Many crises and grand challenges (Ferraro et al., 2015; Gümüsay et al., 2022) have shaken the foundations of a predictable, plannable, and manageable world, available for humans to control, produce, or chose. But none has posed a greater challenge than climate change (IPCC, 2023; Wenzel et al., 2020). Two hundred years of industrial activity has altered the chemistry of planet Earth in ways never experienced by humanity, potentially putting humanity’s own survival at risk (Wright & Nyberg, 2017). In the midst of climate change there’s a growing interest to better understand how to organize in close alignment with nature (e.g., Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021; Labatut, 2023; Purser et al., 1995). There’s a critique of current organizing as overly anthropocentric, furthering what Nyberg et al. (2022) call a climate enlightened business-as-usual, which fails to seriously and creatively challenge the basic assumptions of organizing-as-we-know-it.

According to Wright et al. (2013, p. 649), climate change does not only present a physical threat to human existence, but also “a conceptual challenge to the way in which we imagine that existence”. To meet that challenge, they suggest, much more attention must to be paid to how predominant economic, social, and political imaginaries stand in the way of transformative action. As suggested by De Cock et al. (2021), asking such ‘big questions’ allows for less anthropocentric organizational possibilities, for new imaginaries that are not based on a human entitlement to Earth (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021). Yet, despite good intentions to foster more sustainable and resilient ways of organizing (Labatut, 2023), anthropocentrism prevails (Ergene & Calás, 2023). As a result, current practices run the risk of merely leading to more of the same (Berkowitz, 2023; Ergene & Calás, 2023), namely a human-centric extractivist relation to nature, as detrimental and existentially threatening to non-human others as to humans themselves – a continuation of the industrial activity that has turned the human into a geological force in its own right (Steffen et al., 2011).

The challenges of climate change are increasingly addressed in both affirmative and critical ways (Raffnsøe et al., 2022), exploring the basic assumptions of organizational relations between humans and nature (De Cock et al., 2021; Ergene & Calás, 2023). This is not least visible in how posthumanist thinking, with its radical decentring of human exceptionalism, is gaining momentum also in organization studies (e.g., de Vaujany et al., 2024). The aim of this research project is to contribute to that development by exploring organizational becomings with human nature entanglements.

A particularly challenging area in that regard is the ocean (Berkowitz, 2023). While it plays a specific and crucial role in supporting life on Earth (IPCC, 2022, p. 381), its vastness and remoteness tends to be associated with infinite resources and a bottomless capacity to absorb pollution and litter (Berkowitz, 2023). While human ocean relations are creatively explored in various scholarly disciplines (e.g. Carson, 1998; Oppermann, 2023; e.g. Shefer et al., 2023), they’re more scarcely addressed in management and organization studies (Berkowitz, 2023), also in research with a critical ecocentric approach. This shortage of asking the big questions and stimulating new forms of noticing (De Cock et al., 2021) with regards to the ocean runs the risk of contributing to upholding an anthropocentric paradigm of ocean exploitation (Berkowitz, 2020). As a result, even well-intended initiatives to build sustainable practices for human nature relations with the ocean, such as the UN-based notion of the Blue Economy meant to foster both economic growth and ecological longevity, might inadvertently put further pressures on an already strained ecosystem, unless geared towards “ensuring a harmonious, interdependent, sustainable evolution of both humans and nonhumans” (Berkowitz, 2023, p. 72).

Aim and Research Question

This project engages with the organizational entanglements of human ocean relations, taking a critical posthumanist approach (e.g. Braidotti, 2019; Calás et al., 2023; de Vaujany et al., 2024). Focusing on “the boundary-making practices by which the ‘human’ and others are differentially delineated and defined” (Cozza & Gherardi, 2023b, p. 8), it homes in on the differentiation processes of human and ocean, as they become across social domains and inform organizational practices. The aim is to explore less anthropocentric organizational possibilities, contributing to the field of organization studies by challenging human-centric paradigms and proposing new ways of thinking about organizational entanglements with the ocean. The study takes a qualitative approach, engaging in a one-year multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) in Cabo Verde, a Small Island Developing State highly exposed to the threats and challenges of climate change (UNDP, 2024), and with a both current and historically strong and complex relation to the ocean.

Based on this framing, the following question will serve as a guide: How are human ocean entanglements differentiated and performed in the everyday practices of organizing with the ocean?

Download the full Thesis Proposal here [opens new window].