Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction

by Christopher Wright, Daniel Nyberg

Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing humanity, a definitive manifestation of the well-worn links between progress and devastation. This book explores the complex relationship that the corporate world has with climate change and examines the central role of corporations in shaping political and social responses to the climate crisis. The principal message of the book is that despite the need for dramatic economic and political change, corporate capitalism continues to rely on the maintenance of 'business as usual'. The authors explore the different processes through which corporations engage with climate change. Key discussion points include climate change as business risk, corporate climate politics, the role of justification and compromise, and managerial identity and emotional reactions to climate change. Written for researchers and graduate students, this book moves beyond descriptive and normative approaches to provide a sociologically and critically informed theory of corporate responses to climate change.

Genres: Environment, Politics, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published September 23, 2015

About the author

Christopher Wright is Professor of Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School with an extensive publication record in organisational and critical management studies. His research focuses on the political economy of corporate capitalism, organisational change, and corporate responses to climate change with particular reference to issues of corporate political activity, the dominance of market logics, and managerial emotion and identity in understanding the climate crisis. He has published extensively on these topics in a range of leading management and critical social theory journals, and is the author of several books including The Management of Labour: A History of Australian Employers (Oxford University Press, 1995), Management as Consultancy: Neo-bureaucracy and the Consultant Manager (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-destruction (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Reviews

[Aden Date · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nyberg and Wright's book can be seen as a companion to Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt. Where Naomi's book covers the backroom deals and power plays that created the industry of climate denial, Nyberg & Wright look at the kind of Capitalist luke-warmism that works in plain sight-- the way that the tools and techniques of capitalist logic incorporate and synthesise all criticism.

The style is academic: Dry yet convincing. The authors discuss how climate politics become translated in to "risk" frameworks in the corporate world, and "risk" always refers to risk to profitability. They discuss orders of worth-- how corporations may try to do multiple things (build a better society, meet real human needs, or save the planet), but will always ultimately be subservient to the profit motive. They discuss how corporations frame climate change as a business opportunity and frame the emotional debate around action on climate change. All these subtle processes reinforce corporations' position at the nexus of solving the climate crisis and reinstate neo-liberal hegemony.

The most compelling part of the book, with quotes peppered throughout, are the lived experiences of sustainability professionals in organisations. A lot of books on climate politics have focused on indigenous movements, direct action, eco-separatists and so on-- but Nyberg & Wright's examination in to the intra- and interpersonal tumult of environmentalists in the corporate sector is peerless and sympathetic. This population have also probably been ignored in the effort to build a more revolutionary eco-politics-- they are numerous and broadly disaffected.

The book loses it's academic restraint towards the end and becomes more emotive. Good-- because, by the end one feels vividly the grip of neoliberal hegemony that was always there-- and that almost no good can be done within the current corporate structure. Nyberg and Wright reach similar conclusions to other authors, placing the solutions to our predicament squarely in the civic and social sphere-- damn the corporation (and if you're a sustainability professional, God help you).

[Ben Thurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wright and Nyberg begin their work with the obligatory outline of the increasing evidence and impacts of fossil-fuel driven global warming and climate disruption. The dot-point litany of melting ice, floods, wildfires, supertyphoons, heatwaves and droughts, precedes most works on climate change as if we continually need the reminder in the starkest, simplest forms that it is happening. It is happening now. It is happening everywhere. And it's really not good.

They then pose the obvious question. In response to the compelling science, the increasing scale and severity of impacts, and the threats posed by climate change, "how do we choose to respond?" Political action is timid, fitful and easily reversed (as policy-making in Australia amply demonstrates). Public attention to the problems of climate change is either sporadic or a site for partisan division and dispute. Fossil fuels continue to be extracted and burned.

Why? Why have our responses so far failed to rise even remotely to the challenge of planet-wide climate disruption?

Wright and Nyberg argue that our particular form of global capitalism puts humanity at a "strategic disadvantage" in responding to climate change, with corporations positioned socially and economically as both the principal agents producing the greenhouse gases that are disrupting our climate and our best hope for innovating or "sustainably consuming" our way back to climate safety.

They characterise the link between economic growth, corporate innovation, and environmental destruction, as a process of 'creative self-destruction' in which economic expansion relies on the continued exploitation of natural resources.

We are destroying ourselves. It is as simple as that. Economic growth and the exploitation of nature have long gone hand-in-hand, but they now constitute the most ill-fated of bedfellows. Climate change, the greatest threat of our time, is the definitive manifestation of the well-worn links between progress and devastation.

This is not glib anti-capitalist rhetoric, though. The work is built on analysis of the business and sustainability strategies of 25 large corporations from a variety of industries, and interviews with more than 70 senior managers and industry representatives. The authors highlight how corporations:

* take climate uncertainties and threats and render them as risks – amenable to commodification, trade and profit;
* engage a variety of strategies for political and public engagement on climate change that reinforce the notion that the corporation and the market are the central mechanisms by which climate change should be addressed;
* facilitate and authorise different sustainability strategies as well as personal and managerial identities and emotionologies (from the "rational manager" who finds profitable win-win solutions by reducing waste, to the "green change agent" who champions environmental concern in corporate practice, to the "committed activist") which all allow the environment to have some value within the corporation's purpose and activities but ultimately serve to subordinate the environment to the market in corporate, political and public orders of worth.

In place of this fantasy – more consumption and more corporate freedom as the solutions to climate change – the authors advocate deeper democracy and citizen engagement. They expose the myths of corporate environmentalism, good corporate citizenship, and corporate omnipotence and competence as the "sole, supremely inevitable rejoinder to the climate crisis both now and in the future." These myths – which have such a deep hold on the public imagination – need to be replaced urgently, and they propose alternative narratives and imaginaries that might resource more effective climate responses. Rightly, they note that,

It is not enough to push the 'right' technologies. We need to pursue alternative narratives of how we make sense of human society within the limits of our planet – how we organise work, how we define success and well-being, and how we are represented in the decision-making process.

They highlight how alternative narratives and approaches are already taking hold in some cases, notably around renewable energy, the possibilities for regulatory and legal intervention, and campaigns for divestment.

The last chapter focuses on hope for movements that may help shape a better future to 'business as usual'. The movements are broad and sketched out quickly – most are not really movements in the social sense but rather changed perspectives, imagery and language for this better future. It's hard to disagree with Nyberg and Wright that we must develop a new vision of our relationship with nature, use new language and imagery to articulate our plight and solutions, build better democracies, put "values" above "value" and champion authentic emotionality in our engagement on climate change. But it would be good to spend time exploring the evidence that underpins these as potentially productive responses and to identify plausible pathways for making use of them in realising concrete social and economic alternatives.

I know it's easier to critique than to construct. I know that the pathway to solutions is generally through a clear-sighted analysis of the problem. But I would, just every so often, love a book like this to start – not end – with the chapter on hope and spend as much time articulating compelling arguments for particular solutions as it does laying out the problem.

[Alexander Tas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brutal examination of how corporations have changed the conversation of climate change (and environmental degradation in general) in order to benefit themselves.

[Peter Hawkeye · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating, and compelling book to read I thought.

[Mladen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent read which provides a much needed eye-opening perspective on the world that we live in.