Agnes Bolsø, Norwegian University of Science & Technology, NORWAY

Christine Katz, University of Lueneburg, GERMANY

Mary Phillips, University of Bristol, ENGLAND

Ida Sabelis, VU University, Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS 

There is broad agreement that the Earth is warming, and the impacts of climate change such as loss of polar and glacial ice and more frequent and more intense severe weather events such as heat waves, storms and cold, are beginning to become ever-more apparent. Insidious environmental degradation continues apace. Yet, politicians and the business community seem paralysed and efforts to address ecological crises have been described as a dismal failure (Wittneben, Okereke, Banerjee & Levy 2012). Organizational responses are characterized by a business case approach based on obtaining competitive advantage (Bansal & Roth 2000), finding a technical fix (Boiral, Cayer, & Baron 2009) and greenwashing (Walker & Wan 2012). Banerjee notes that: ‘Rather than reshaping markets and production processes to fit the logic of nature, sustainable development uses the logic of markets and capitalist accumulation to determine the future of nature’ (Banerjee 2003:153). The primacy of market forces, economic progress and technology remains largely unquestioned such that current discursive formations and material practices of organizational sustainability limit possibilities for transformative change. 

The environment/nature is thus presented as a risk that should be ameliorated through mastery and domination or a market opportunity to be appropriated, commodified and consumed (Banerjee, 2003). Conceptualising the natural world in this way is grounded in what Connell (1995) has referred to as hegemonic masculinity. Masculinity is aligned with reason, rationality and the human mind which devalues the feminine, emotion, the body and the natural world (Lloyd 1993). This is a long-established argument made by feminist philosophies, but its treatment has tended to focus on the implications for gender, instead of what it might mean for gender and nature. Feminist approaches to environmental sustainability have  developed in response to the ways in which ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ are conceptually linked in Western thought, wherein the processes of inferiorization have been mutually reinforcing. In so doing, such approaches have the potential to mount a radical challenge to current organizational and academic discourses and practices surrounding sustainability, social responsibility and justice (Plumwood, 1993). This Special Issue will explore the relation between the gendered nature of such discourses and practices and current debates surrounding sustainability in studies of work and organization.

The Special Issue therefore provides an arena through which gendered approaches to environmental sustainability can be further developed in studies of organization especially within the context of environmental uncertainty and crisis. There has been a lack of gendered analysis, including feminist and philosophical analysis, in the field of sustainability and organizational sustainability and we wish to address this. We invite philosophical, theoretical and empirical papers that explore a gendered, and particularly feminist, commitment, practice and politics to the study of gender and nature in the field of work and organization relating to the environment, sustainability and social justice. We argue, following Phillips (2014), that a feminist environmental ethics can provide a critical analysis of the gendered ways in which organizations, and organization studies, represent, construct and appropriate nature, and how that might be subverted and re-imagined to interrogate relations of power, resistance and politics. Indeed does feminism and eco/environmental feminism enable a radical challenge to the field of gender and organization broadly, and sustainability specifically? However, we also acknowledge the problematics within current eco/environmental feminist philosophy in areas such as engaging with post-colonial thought, the representation/appropriation of indigenous voices and practices, corporeality and embodiment and approaches to an ethics of care and we particularly welcome submissions that move these debates forward.