Description
Land plays a constitutive, yet under‑theorized, role in the organizing of managerial and governance practices. At a moment of intensifying climate and ecological crises, alongside escalating wars and geopolitical conflicts, land is rapidly becoming a central and visible domain of organizing and organizations. Yet theoretical insights on land remain fragmented and insufficiently addressed within management and organization studies. By this, we wish to stress how the “landed” condition is always present in all forms of organizing, and how organizations are always materially, politically, and historically situated in relation to land. In essence, land actively shapes, and is shaped by, how organizations are formed, governed, contested, and sustained. The aim of this sub‑theme is therefore to invite work that examines what we refer to as the “landed” condition of organizations.Historically, transformations of land have been inseparable from the making of the modern colonial world, from processes of enclosure and colonization to the provision of the material resource base for industrialization beginning in the 15th and 16th centuries (Linebaugh, 2014; Marx, 2024, pp. 650–652). The ways in which land is organized shape systems of provisioning and production, as well as processes of subject and identity formation across capitalist, alternative, and commons‑based economies (Albareda & Sison, 2020; Arjaliès & Banerjee, 2025; Nishat‑Botero & Thompson, 2025b). Land questions have also shaped the history of fascist organizations and ideologies (Paxton, 2004), an issue now gaining renewed attention in organization studies (Matten, 2026; Varman, 2025). Hence, the ways in which land is understood and theorized as an organizational construct are of particular significance today, as commodification, dispossession, and ecological degradation continue to accelerate (Riofrancos, 2025; Shattuck et al., 2023).
In MOS, whether explicitly or implicitly, land already underpins much research on climate change (Nyberg & Wright, 2022), biodiversity loss (Arjaliès & Banerjee, 2025), food and agriculture (Beacham, 2018; Colombo et al., 2024), urban geographies (Vandeventer et al., 2024), extractivism (Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2022a; Flores et al., 2022), and planetary boundaries (Heikkurinen et al., 2021). Land is also central to regenerative and alternative modes of organizing (Albareda & Branzei, 2025; Ehrnström-Fuentes & Biese, 2023; Nishat-Botero & Thompson, 2025a). Additionally, the growing body of scholarship on Indigenous, feminist, peasant, and ecocentric forms of organizing points at radically different human-land relationalities that challenge dominant capitalist and anthropocentric assumptions of land as something separate from human organizations (Daher et al., 2026; Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2022b; Ergene & Calás, 2023; Peredo, 2023; Vlasov, 2019). These connected debates highlight the centrality of land to management and organization studies and point to the need for more explicit theorization of land as a constitutive condition of organizing.
The resurfacing of geopolitical conflicts and wars (Lumineau & Keller, 2025)—including intensified forms of environmental warfare in West Asia and beyond (Fieldhouse & Basu, 2026; Moulavi, 2024)—renders the landed condition of human organizing increasingly visible. These conflicts highlight a fundamental tension between expanding demands for land to sustain extractive and growth‑oriented economic systems and the need to sustain human and nonhuman life. It is also becoming increasingly visible how the control over land (and water) is central to the governance and management of logistical corridors and transportation routes that sustain global trade (e.g., the Strait of Hormuz), which underscores the landed condition of the global political economy. “Green” techno‑fixes and market managerialist pathways to decarbonization promoted by states and corporations as responses to the climate emergency (Nishat‑Botero & Willmott, 2025) also intensify pressures on land, not least through processes of financialization and speculation, while obscuring their consequences for land‑based communities and rural landscapes in both the Global North and South (Böhm et al., 2022). These are expressions of the material, political, and historical conditions that shape both land and organizing. As historian Patrick Wolfe reminds us, land is life, and conflicts over land can—and often do—become conflicts over life itself (Wolfe, 2006).
How agri‑food systems are organized is another domain in which the landed condition of organizing becomes particularly pronounced, revealing the coexistence and tension between extractive, exploitative, and care‑based relations to land (Beacham, 2018; Böhm et al., 2019; Colombo et al., 2024). Many forms of community‑based organizing have emerged in resistance to extractive agri-food systems (Ehrnström-Fuentes & Hokkanen, 2025), exposing how land functions as an organizing space of both resistances and alternatives (Daskalaki & Kokkinidis, 2017). Such efforts are often led by smallholders, peasants, Indigenous communities, and farmworkers most affected by dispossession and enclosure under extractive agrarian regimes (Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2022a, 2022b; Peredo, 2023; Shattuck et al., 2023). As climate and ecological crises continue to seriously undermine the fertility and well-being of land itself, such forms of resistance to—and experimentation with—the different landed conditions of organizing that sustain life are likely to proliferate across organizational and geographical contexts.
With this in mind, we pose what is arguably one of the life‑defining questions of our time: how might societies and economies be reorganized in ways that take the landed condition of organizing seriously, and that allow planetary life to flourish? If we humans are to avoid the systemic destruction of the possibilities for life to flourish on Earth, we urgently need to reconfigure the very rules of the game—rethinking how both human and nonhuman life on land is organized throughout urban, rural, and ecologically diverse regions (Nishat-Botero & Thompson, 2025b). This requires a radical rethinking of organizational theory that moves beyond treating land as external to how humans organize their lives, and instead as integral to how management and organizations are understood in contemporary societies.
This sub-theme invites scholars to advance land-based theorizing in management and organization studies, placing land at the center of organizational analysis rather than treating it as a passive resource, an empty space of “terra nullius” (Wolfe, 2006), or a “free gift” (Battistoni, 2025). We seek contributions that engage with land as material, political, historical, and relational and that explore how organizing on and with land shapes possibilities for planetary life to flourish.
The sub-theme seeks to explore the various organizational dimensions of land through diverse philosophical approaches, including feminist, ecological, decolonial, and more-than-human perspectives. In particular, we welcome conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- Conceptual explorations of the landed conditions of organizing, or how to understand organizing and organization if land is the focal point of how organization happens
- Empirical engagements with organizing on and with land in the context of climate breakdown, extreme events, biodiversity loss, war and conflict.
- Examinations of how green energy transitions, the increased demand for critical raw materials, and dual land use impact and are impacted by the landed conditions of organizing.
- Investigations of how labor regimes and resistance across agrarian, extractive, and resource frontiers shape and are shaped by the landed conditions of organizing.
- Engagements with agri‑food systems as sites of organizing, contestation, and experimentation with alternative land relations.
- Examinations of how financialization, carbon markets, and novel biodiversity offsetting regimes affect life on the land.
- Rethinking social justice as land justice entangled with claims for food sovereignty, agroecology, conservation, and territorial autonomy.
- Theorizing noncapitalist and alternative forms of land-based organizing, including commons, cooperatives, community governance, grassroots organizing, and democratic planning.
- Papers drawing on insights from feminist, Indigenous, decolonial, antiracist, peasant, and more‑than‑human and pluriversal perspectives on land organizing.
- Examining how different ontological and epistemological understandings of land shape management practices, organizational forms, and modes of governance
- Exploring spatial reconfigurations of land-based organizing, through domains such as rurbanization, rewilding, and various land-sharing and land-sparing practices.
- Critical examinations of fascism, authoritarianism, and far‑right organizing in relation to land, territory, and nature.
References
Albareda, L., & Sison, A. J. G. (2020). Commons organizing: Embedding common good and institutions for collective action. Insights from ethics and economics. Journal of Business Ethics, 166, 727–743. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04580-8
Albareda, L., & Branzei, O. (2025). Biocentric work in the Anthropocene: How actors regenerate degenerated natural commons. Journal of Management Studies, 62(8), 3501–3557. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13080
Arjaliès, D.-L., & Banerjee, S. B. (2025). “Let’s go to the land instead”: Indigenous perspectives on biodiversity and the possibilities of regenerative capitalism. Journal of Management Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13141
Battistoni, A. (2025). Free gifts: Capitalism and the politics of nature. Princeton University Press.
Beacham, J. (2018). Organising food differently: Towards a more-than-human ethics of care for the Anthropocene. Organization, 25(4), 533–549. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508418777893
Böhm, S., Spierenburg, M., & Lang, T. (2019). Fruits of our labour: Work and organisation in the global food system. Organization, 27(2), 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508419888901
Böhm, S., Carrington, M., Cornelius, N., et al. (2022). Ethics at the centre of global and local challenges. Journal of Business Ethics, 180, 835–861. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05239-2
Colombo, L. A., Bailey, A. R., & Gomes, M. V. (2024). Scaling in a post-growth era: Learning from social agricultural cooperatives. Organization, 31(6), 907–928. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084221147480
Daher, S., Stocco, L. C., & Paiter Suruí, G. W. (2026). When sustainability initiatives and Indigenous realities meet: Ontological violence in the case of the “Paiter Suruí Carbon Credit REDD+ Project.” Business & Society, 65(4), 802–836. https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503251396758
Daskalaki, M., & Kokkinidis, G. (2017). Organizing solidarity initiatives: A socio-spatial conceptualization of resistance. Organization Studies, 38(9), 1303–1325. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840617709304
Ehrnström-Fuentes, M. (2022a). Confronting extractivism – the role of local struggles in the (un)making of place. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 18(1), 50–73. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-01-2018-0016
Ehrnström-Fuentes, M. (2022b). Organising in defence of life: The emergence and dynamics of a territorial movement in Southern Chile. Organization, 29(1), 155–177. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508420963871
Ehrnström-Fuentes, M., & Biese, I. (2023). The act of (de/re)growing: Prefiguring alternative organizational landscapes of socioecological transformations. Human Relations, 76(11), 1739–1766. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267221112241
Ergene, S., & Calás, M. (2023). Becoming naturecultural: Rethinking sustainability for a more-than-human world. Organization Studies, 44(12), 1961–1986. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406231175293
Fieldhouse, R., & Basu, M. (2026). “Black rain” in Tehran: What are the health effects? Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00800-9
Flores, R. K., Böhm, S., & Misoczky, M. C. (2022). Contesting extractivism: International business and people’s struggles against extractive industries. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 18(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-07-2020-0093
Heikkurinen, P., Clegg, S., Pinnington, A. H., Nicolopoulou, K., & Alcaraz, J. M. (2021). Managing the Anthropocene: Relational agency and power to respect planetary boundaries. Organization & Environment, 34(2), 267–286. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026619881145
Linebaugh, P. (2014). Stop, thief! The commons, enclosures, and resistance. PM Press.
Lumineau, F., & Keller, A. (2025). War as a phenomenon of inquiry. Journal of Management Studies, 63(6), 2363–2397. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13213
Matten, D. (2026). Fascism as a management philosophy. Philosophy of Management, 25(1), 21–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-025-00355-1
Marx, K. (2024). Capital: Critique of political economy (Vol. 1). Princeton University Press.
Moulavi, S. (2024). Environmental warfare in Gaza. Pluto Books.
Nyberg, D., & Wright, C. (2022). Defending hegemony: From climate change mitigation to adaptation on the Great Barrier Reef. Organization, 31(2), 247–268. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084221115836
Nishat-Botero, Y., & Thompson, M. (2025a). Planning in nature’s metropolis: Metabolic municipalism and ecological planning in Barcelona. Environment & Planning D: Society and Space, 44(4), 633–653. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758251364061
Nishat-Botero, Y., & Thompson, M. (2025b). The land question and postcapitalist countrysides. In N. Gallent et al. (Eds.), Postcapitalist countrysides: From commoning to community wealth building (pp. 393–415). UCL Press.
Nishat-Botero, Y., & Willmott, H. (2025). Fossil governance: Oil companies, climate emergency, and the consequences of a complicit architecture of soft regulation. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 98, pp. 133–158. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20250000098007
Paxton, R. O. (2004). The anatomy of fascism. Random House.
Peredo, A. M. (2023). The unsettling potential of Indigenous organizing. Organization, 30(6), 1211–1221. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084231189263
Riofrancos, T. (2025). Extraction: The frontiers of green capitalism. Icon Books.
Shattuck, A., Grajales, J., Jacobs, R., Sauer, S., Galvin, S. S., & Hall, R. (2023). Life on the land: New lives for agrarian questions. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 50(2), 490–518. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2023.2174859
Vandeventer, J. S., Lloveras, J., & Warnaby, G. (2024). Seeking organizational geographies: A multidimensional spatial analysis of everyday organizing. Organization Studies, 45(8), 1133–1160. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406241248983
Varman, R. (2025). Corporations and fascism in “new” India. In R. Varman (Ed.), The politics of corporations in “new” India (pp. 1–41). Cambridge University Press.
Vlasov, M. (2019). In transition toward the ecocentric entrepreneurship nexus: How nature helps entrepreneurs make ventures more regenerative over time. Organization & Environment, 34(4), 559–580. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026619831448
Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240
| Period | 8 Jul 2027 → 10 Jul 2027 |
|---|---|
| Event title | EGOS Colloquium: The Games We Play: Re-Writing the Rules of Organization? |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 43 |
| Location | Liverpool, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |