Contenu du sommaire : Organisation et sciences de gestion à l'épreuve de l'Anthropocène

At a time when the global destabilization of natural ecosystems is accelerating, the management sciences are being directly challenged, since they have not taken the full measure of the phenomena underway. As a preamble to the ten articles in this special issue, which examines the organizational and managerial upheavals brought about by the Anthropocene and the crossing of planetary boundaries, this introduction provides an overview of the current state of affairs and outlines our research agenda. We identify four major disciplinary shifts, outlining new frontiers for the management sciences: the increasing scarcity of natural resources, the non-linearity and irreversibility of risks, the naturalistic conception of collective action, and the identity of teacher-researchers.

The term "Anthropocene" is used to refer to the most recent period in Earth's history, evoking humanity's share of responsibility for the planet's transformations and calling into question the legitimacy of certain human activities. In this context, we study the arguments used during a controversy about the presence of wild animals in French circuses. The "order of worth" theory sheds light on a type of justification stemming from a non-anthropocentric discourse, according to which nature must be preserved for its own sake. This "natural order of worth" enables actors to criticize certain human activities and their impact on the Earth system.

Faced with the challenge of the Anthropocene, agriculture must reinvent itself. This article examines the imaginaries of twenty-eight ecopreneurs operating in local agricultural sectors to understand what underpins their practices and what lessons we might learn from them. An analysis of their personal accounts helps uncover common themes as well as differentiated perspectives, resulting in the emergence of two types of local sectors. The article makes a contribution to current social imaginaries and holds out hope for an optimistic response to the Anthropocene: taking action, at our own scale, without waiting for the world to change.

This article analyzes the ways in which companies responsible for ecological degradation are constructing a narrative around the Anthropocene. By studying the implementation of an extractive project in Indonesia, we identify the central role played by CSR management in this narrative, which assigns a social value to environmental impacts and thus maintains the project's legitimacy. Our results show that the company's CSR practices (impact analysis, stakeholder management, reporting) make it possible to offset its negative ecological impacts with its promises of development for local residents.

In recent years, a number of employees concerned about the challenges of the Anthropocene Era have decided to organize themselves into collectives to transform their organizations from within. This phenomenon, little explored in the literature, is at the crossroads of the microfoundations of corporate social responsibility and internal activism. Analysis of secondary sources reveals that these collectives succeed in bringing about change by establishing "ridgelines," that is, delicate relationships with different internal stakeholders.

This paper looks at organizations already facing the effects of the Anthropocene epoch. To this end, we borrow the concept of “sentinel,” as used in the context of scientific ecology and the social sciences, to conceptualize the strategic future of organizations in the Anthropocene. We adopt a pragmatic perspective, examining the investigative processes employed by two mid-mountain ski resorts in the face of climate change. Based on the different strategic responses identified within these organizations, we propose a definition of a "sentinel organization."

This historical study examines the role of cost pricing in the spread of rubber plantations, one of the leading sources of deforestation in Southeast Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century, using a corpus of press archives. By linking the concept of the "cheapization" of living organisms with that of commensuration, we show that the widespread use of cost prices in the press was often conducive to certain forms of exploitation of living beings, leading to the destruction of primary forests in the French colonial empire. Our work sheds light on the structural effects of this period on rubber production methods.

This article looks at the day-to-day practices of professional accountants that could help accounting evolve in the face of the Anthropocene. The authors identify the institutional work practices responsible, on the one hand, for upholding the existing accounting framework and, on the other hand, for creating and developing new accounting models. This research contributes to our understanding of the obstacles and limits associated with these practices, and explores the role that other actors could play in the evolution of accounting practices.

This essay offers a critical analysis of innovation management research in light of the theoretical framework proposed by the French anthropologist Philippe Descola. It demonstrates how occidental societies are characterized by a “naturalist” ontology that establishes a clear separation between nature and culture. We show how this ontology translates into the Schumpeterian concept of creative destruction, which constitutes the theoretical background of the discipline. This leads to a pro-innovation bias that excludes from the scope of analysis both the question of the ends of innovation and that of ecological limits. This, we argue, constitutes an ontological obstacle to conceptualizing the ecological transition. We conclude with current evolutions and propose some perspectives for future research.

Faced with the challenges of the Anthropocene, management programs are focusing on the causal relationships between economic activities and ecological impacts. This article draws on Castoriadis' concept of the social imaginary to explore a different pedagogical approach: an art-based seminar. A visual analysis of the artworks produced by students yields four archetypes: reveal, amplify, reform, and play. Each of these archetypes describes a way of criticizing the imaginaries of the Anthropocene, or offering alternative ones. This research paper highlights the potential of art to grasp the ideological challenges of the Anthropocene in management curricula.

This article is the result of an encounter between the theoretical archetypes of the Anthropocene (Hoffman and Jennings, 2018) and a fictional text, Odds Against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich (2014). It attempts to combine academic and fictional registers in a polyphonic text built around four variations. Bringing academic and fictional registers into dialogue through a process of creative writing makes it possible to go beyond the role of fiction as mere research material and to examine the potential value of such "fictional writing under theoretical constraints".