Category: General

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Sustainability & Capitalism

Game Over. Capitalism is over if you want it.

tl,dr: Sustainability and capitalism have complex interactions. While capitalism emphasizes accumulation and expansion, sustainability requires long-term dynamic balance for all life.

Can sustainability can be reconciled with the logic of capitalism? I’ll try to sort both terms and will also talk about post-growth and degrowth. And if we’re at it, we just might want to also talk about post-capitalism and if such a thing exists.

Sustainability. A huge word, a non-word, both under- and over-complex.… Read more

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Notes from AOM 2018

tl;dr: Management scholars need to embrace activism, not just because of the state of the world but because of the state of their field.

Every August since 2009 it is AOM season for me: the Academy of Management holds its annual meeting and around 10,000 management scholars from around the planet converge on one place for five days, filled with workshops, symposia, paper sessions and endless debates on the relevance, impacts and challenges of management as society’s dominant practice.… Read more

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Progressive Degrowth

Degrowth is a conservative perspective on humanity’s future and thus always runs into serious  acceptance problems when dealing with progressive proposals of “limitless” developments. What is needed is a reframing of these proposals as conservative and limiting our future while degrowth is presented as a “new progressivism”.

If you are an optimist regarding your life, technological opportunities and the general scheme of things, degrowth is hardly an attractive political-economical idea – less a philosophy you’d like to call your own.… Read more

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Convivial Modernity

In my module on »Sustainable Development« at Karlshochschule International University I also teach sociological theories dealing with the natural environment. The other day my class and I were discussing »Risk Society« by Ulrich Beck among others. The idea behind it is that the old industrial society – modernity 1.0 – has given way to a different kind of modernity, one in which the production and distribution of risks has taken the place of wealth production and distribution.… Read more

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Postgrowth Europe: The Next Big Civilization Experiment?

Earlier this year, I wrote a blog article on “The End of Europe“. The motivation behind it was this nagging feeling that something went wrong on the old continent, that something along the way to European integration got lost – the heart and soul of Europe and what this European project is about. For 500 years, Europe was about civilization – and dominance, colonization, exploitation of people and planet, bloody wars at home and abroad; but also great successes in the progress of humanity, with the formulation (and “sacralization” according to Hans Joas) of human rights, born out of the European traumata so inseparably connected to its cruel history.… Read more