This open access article titled, Multispecies Organizing in the Web of Life: Ethico-Political Dynamics of Matters of Care in Ecologies-in-Place, is the result of a collaborative effort between co-authors Maria Ehrnström-Fuentes, Steffen Böhm, Sophia Hagolani-Albov, and Linda Annala Tesfaye.
Check out the whole paper here.
The story of the Knepp Estate in England inspired this paper. The owners of the Knepp Estate that generations of intensive agricultue had stripped their land of its non-human inhabitants. Rather than try to do more to manage the land, they instead started to do less. They stepped back and let nature take the wheel. Slowly, and then more quickly life began to return, butterflies, insects, and birds that were once absent were now abundant.
In this paper, we argue that organizing isn’t only something humans do, rather it is a co-becoming with other species, where species collaborate, care, and shape their shared ecologies. Through situated examples from the Knepp Estate experience, we show how organizing is fundamentally relational and involves the actions of humans and non-humans alike.
Abstract: Contemporary human-centered organization and management practices endanger the planet’s health, affecting the life and death of multiple species—including humans. Drawing on insights from multispecies ethnography and feminist new materialism, this article contributes to the business ethics literature by developing a theoretical framework for multispecies organizing as a matter of care. Going beyond existing understandings of human-animal relations, we show how ethico-political dynamics shape multispecies relations in three ways: how we and other species relate to ecologies-in-place (affective relationalities); what we and other species do (vital doings); and, finally, what kinds of worlds we—through our ethical sensibilities—commit to bringing into being (ethical obligations). Using an illustrative example of a rewilding site in England, this article shows how multispecies organizing plays out in a specific ecology-in-place. Our argument has important implications for the conception and contemporary practices of the organizational ethics of life and death.