Heat and Organization Studies: Organizing in a world approaching 50°C

Organization Studies · 2024 · Volume 45 · Issue 10

Abstract

As a symptom of the current global climate emergency, rising temperatures pervade organizational lives. Yet organization studies have hardly investigated the everyday organizing necessary to cope and adapt, here and now , to life in a world approaching and even surpassing 50°C. This article seeks to open spaces of collective inquiry to grapple with practices of organizational co-evolution with heat. I apply Barad’s post-humanist notion of diffraction—patterns of interference in entangled agency—through warming organizations, as rising temperatures intra-act with the matter, materials, bodies, and discourses that co-constitute them. Diffractive inquiry helps organization studies understand how rising heat alters and amplifies bodily differences across families, communities, firms, societies, and ecologies. This post-humanist view forces us to rethink theories of organizational resilience, inequality, and identity in co-evolution with heat and other ecological phenomena as part of a relational whole.

Keywords

climate adaptation, global warming, materiality, organizational resilience, socio-ecological resilience

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