Increasingly, we can observe employees leaving a job due to concerns about their employer’s impact on the climate or because you want to work directly on addressing climate issues. Together with Grace Augustine (University of Bath), I have published an article in The Conversation on this phenomenon, often referred to as “climate quitting”:
If you’re contemplating leaving your job over climate concerns, you’re not alone. Half of Gen Z employees (people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s) in the UK have already resigned from a job due to a conflict in values. And 48% of people aged 18–41 say they are willing to take a pay cut to work for a company that aligns with their sustainability values.
Screenshot of Last Week Tonight segment on “McKinsey” (at about 25:36)
John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight with its well-researched and in-depth segments of journalism in satire’s clothing regularly manages to escape the 24-hour news cycle and instead set the agenda themselves. And if John Oliver takes on large consulting firms in general and McKinsey in particular, it is a must-watch for any student and scholar of management and organization studies. Check it out:
I would have enjoyed this piece very much, hadn’t it been all too accurate a depiction of systemic deficiencies in our contemporary corporate world. And while I really applaud the way the segment demonstrates that the problem with McKinsey is not one of “bad apples” but rather systemic, indeed, it does not really offer suggestions on how to improve the situation.
Dear all, we are delighted to extend a warm invitation to the seventh Organization Studies ConJunction Day, which will take place on November 24, 2023, at 3 p.m.
The 40th EGOS Colloquium will take place from July 4-6, 2024, in Milan, Italy, and I am very happy to co-convene a sub-theme with Anne K. Krüger (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities) and Neil Pollock (University of Edinburgh Business School, UK). Please find the Call for Short Papers (about 3.000 words) of sub-theme 61 on “Reorganizing Knowledge Practices in the Digital Era: Driven by Data, Out in the Open?” below, submission deadline is January 09, 2024. Please also have a look at the submission guidelines.
Organizations produce, offer and structure knowledge that not only provides us with new insights but also triggers new developments. They display information that is supposed to support decision-making of people, enterprises, or politicians ranging from statistic reports, e.g. on demographic developments (Desrosières 1998), evaluation, e.g. of the credit-worthiness of individuals and nation states (Besedovsky 2018; Kiviat 2019) or of the performance of hospitals (Reilley and Scheytt 2019) and prisons (Mennicken 2013) to rankings of start-ups (Pollock and D’Adderio 2012), universities (Espeland and Sauder 2016; Wilbers and Brankovic 2021) or entire cities (Kornberger and Carter 2010). Much of our “knowledge about the world” is provided by organizations and highly organized processes. Particularly in times of perceived uncertainty and existential environmental threats (Bacevic 2021) such knowledge is having a crucial effect on our understanding of social problems and possible solutions.
Yet, in light of mounting demands for open access, open source, open data and open science (Bacevic and Muellerleile 2018; Dobusch et al., 2023) as well as increasing accumulation of mass data and their automated analysis (Crawford 2021), digitization presents a crucial crossroad for organizational knowledge production. These developments reorganize the ways how and which kind of knowledge is produced and offered. They not only amplify the possibilities of knowledge production in organizations and of access to knowledge through organizations but also allow for entirely new and very diverse forms of organizing knowledge creation and distribution, ranging from algorithm- and AI-based to volunteer- and crowd-driven. They furthermore influence what counts as knowledge, who has the authority to provide knowledge and how this knowledge informs our decisions and perception of what counts, e.g. as a trustworthy seller (Kornberger et al. 2017), as excellent science (Krüger and Petersohn 2022) or simply as good music (Alaimo and Kallinikos 2020).
ConJunction 