Sustainability Seminar Series - André Spicer
Arranged by the CBS Sustainability Platform & the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management
September 17th, 2012, from 13.00 - 15.00 at Porcelænshaven 22, room R3.20
The seminar is free of charge and all are welcome, but please register by writing jes.ikl@cbs.dk
André Spicer is Professor of Organizational Behavior at Cass Business School, City University London. André is currently visiting us here at CBS and his research focuses on organizational power and politics, identity, the creation of new organizational forms, space and architecture plays at work and more recently leadership.
His work looks at a wide range of settings including knowledge intensive firms, seaports, universities, libraries, media organizations, and new social movements.
He has published extensively in scientific journals and he has also published the books: “Contesting the Corporation” (Cambridge), ”Unmasking the Entrepreneur” (Edward Elgar), “Understanding Organizations” (Sage) and “Metaphors we Lead By” (Routledge).
André Spicer is also a senior editor at the Journal of Management Studies and is on the editorial board of Organization Studies, Social Movement Studies, Management Communication Quarterly and Journal of Management.
André Spicer will base this seminar on a recent paper (attached to this email: David L. Levy & André Spicer – Contested Imaginaries and the Cultural Political Economy of Climate Change), which analyzes the evolving cultural political economy of climate change by developing the concept of “climate imaginaries” as shared socio-semiotic systems that structure a field around a set of shared understandings. Climate imaginaries imply a particular mode of organizing production and consumption, and a prioritization of environmental and cultural values. In particular, the paper examines contestation among NGOs, business, and state agencies over four core climate imaginaries, here termed “fossil fuels forever”, “climate apocalypse”, “techno-market”, and “sustainable lifestyle”. The authors argue that contestation over these imaginaries forms a key part of the struggle over responses to climate change and helps to explain the lack of effective organizational response from firms and governments in the face of mounting evidence of a climate crisis. Finally, the paper describes how climate imaginaries co-evolve with economic and technological aspects of the energy system to constitute “value regimes”, a concept developed to characterize this broader semiotic and material system in which economic value and environmental visions are conjoined and stabilized.