HRMOB Seminar Series. "Organizing Plants? How vegetal thinking might contribute to rethinking management and organisation relations"
Published: 30 January 2025
19 March 2025. Professor Karen Dale, Lancaster University
Professor Karen Dale, Lancaster University
"Organizing Plants? How vegetal thinking might contribute to rethinking management and organisation relations"
Wedesday 19 March 2025. 15:00 - 16:30
Room 141AB, Adam Smith Business School
Abstract
As humans, plants are our necessary but often ignored other. The equation for respiration – the living breath of humans and other creatures – is the complementary opposite of that of plant photosynthesis: animal life is inherently interdependent with that of plants. In organisation studies we have started to recognise the organisation of animals, their labour, their entanglement with human organisation, and have also recognised the vibrancy and liveliness of matter. However, plants remain peripheral. Yet in paying attention to the ways in which plants organise themselves and indeed organise us as humans, there might be possibilities for understanding our own rootedness, entangledness and symbiosis in a different way.
Plant life was foundational to the development of large-scale trading, and therefore also to the development of large-scale organisations, and their twin roots colonialism and capitalism. We know at an abstract level that mercantile development was based upon the trading of sugar, rubber, tea, cotton and so on, but we tend to think of these in their commodified forms and rarely do we connect these to the plants themselves. Further, we are keenly aware of what these organisations and practices did to humans, but we forget the consequences for the plants. Just as human organisation developed practices of mass production, the assembly line and deskilled and devalued labour, so too plants were put to work in monocultures, torn away from their natural ecosystems which then involved interventions through chemical fertilizers and pesticides, with ecological consequences for humans and plants that we are now urgently having to face.
Through considering some ways of thinking about and with plants, I want to start to pose questions such as:
o How can we challenge our thinking, and the basis of our relationships, within organisations, management and management education?
o How can we re-conceptualise how we relate to ‘the other’, especially in a time of climate, economic and social crisis?
o And how can we develop different stories, away from those of mainstream western management assumptions, which can provide us with a new awareness of the contemporary, unprecedented challenges and responsibilities of management and organisations?
Bio
Karen Dale is Professor of Organisation Studies at Lancaster University. Her research on organisational embodiment, spatiality and materiality has been published in leading journals and books including Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory (Palgrave); The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space: Power, Identity and Materiality at Work with Gibson Burrell (Palgrave), and Organizational Space and Beyond: The Significance of Henri Lefebvre for Organization Studies, with Sytze Kingma and Varda Wasserman (Routledge). She has researched about the consequences of the growing use of performance enhancing drugs in the workplace, including reviews for the EU Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA). She is currently researching the productive body in contemporary work; shared embodiment in the fitness industry; and exploring human – more-than-human relations, particularly with plant-life.
For further information, please contact business-seminar-series@glasgow.ac.uk.
We foster a positive and productive environment for seminars through our Code of conduct.
First published: 30 January 2025