The nascent trans-disciplinary topic of business degrowth must find a home where it can cross-pollinate to form new strands of management scholarship.
Much of the literature in the field of degrowth lands in the Journal of Cleaner Production. But degrowth business management literature needs to land where business scholars can find it and engage with it at a theoretical level. I’m optimistic about the Journal of Business Ethics and suggest it as a target publication to business degrowth scholars. Their 40th Anniversary edition in 2022 included a number of essays by the editorial team about the future for business ethics, including one by Steffen Boehm, a professor in organisation and sustainability at the University of Exeter, who stresses that business ethics scholars and practitioners must face the ecological crisis head on, including accepting the need for degrowth.
“[T]he basic understanding that lies behind any “green growth” (or clean growth, or green capitalism) approaches is that we can keep growing our economies in the exponential way we have since the 1950s if we find ways to do so without any (or manageable) environmental impact. This is a myth. As the global community of degrowth scholars (e.g. D’Alisa et al., 2014) have shown for many years now, decoupling is not possible without questioning capitalism’s thirst for economic growth.”
Image by Charles Etoroma on Unsplash
Heliocene 