Managerial Interventions in the Environment: Learning from Lefebvre s Theorization of the City

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1 Global Journal of Management and Business Studies. ISSN Volume 3, Number 4 (2013), pp Research India Publications Managerial Interventions in the Environment: Learning from Lefebvre s Theorization of the City Srinath Jagannathan 1 and Patturaja Selvaraj 2 1 Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. 2 Indian Institute of Management Indore, Indore, India. Abstract In the present competitive business environment, it is not only regulatory authorities but also customers who try to keep a check on the organization s effect on the environment. Organizations therefore should be aware of the damage they cause to the natural environment. Managers need to play a pro-active and crucial role in making organizations nature friendly and green. Organizations need to sustainably engage with the nature. In order to do so, the discourses which dominate the organizational considerations may need to be changed. We discuss various ways through which organizations could device mechanisms to pay attention to issues of nature, drawing from Henri Lefebvre s theorization of urban space. While the concept of the street has the potential to open up spontaneous conversations between organizations and communities and also creates deliberative spaces within organizations, the concept of the monument can repress progressive and creative discussions. Finally, sustainable engagement with nature may also provide long term competitive advantage to organizations. Keywords: Lefebvre, street, monument, environment, nature. 1. Introduction Organizations are concerned about the environment and seek to deploy green projects for competitive advantage. For the purposes of sustainable growth organizations need to be aware of the damages they cause to the natural environment. Organizations need to play a crucial role in making organizations nature friendly. Organizations need to

2 366 Patturaja Selvaraj et al sustainably engage with the nature. In order to do so, the discourses which dominate organizational considerations may need to be changed. We draw from the theorization of Henri Lefebvre (2003) on the emerging spatiality of the urban, to uncover social and organizational forms that could be usefully deployed in improving the efficacy of green organizational projects. We draw upon devices that Lefebvre (2003) provides such as the street and the monument to introspect on the organization of space as heterotopia in conceiving a more productive engagement with the practice of sustainability (Chatzidakis, Maclaran and Bradshaw, 2012). Heterotopian spaces provide freedom for politics, critique and experimentation and may be necessary in moving beyond moralistic frames while engaging with the spatial contexts in which green behaviors are produced (Chatzidakis, Maclaran and Bradhsaw, 2012). Lefebvre s politics is one of articulating rights to spaces, particularly spaces of the city as embodied in affordable housing, transit and other public services (Kipfer, Saberi and Wieditz, 2013: 115). Lefebvre is interested in the contradictory becoming of everyday space, and the subversive potentialities that inhere in spatial formations such as art and the festival (Gardiner, 2012b: 52). Lefebvre (1991) indicates how technical representations of space using quantity, commodity and category construct an official truth of space, a singular representation which often departs from the pluralities that inhere in space. However, lived space is different from its official representation. Thus, according to Lefebvre (1991), the truth of space varies from the practice of true space. Lived space is constructed by dynamic and competitive processes where the conceptual and embodied apparatus of human beings participates in complex ways (Lefebvre, 1991). Drawing upon, Lefebvre s concept of space, Leonard (2013) suggests that organizational discourses linked to environmental sensitivity are largely rhetorical and end up constructing lean workplaces instead of green organizations. 2. Streets, Monuments, Management and Nature One of the ways in which the discourse of nature can be animated in organizations is by paying attention to Lefebvre s (2003) narrative of the street. According to Lefebvre (2003: 18), the street is a site for discovering the self in the social In the street, a form of spontaneous theatre, I become spectacle and spectator, and sometimes an actor. The street is where movement takes place, the interaction without which urban life would not exist, leaving only separation, a forced and fixed segregation. Just like streets are sites of movement in a city, in an organization as well, streets are required to bring about unpredictable meetings, to set into movement moments of spontaneous theatre, movements which do not disembody organizational processes such as financial instruments from their physical targets (Bansal and Knox-Hayes, 2013). Else, like the city, the forced and fixed segregations of organizations will lead them to decay and death, given the serious implications of the relationships between organizations and their environments (Reid and Toffel, 2009). In this sense, a street is required not only within an organization, but the organization also needs mechanisms to participate in its environment, in nature through the spatiality of the street.

3 Managerial Interventions in the Environment: Learning from Lefebvre s 367 Else, the distance between organization and its environment and nature is only likely to grow. We argue that the technology of the street is one of the mechanisms through which the practice of sustainability could be enduringly embedded in organizations (Starik and Kanashiro, 2013). The lack of sustainable engagement of organizations with nature are the cause of climate disruption, debilitating poverty, biodiversity loss, human rights and child labor issues, ecosystem toxic pollution, overpopulation, and overconsumption deforestation and gender discrimination war, violence, crime, illiteracy (Starik and Kanashiro, 2013: 9). Societies need to seriously rethink issues of development and consumption if sustainable existence on earth is to be preserved (Starik and Gribbon, 2013). Management education and research is one of the sites where environmental issues need to be raised in an attempt to influence practice (Sharma, Starik and Husted, 2007). One of the ways of building movements of the street within organizations is to replan the spatiality of the organization. Engagement with nature involves lengthening the temporality of the organization, an imagination that the organization, nature and society have to survive together for several years to come, which is against the trend of space-time compression (Harvey, 1989), the current organizational and social reality. In this sense, two journeys of the street may be undertaken. For instance, could a mining corporation which engages with the community invite members of the community to visit it? Could it invite a group of ten people children, youth, women, elders and middle aged men from the community to visit it? When the people travel through the organization, they have brought the ethics of the street into the organization, thus ensuring that the environment is no longer just another empirical context for management to engage with (Bansal and Gao, 2006). The practice of the street which brings the organization spatially and temporally closer to its stakeholders is necessary even to understand consumer behavior, particularly the behavior of environmentally conscious consumers (Lin and Chang, 2012). Consumers often feel that green products are inferior to regular products and thus feel the need to use a higher quantity of green products in order to satisfy their needs (Lin and Chang, 2012). This assessment of rating green products as inferior products is truer of environmentally conscious consumers than those who are not environmentally sensitive (Lin and Chang, 2012). Apart from the practice of the street, Lefebvre (2003: 21) also articulates the concept of the monument The monument is essentially repressive. It is the seat of an institution (the church, the state, the university). Any space that is organized around the monument is colonized and repressed. The great monuments have been raised to glorify conquerors and the powerful. If sustainable engagement with nature is to be preserved, organizations will also have to device mechanisms through which the glorification of the powerful is avoided, as it is the abuse of power which is attributed to be the cause of climate change, which has threatened the lives and livelihoods of a large proportion of the world s population (Lohmann, 2006). They will have to discover ways to ensure that the board room or the offices of the top management do not become monuments which perform the role of repression and become complicit in

4 368 Patturaja Selvaraj et al projects of violence such as slave and child labour, deforestation, repression of trade unions and payment of abysmal wages in the name of carbon financing (Lohmann, 2006: 314), but remain as streets where human action shapes unpredictable decisions. Ensuring that the organization itself does not become a monument means multiple things. On the one hand, it means that the organization does not only pay attention to those who are powerful in society, but also engages in conversations with those who are powerless, such as indigenous communities and others who are affected by plantation projects which promise to save the environment by initiating carbon trading projects in the south (Lohmann, 2006:38). 3. Conclusion The practice of the street and the overcoming of blind fields in organizations can lead to positive engagements with nature. The environmental technology portfolio of an organization through which it channels investments in environment friendly technologies can also improve its manufacturing performance substantially (Klassen and Whybark, 1999). On the other hand, organizations need to realize that when nature is destroyed, it creates negative externalities for all entities in the economy. Nature contains various encoded messages. In order to be able to read these messages, organizations need to encourage managers to become well versed with the business they are engaging. Finally so long as society needs organizations, they will continue to exist, but society will also have to comprehend the limits placed by nature, not in the sense of a conflict between society and nature, but in the sense of the social space itself being a possibility envisaged by the evolving conditions of nature. Reference [1] Bansal, P., & Knox-Hayes, J The time and space of materiality in organizations and the natural environment. Organization and Environment, 26(1): [2] Bansal, P., & Gao, J Building the future by looking at the past: Examining published research in organizations and environment. Organization and Environment, 19: [3] Chatzidakis, A., Maclaran, P., & Bradshaw, A Heterotopian space and the utopics of ethical and green consumption. Journal of Marketing Management, 28(3-4): [4] Gardiner, M. E. 2012a. Henri Lefebvre and the sociology of boredom. Theory, Culture and Society, 29(2): [5] Harvey, D The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. [6] Kipfer, S., Saberi, P., & Wieditz, T Henri Lefebvre: Debates and controversies. Progress in Human Geography, 37(1):

5 Managerial Interventions in the Environment: Learning from Lefebvre s 369 [7] Klassen, R. D., and Whybark, D. C The impact of environmental technologies on manufacturing performance. Academy of Management Journal, 42(6): [8] Lefebvre, H The urban revolution, trans. R. Bonono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [9] Lefebvre, H The production of space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. [10] Leonard, P Changing organizational space: Green? Or lean and mean? Sociology, 47(2): [11] Lin, Y-C., & Chang, C-C. A Double standard: The role of environmental consciousness in green product usage. Journal of Marketing, 76(5): [12] Lohmann, L Carbon trading: A critical conversation on climate change, privatisation and power. Uppasala: The Dag Hammarskjold Centre. [13] Reid, E. M., & Toffel, M. W Responding to public and private politics: Corporate disclosure of climate change strategies. Strategic Management Journal, 30: [14] Sharma, S., Starik, M., & Husted, B. (Eds.) Organizations and the sustainability mosaic: Crafting long-term ecological and societal solutions. Northampton: Edward Elgar. [15] Starik, M., & Kanashiro, P Toward a theory of sustainability management: Uncovering and integrating the nearly obvious. Organization and Environment, 26(1): 7-30.

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Capital, Institutions and Urban Growth Systems

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