Arctic feedbacks will accelerate climate change and could jeopardise mitigation efforts. The permafrost carbon feedback releases carbon to the atmosphere from thawing permafrost and the sea ice albedo feedback increases solar absorption in the Arctic Ocean. A constant positive albedo feedback and zero permafrost feedback have been used in nearly all climate policy studies to date, while observations and models show that the permafrost feedback is significant and that both feedbacks are nonlinear. Using novel dynamic emulators in the integrated assessment model PAGE-ICE, we investigate nonlinear interactions of the two feedbacks with the climate and economy under a range of climate scenarios consistent with the Paris Agreement. The permafrost feedback interacts with the land and ocean carbon uptake processes, and the albedo feedback evolves through a sequence of nonlinear transitions associated with the loss of Arctic sea ice in different months of the year. The US’s withdrawal from the current national pledges could increase the total discounted economic impact of the two Arctic feedbacks until 2300 by $25 trillion, reaching nearly $120 trillion, while meeting the 1.5 °C and 2 °C targets will reduce the impact by an order of magnitude.

In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization’s viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm’s perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers’ efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine cross-scale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our theoretical argument using an example of Unilever and palm oil production in Borneo.

The scientific literature on physical changes in the Arctic region driven by climate change is extensive. In addition, the emerging understanding of physical feedbacks and teleconnections between the Arctic and the rest of the world suggests that the warming in the Arctic region is likely to cause impacts that extend well beyond the region itself. However, there is only limited research on how Arctic change may affect economies and individual industry sectors around the world. We argue that there is a pressing need for more research on this topic and present a conceptual framework to guide future research for assessing the regional and global economic impacts of Arctic change, including both possible benefits and costs. We stress on the importance of a transdisciplinary approach, which includes an integration of the natural sciences, economics and social sciences, as well as engagement with a wide range of stakeholders to better understand and manage the implications of Arctic change.

Arctic feedbacks accelerate climate change through carbon releases from thawing permafrost and higher solar absorption from reductions in the surface albedo, following loss of sea ice and land snow. Here, we include dynamic emulators of complex physical models in the integrated assessment model PAGE-ICE to explore nonlinear transitions in the Arctic feedbacks and their subsequent impacts on the global climate and economy under the Paris Agreement scenarios. The permafrost feedback is increasingly positive in warmer climates, while the albedo feedback weakens as the ice and snow melt. Combined, these two factors lead to significant increases in the mean discounted economic effect of climate change: +4.0% ($24.8 trillion) under the 1.5 °C scenario, +5.5% ($33.8 trillion) under the 2 °C scenario, and +4.8% ($66.9 trillion) under mitigation levels consistent with the current national pledges. Considering the nonlinear Arctic feedbacks makes the 1.5 °C target marginally more economically attractive than the 2 °C target, although both are statistically equivalent.

Delivering access to sufficient food, energy and water resources to ensure human wellbeing is a major concern for governments worldwide. However, it is crucial to account for the ‘nexus’ of interactions between these natural resources and the consequent implications for human wellbeing. The private sector has a critical role in driving positive change towards more sustainable nexus management and could reap considerable benefits from collaboration with researchers to devise solutions to some of the foremost sustainability challenges of today. Yet opportunities are missed because the private sector is rarely involved in the formulation of deliverable research priorities. We convened senior research scientists and influential business leaders to collaboratively identify the top forty questions that, if answered, would best help companies understand and manage their food-energy-water-environment nexus dependencies and impacts. Codification of the top order nexus themes highlighted research priorities around development of pragmatic yet credible tools that allow businesses to incorporate nexus interactions into their decision-making; demonstration of the business case for more sustainable nexus management; identification of the most effective levers for behaviour change; and understanding incentives or circumstances that allow individuals and businesses to take a leadership stance. Greater investment in the complex but productive relations between the private sector and research community will create deeper and more meaningful collaboration and cooperation.

Scholars from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives have sought to unravel the high complexities of sustainability. A mature understanding of sustainability management requires studies to adopt a multidisciplinary systemic lens capable of appreciating the interconnectivity of economic, political, social and ecological issues across temporal and spatial dimensions. Yet the field of systems thinking in the context of sustainability management research is disparate and can benefit from a comprehensive review in order to assimilate the current fragmented body of research and to identify promising research directions. To address this gap, we conducted a review of the systems thinking and sustainability management literature from 1990 up to 2015 including 96 articles. In this review, we first present descriptives that show an emerging body of work rapidly growing since 2011. We found that 54 percent of articles were published in two transdisciplinary journals, demonstrating that a systemic approach is not yet prevalent in mainstream management journals. Second, we identify and describe the core theoretical concepts of systems thinking found in the literature including interconnections, feedbacks, adaptive capacity, emergence and self-organization. Third, findings show a number of research themes, including behavioral change, leadership, innovation, industrial ecology, social-ecological systems, transitions management, paradigm shifts and sustainability education. Finally we offer a cross-scale integrated framework of our findings, and conclude by identifying a number of promising research opportunities.

The extensive melting of Arctic sea ice driven by climate change provides opportunities for commercial shipping due to shorter travel distances of up to 40% between Asia and Europe. It has been estimated that around 5% of the world’s trade could be shipped through the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in the Arctic alone under year-round and unhampered navigability, generating additional income for many European and East Asian countries. Our analysis shows that for Arctic sea ice conditions under the RCP8.5 emissions scenario and business restrictions facing shipping companies, NSR traffic will increase steadily from the mid-2030s onwards, although it will take over a century to reach the full capacity expected for ice-free conditions. However, in order to achieve a balanced view of Arctic shipping, it is important to include its detrimental environmental impacts, most notably emissions of short-lived pollutants such as black carbon, as well as CO2 and non-CO2 emissions associated with the additional economic growth enabled by NSR. The total climate feedback of NSR could contribute 0.05% (0.04%) to global mean temperature rise by 2100 under RCP8.5 (RCP4.5), adding $2.15 trillion ($0.44 trillion) to the NPV of total impacts of climate change over the period until 2200 for the SSP2 socio-economic scenario. The climatic losses offset 33% (24.7%) of the total economic gains from NSR under RCP8.5 (RCP4.5), with the biggest losses set to occur in Africa and India. These findings call for policy instruments aimed at reducing emissions from Arctic shipping and providing compensation to the affected regions.

Integrated reporting has fast emerged as a new accounting practice to help firms understand how they create value and be able to effectively communicate this to external stakeholders. While insightful experiences from the early-adopters of integrated reporting start to accumulate, the development of the field and how integrated reporting may be successfully implemented remains challenging and contested. Several issues are still controversial with no consensus reached on the central purpose about integrated reporting. This paper relies upon a qualitative approach to accomplish two objectives. First, we provide a review of the embryonic academic literature in the integrated reporting field in order to summarize extant knowledge. Second, in response to a gap in the literature on managerial perceptions concerning integrated reporting, we present the sensemaking approaches of three key experts impacting integrated reporting practices at the global level using semi-structured interviews. Our findings suggest that experts perceive the field to be fragmented and believe that most companies currently have weak understanding of the business value of integrated reporting. The experts give insights into how they perceive the field to be progressing despite challenges and on where they see improvements in the diffusion of practices in integrated reporting. Our study contributes to this special issue by reframing the existing implementation challenges of integrated reporting into promising and inclusive research opportunities that align the priorities of both academia and business.

Research on corporate philanthropy typically focuses on organization-external pressures and aggregated donation behavior. Hence, our understanding of the organization-internal structures that determine whether a given organization will respond philanthropically to a specific human need remains underdeveloped. We explicate an attention-based framework in which specific dimensions of organization-level attention focus interact to predict philanthropic responses to an emergent human need. Exploring the response of Fortune Global 500 firms to the 2004 South Asian tsunami, we find that management attention focused on people inside the organization (employees) interacts with both attention for places (countries in the tsunami-stricken region) and attention for practices (corporate philanthropy in general) to predict the likelihood of charitable donations. Our research thus extends beyond the prevailing institutional perspective by highlighting the role of attention focus in corporate responsiveness to emergent societal issues.

Gail Whiteman learned to be a beaver trapper by working in the field with a Cree tallyman in Eastern James Bay, Québec. An account of her managerial experiences and some potential lessons for organizations were reported in Whiteman and Cooper (2000). Central to her managerial experience was the sense of being ecologically embedded – literally being grounded in the local ecology. From that experience we suggested that resources are more likely to be cared for if managers have a strong ecological sense of who and where they are. Banerjee and Linstead (2004) have provided an extensive critique of our article. We itemize the sins with which we are charged and provide responses to the more central criticisms. We close by reiterating the purpose of the original article and what we continue to believe are the virtues of the main points.

Effectuation theory invests agency - intention and purposeful enactment - for new venture creation in the entrepreneurial actor(s). Based on the results of a 15-month in-depth longitudinal case study of Amsterdam-based social enterprise Fairphone, we argue that effectual entrepreneurial agency is co-constituted by distributed agency, the proactive conferral of material resources and legitimacy to an eventual entrepreneur by heterogeneous actors external to the new venture. We show how in the context of social movement activism, an effectual network pre-committed resources to an inchoate social enterprise to produce a material artefact because it embodied the moral values of network members. We develop a model of social enterprise emergence based on these findings. We theorize the role of material artefacts in effectuation theory and suggest that, in the case, the artefact served as a boundary object, present in multiple social words and triggering commitment from actors not governed by hierarchical arrangements.

in this article, I utilize semifictional dialogue as a means of reflecting on my Ph.D. research on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Although my findings were ultimately published in the Academy of Management Journal, the research, defense, and publication process raised a number of interesting issues, including ambiguities and miscommunications that emerged when I tried to communicate and share my findings with academic and business audiences. These reflections are presented in a creative semifictional format that privileges the dialogical basis of Indigenous oral tradition and storytelling. By using this medium, I hope to deepen our understanding and appreciation of TEK as an interesting ecologically embedded approach to management and also to raise and reflect on the validity and implications of using this type of ethnographic representation within organizational research.

Notions of place and sense of place appear more frequently in organizational research, reflecting the growing influence of human and cultural geography on the field. This article argues that scholars should continue to explore and refine research on sustainability by engaging with these issues through concrete research on place and sense of place. After discussing the diverse ways these terms are used in scholarship outside our field, the article considers ways in which they have been used in organizational studies of sustainability and identifies ways of extending this work, including a preliminary agenda for future research. By incorporating place and sense of place, organizational scholars may find more comprehensive and transformative understandings of sustainability. © the Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav.

Traditional models of transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and stakeholder management do not capture the nuance and dynamics of (counter-)organizing processes around anti-corporate mobilization. Based on the case of a resistance movement against a planned bauxite mine on tribal land in India, we develop a process theory of interactions between local, national and international actors within transnational advocacy networks. These encounters are not always friendly and are often characterized by conflict between actors with disparate goals and interests. We highlight the importance of national advocacy networks (NANs) in anti-corporate social movements and describe the conflicts and disruptions that result from ignoring them. Our findings also point to the role of corporate counter-mobilization strategies in shaping resistance movements. Our narrative revolves around a particular focal actor in the anti-mining campaign: a young tribal man who emerged as a passionate spokesperson for the movement, but later became a supporter of the controversial mine. Our findings contribute to a richer understanding of the processes underlying transnational and national anti-corporate mobilization.

Cities are key drivers of global climate change, with the majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions being tied to urban life. Local actions to mitigate and adapt to climate change are essential for stabilization of the global climate and can also help to address other urban ecological problems such as pollution, decreasing biodiversity, etc. Companies are important urban actors in the development of low-carbon cities because they provide a multitude of goods and services to city populations and directly influence urban carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This is a new area of research. While studies on corporate sustainability are numerous, there is little, if any, existing research that examines the role of companies in climate change adaptation and mitigation within specific urban areas. Urban ecologists also have not examined how corporate activity affects urban systems. Taking a multi-disciplinary systems approach, we present a conceptual model of the role of companies in managing urban interactions with the climate system. We also present empirical findings illustrating how one company 'partners' with the city of Rotterdam to test electric vehicles as a pilot project for urban climate adaptation and mitigation. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment.

Collectively, the articles in this dialogue show that the heart does matter in research. In this closing commentary, the author suggests that scholars also need to write more emotionally in order to adequately convey the richness of using your heart within research endeavors.

Management scholars study human phenomena filled with emotional upheaval. Though emotions in management may be legitimate topics of study, strong emotional reactions to such upheavals tend not to be. This is a missed opportunity. This article argues that heartbreak can help scholars analytically and emotionally connect with their data, the people they study, and shape the purpose of their work and life. Heartbreak can arise from the data themselves (if they touch us deeply) and through shared experience. Without it, scientific accounts may be less rich and potentially misleading. The author provides an example from her own research.

Educational approaches addressing environmental sustainability are of growing interest to management educators. The James Bay Cree in Canada offer a novel and ecologically embedded approach to management education as an inspiring template for integrating a deep sense-of-place within management education. The authors describe the Cree approach as “managing outside”; literally managing out of doors on (and with) the land. They develop their ideas collaboratively with FJ, a Cree tallyman (a senior hunter and leader of his family’s hunting territory). FJ challenges modern managers and students interested in sustainability to learn how to manage and educate outside, to relocate and relate their management education to specific local places by working collaboratively with Indigenous Peoples in a participatory manner.

Most methodology books do not explain how nature—or in the author’s case, heavy wet snow and swampy muskeg—can be an intrinsic part of a qualitative research design. Yet the author’s inability to make sense of the subarctic not only limited her preliminary qualitative analysis, but this lack of skill also nearly killed her. This article describes the author’s emergent belief that first-hand situated knowledge of the local ecology is an essential requirement of effective qualitative inquiry in social—ecological contexts. The author uses data from two ethnographic studies that were published in the Academy of Management Journal (2000) and Organization & Environment (2004) to illustrate this point. She discusses how the local ecology affected her qualitative research design in terms of access, type of data collected, and interpretation of local management practices. The author closes by calling for a renaturing of qualitative inquiry especially as it relates to research on sustainability.

Research on organizational justice typically investigates how perceptions of justice affect encounters between internal organizational actors, with few studies analyzing perceptions between firms and external stakeholders. In addition to a narrow focus on employer—employee relations, the organizational justice literature is dominated by western and European cultural perspectives. My paper addresses these gaps by exploring how justice theory may be useful in understanding conflicts between local Indigenous Peoples and multinational firms from the natural resource sector. I argue that this applied research problem can make a number of conceptual contributions to organization studies of justice. I illustrate how organizational justice theory applies within this new context, and also how indigenous cultural visions of justice enrich and challenge our very notion of organizational justice.

In recent years, major disasters have figured prominently in the media. While corporate response to disasters may have raised corporate philanthropy to a new level, it remains an understudied phenomenon. This article draws on comparative research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate philanthropy to explore the geography of corporate philanthropic disaster response. The study analyzes donation announcements made by Fortune Global 500 firms from North America, Europe and Asia to look for regional patterns across three recent disasters: the South Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Kashmiri earthquake. The results reveal inter-regional differences in the overall likelihood of donations and in their cash value, in addition to the identification of home-region- and local presence effects. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

With rising interest in sustainability, ecology is an increasingly important dimension of organizational research. Yet few empirical studies integrate local ecology into coevolutionary approaches where firms are key actors, and fewer still approach the question of sustainability and organizations from a systems perspective. In this paper, we ask how organizations can effectively participate in efforts to increase sustainability from a systems perspective. We develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding firm-ecology relationships and then explore how this framework sheds light on regional planning and industrial practice in northern California's wine industry.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine whether the emotional experiences from qualitative research can enrich organization and management studies.Design/methodology/approachThe paper's approach includes a review of the literature in sociology, anthropology, psychology, and feminist studies, in which scholars have argued convincingly for the explicit need to acknowledge and utilize the emotions of researchers as they study social and organizational phenomenon. Also, past research is emotionally re‐written as reflexive examples.FindingsThe use of emotions as qualitative researchers can enrich the understanding of organizational and social life by offering new questions, concepts, and theories. At the level of methodology, this leads one to develop and reflect upon an emotional and cognitive orientation of the field.Originality/valueThe majority of narratives in organization studies remain sanitized, emotion‐less texts. While a discussion of researcher‐emotion can remain a back‐stage activity between colleagues over dinner, it is believed that much can be gained by a more explicit discussion.

Although there has been a tremendous amount of past and future development in the James Bay region of northern Canada, there has been very little empirical research that examined the impact of economic development on Cree tallymen, who are the senior grassroots managers of this vulnerable ecosystem. This oversight is particularly important because the region is currently facing the possibility of additional large-scale hydroelectric development and there is no existing baseline information on past impacts on Cree tallymen. In addition, tallymen continue to have important cultural significance to the Cree Nation and also broader significance to the field of sustainable management. This article attempts to fill this gap by providing ethnographic research on the impact of past development on Cree tallymen from the perspectives of the tallymen themselves. The author also draws implications for environmental impact assessments in the region and, more broadly, for the future study of ecologically embedded managers such as the Cree tallymen. © 2004 Sage Publications.

The construct of social embeddedness has helped explain some of the ways in which individuals and organizations form and sustain alliances. We introduce the construct of ecological embeddedness, or the extent to which a manager is rooted in the land. Ecological embeddedness is illustrated by an ethnographic study of a Cree tallyman, or beaver trapper, in James Bay, northern Québec. To be ecologically embedded as a manager is to personally identify with the land, to adhere to beliefs of ecological respect, reciprocity, and caretaking, to actively gather ecological information, and to be physically located in the ecosystem. We conclude by drawing some implications for sustainability.

Humans are an integral component of ecosystems, just as the products of ecosystems are critical to social systems. To understand the future state of the boreal forest, we must understand the ecological, social, economic, and business interactions that link ecological and social systems into a common regional system, as well as the feedbacks that govern changes in these interactions. We analyze the negative feedbacks that promoted a sustainable interaction between ecological and social systems prior to the development of business systems, which are dominated by positive feedbacks that have reduced the sustainability of the boreal system. We suggest a minimum set of interactions that are required to improve the sustainability of a business-based boreal system. Copyright © 1998 by the Resilience Alliance.