subjects, slowly changing the relationship between nature and culture in the legal and political domains.

Scholarly and artistic interventions are included in Rancière’s concept of politics. The example of the white picket fence illustrates a distinctly legal approach used to deploy the elevated position of artwork to protect nature. However, artists, authors and scholars have the possibility of depicting and giving legitimacy to alternative worldviews without necessarily engaging with the legal system. Rather, the risks and the political potential of such engagements are likely to be defined by the order of the police of a particular scientific discipline or artistic tradition. In the case of organization studies, our predominant focus is on the only other non-human entities that have legal personhood rights, namely organizations. And organizations in many significant regards reflect the separation and elevation of cultural and socio-economic preoccupations from the natural world. Typically, organization studies focus primarily on social phenomena such as culture, language, meaning systems and relationships of power (Czarniawska, 2016), while nature and environment often tend to be regarded as a mere external context for business activities (Bansal and Hoffman, 2012; Prasad and Elmes, 2005). This implies that critical scholarly engagements with the Anthropocene within the field of organization studies would unsettle the boundaries of our discipline.

More concretely, such engagements could, for example, involve developing further those contributions that recognize the significance of non-human agencies (Joerges and Czarniawska, 1998; Labatut et al., 2016), or by unpacking the purely social conceptualizations of organizations by investigating how the geo-biophysical is embedded in, and co-produced through, situated forms of organizing (Lövbrand et al., 2015; Malm and Hornborg, 2014). Moreover, it is possible to work in conjunction with other critical traditions that have long sought to alert us of the embodied and embedded nature of organizing, as, for example, eco-feminism (Phillips, 2014) and postcolonial theory (Prasad, 2006; Westwood and Jack, 2007). Rancière’s scholarship has only recently been introduced to organization studies (Alexandersson and Kalonaityte, 2018; Huault et al., 2014; Rhodes et al., 2017), and considering its complexity and scope it offers many hither unexplored possibilities to further theorize Anthropocene politics with organizations and organizational scholarship. In a more speculative sense, organization scholars of the Anthropocene may need to move beyond the current boundaries of the discipline by bringing to visibility alternative and not-yet-formalized assemblages of the social and the natural entities. That would certainly be one way to support the future of the planet vis-à-vis short-term socio-economic preoccupations of formalized organizations.

On a more profound level, the Anthropocene holds potential for radical rethinking and reformation of the foundational assumptions of our societies, stemming from Modernity and liberal humanism. The liberal humanist themes such as human intellect and rationality triumphing over nature, or progress toward future prosperity have so far been central to both capitalist and socialist notions of democracy and political economy (Hamilton et al., 2015). However, in the Anthropocene, none of these slogans apply as we are rapidly moving toward an increasingly volatile and potentially disastrous future. This has far-reaching implications for contemporary social thought, because many of the assumptions and concepts we have relied upon in the past are unlikely to aid us in the future. For example, existing proposals for reforming and radically re-structuring the economy, such as circular economy or eco-socialism, may prove to be as firmly rooted in the same division between nature and culture as the contemporary neo-liberal economic order. In this regard, Rancière’s (2006) contribution to the Anthropocene debates rests on his simple, yet provocative notion that equality is a condition for politics and not it’s goal. To the extent we are concerned with the plight of the future generations, extinction of species or the state of the planet as such, we must also dare to think of them as our equals and political allies. And, instead of clinging to the crumbling concepts and imagined communities of our Modern past, we can take steps to craft out a shared political future on the shores of what Clark and Yusoff (2017) refer to as a ‘deeply stratified, self-transformative and potentially catastrophic planet’ (p. 5).

Conclusion

This article has set out to add to the theorization of the Anthropocene in organization studies by investigating how geo-biophysical concerns can be reattached to organizing with the help of a conceptual framework, based on Jacques Rancière’s scholarship. The empirical relevance of the framework is illustrated by the case of unconventional fossil fuel extraction methods such as fracking. The application of the framework suggests that assumptions, underlying policy framings of our tampering with the Earth system through procedures such as fracking continue to reflect the separation and elevation of cultural and socio-economic preoccupations from the natural world. This separation is reflected in the legal language and formal procedures that shape whose interests can formally be taken into consideration by decision makers. In consequence, for the geo-biophysical concerns to gain urgency and political valence, the current distribution of political and legal rights must be significantly altered. Rancière’s framework suggests that such changes occur through activism that engages in persistent politics on the behalf of new political subjects, illustrated by the rivers going to court and in several instances also gaining legal personhood status. Moreover, scholarly and artistic work too can aid politics through acts of representation that give visibility, agency or legal protection to non-human or not-entirely-human entities, as in the case of the white picket fence being copyrighted as artwork. These examples suggest that the Anthropocene has the potential of being an epoch of bold political experimentation and a profound renewal of our modes of organizing. However, a concluding word of caution is in order. Whether we should approach the Anthropocene with hope or despair is determined by our own willingness to engage in and support such political acts. Or, as Rancière (2006) expresses it,

democracy […] is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy. (p. 96)

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Special Issue editors and the anonymous reviewers, and also Martin Gren, Monika Müller, Anna Alexandersson and Christian Huber for helpful comments on earlier versions of the article.

Notes

Author biography

Viktorija Kalonaityte is a senior lecturer in organization studies and a member of Work Aesthetics Research Group at Linnaeus University. Her current scholarly work is at the intersection of organization theory and the humanities, inspired by the Postcolonial Theory, Girlhood studies and Gurlesque, political philosophy of Jacques Rancière and the Anthropocene. Her other interests are non-academic writing and art as a form of knowledge production.

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When rivers go to court: The Anthropocene in organization studies through the lens of Jacques Rancière

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Theoretical framework

The Anthropocene and organization studies

Looking at the Anthropocene through the lens of Jacques Rancière

Illustrative example: opposing fossil fuel development

Discussion

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Notes

Author biography

References