With the worsening impacts of climate change becoming ever more evident, environmental protest has used more spectacular interventions to garner public awareness and support. Here, media-savvy activists have used spectacle to generate public attention to their cause. This has included protest performances against corporate sponsorship of cultural institutions, the disruption of major sporting events, and the ‘culture jamming’ of corporate advertising and public relations. These new forms of protest seek to capture public attention and engagement through viral social media imagery and other communications that, echoing the strategy of Greenpeace’s founder Bob Hudson, act as ‘mind bombs’ in expanding the public’s understanding of the urgency of climate change.
Continue reading Protest as spectacle: On the counter-hegemonic potential of climate activismCategory Archives: fossil fuels
Management Scholars Discover Climate Change (too late!)
Recently, Daniel Nyberg and I were invited to contribute a short essay to the Journal of Management Inquiry as part of a themed discussion on ‘Climate Action Research: What’s Holding Us Back?’. Our contribution is reproduced below and argues that business and management scholarship has been particularly slow in focusing on the issue of anthropogenic climate disruption. In the essay we outline why this is and the need for management scholars to broaden their perspective on the relationship between corporate capitalism and the existential threats that humanity now faces in the climate era.
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Book Review: The Politics of Climate Change
Elke Schuessler from Leuphana University, Lüneburg has recently published this review of our book Organising Responses to Climate Change: The Politics of Mitigation, Adaptation in the journal Organization Studies. It contains some interesting reflections on our analysis and the implications for future management and organization research and is reproduced in full below.
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Book Review of “Organising Responses to Climate Change”
Hans Baer from the University of Melbourne has just published a review essay covering eight of the most recent books examining climate change and capitalism. The essay includes a review of our most recent book Organising Responses to Climate Change. The following is an extract from that review essay which can be found in full in the latest issue of the Journal of Australian Political Economy.
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Organising responses to climate change: 2022 in review
2022 has been a particularly busy year in terms of my climate change research and teaching. With my co-researchers we’ve written and published a significant number of new journal articles exploring different aspects of the climate crisis, including:
- the political economy of climate adaptation on the Great Barrier Reef
- the role of celebrities in climate change disputes
- the maintenance of fossil fuel hegemony in Australian energy politics
- the growing criminalization of climate activism; and
- the neglect of climate change in business and management research
From Denial to delay
In this current era of increasing climate activism, a key question that emerges is how the fossil fuel sector continues to avoid social and political sanction given the threat its activities pose to the future of human civilization? In a recently published paper in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, we investigated how the Australian fossil fuel sector has sought to maintain its political dominance in the face of growing social critique. Drawing on an analysis of media coverage and industry press releases during the period 2008-2019, we identified the core discourses underlying the Australian fossil fuel sector’s response to growing public concern over climate change and how these discourses stabilize the hegemonic project and defuse central themes of critique.
The following is a summary of the full article which can be viewed here.
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Climate, People & Organizations 