Category: Degrowth

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Notes from AOM 2025

tl;dr: AOM 2025 brought planetary boundaries, postgrowth, and critique closer to the centre — but the structural tensions remain. Hopeful shifts, unfinished conversations.

2025 in Copenhagen marked my first in-person AOM since 2019 in Boston. I had joined the virtual meetings in 2020 and 2021, but skipped 2022 and 2023. Returning felt both familiar and strange — especially since this was the first AOM Annual Meeting ever held outside of North America. With around 13,000 participants, it was also the largest in the Academy’s history.… Read more

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Hacking growth!

Photo by Elizabeth Gottwald on Unsplash

tl;dr Recapture the concept of growth by reformulating it as ecological growth, containing expansion and contraction, and a clear focus on ecosystem regeneration

A very long time ago, in the autumn of 2022, Liz Truss was briefly Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. One of her big policy announcements was her desire to ignite the forces of growth – by means of government debt and tax cuts, for example in the form of tax-free banker bonuses.… Read more

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Earth must come first

Earth Day was on 22 April and while searching for a bit of background and resources for this day, I came across the Earth Overshoot Day 2021 contest where you can guess, on what date the impacts of human activities will have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet’s biosphere this year. Next to the realization that some countries like e.g. Austria did already have their national Earth Overshoot Day (it was 7 April 2021), this got me thinking about the need for speed when it comes to reducing humanity’s footprint on the Earth’s biosphere and ecosystems.… Read more

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Planetary crises and post-growth organizing

https://unsplash.com/photos/vbFC9BCo95M

tl;dr: special issue on key principles for a sustainable future: frugal abundance, conviviality, care, and open relocalization. 

Envisioning a post-COVID 19 world where societies and organizations can flourish without growth is one of the most difficult tasks facing scholars from all disciplines. This is especially true for those of us who work in management and organization studies, where the status quo assumption remains fixed on economic growth and profit maximization. Together with my colleagues Bobby Banerjee, John Jermier, Ana Maria Peredo, and Robert Perey, we approached this challenge putting together a special issue with ORGANIZATION (SAGE) on “Theoretical perspectives on organizations and organizing in a post-growth era”.… Read more

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Moving Beyond Growth: Compendium on Postgrowth Research

tl;dr: Compendium of my research on degrowth, postgrowth and the next economy

The First Decade of Degrowth Research

For over a decade now I have researched Degrowth or Décroissance from an organizational and business perspective. At the first International Degrowth Conference in Paris in 2008, I was the only management scholar talking about “Economic De-growth as Corporate Competitive Advantage?” (obviously I had taken crazy pills). In 2010 I engaged with Tim Jackson in London on a CEECEC / SERI workshop on “Toward an International Degrowth Network“, continuing with my theme on Degrowth and its implications for the firm.… Read more