Organizational Escapism: Understanding the Agro-industry’s Inertia in the Green Transition

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Abstract

A stream of organization studies literature has investigated the causes of inertia in the green transition by focusing on how organizations observe and relate to planetary crises, particularly the climate crisis, in ways that enable a continuation of business-as-usual. How organizations act respond to planetary crises depends on how they observe the crises but equally as much on how they understand themselves in relation to the crises. This paper supplements previous studies on inertia in the green transition by investigating the latter in a case study of the self-descriptions of the Danish conventional agriculture. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s writing on self-delusion, the paper develops a concept of ‘organizational escapism’ to describe how the Danish agro-industry’s central interest organization escapes the implementation of proposed measures towards a green transition of the conventional agriculture. We find that the organization escapes external calls for action by means of self-descriptions that perform relativizations, temporal confusions and labile identifications. The concept of organizational escapism captures how the constructed multiplicity of self-descriptions enables the organization to escape the invoked self and thus its accountability which becomes indefinitely deferred.
Original languageEnglish
Publication date2024
Number of pages27
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event40th EGOS Colloquium 2024: Crossroads for Organizations: Time, Space, and People - University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Duration: 4 Jul 20246 Jul 2024
Conference number: 40
https://www.egos.org/2024_milan/general_theme

Conference

Conference40th EGOS Colloquium 2024
Number40
LocationUniversity of Milano-Bicocca
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityMilan
Period04/07/202406/07/2024
Internet address

Keywords

  • Agricultural organization
  • Agro-industry
  • Climate change
  • Escapism
  • Planetary crises
  • Inertia
  • Green transition

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