“[…] having a racist and violent police force in your neighborhood is a lot like having a coal-fired power plant in your neighborhood. And having both? And maybe some smoke pouring in from a nearby wildfire? African Americans are three times as likely to die from asthma as the rest of the population. “I Can’t Breathe” is the daily condition of too many people in this country. One way or another, there are a lot of knees on a lot of necks.” (McKibben, 2020: 2).

The largest ever protest movement in the United States took place during the summer of 2020 when between 15 and 20 million people took to the streets calling for racial justice following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis (Buchanan et al., 2020). Black Lives Matter (BLM), which began in 2013 in the United States, became an international social movement following country-wide protests against racism and police violence. Several major companies endorsed BLM and pledged to combat racism and end discrimination in the workplace. September 2019 also saw the biggest climate protest in history as millions of people demonstrated across 185 countries demanding urgent action on climate change (Laville & Watts, 2019). These environmental protests were also about climate justice because climate change has disproportionately harmful impacts on poorer populations, mainly Black and people of color across the world. This was formally recognized by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which in September 2022 announced its plans to create a separate office for addressing environmental injustices (Davenport, 2022). Both racial justice and environmentalism have long and intertwined histories: the civil rights movement in the US in the 1950s emerged from a long-standing campaign by African Americans to end racial discrimination, while the modern environmental movement can be traced back to the 1960s from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and culminating in the celebration of the first Earth Day in 1970.Footnote 1

While management scholars have been studying social issues since the 1960s (Walsh et al., 2003), race and racial justice have been neglected, and with few exceptions organizations have been conceptualized as race-neutral (Nkomo, 1992; Ray, 2019). In the few studies that have examined race in organizations, racial difference has generally been treated as an individual-level variable rather than as an institutional system of racial stratification (Ray, 2019). In addition, the damaging environmental consequences of organizations’ actions on racial minorities have not received much attention because decades of research on corporate social responsibility and stakeholder theory (Carroll, 1979; Freeman, 1984) have generally ignored questions of racism and racial justice. More recent scholarship that has engaged with societal issues such as “grand challenges” (George et al., 2016; Howard-Grenville et al., 2019) perpetuates this neglect by not explicitly addressing issues of racial injustice.

We argue this negligence of racial injustice in social and environmental research in management is concerning in the era of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch proposed by earth scientists, where human activity has changed the functioning of the earth system (Steffen et al., 2011). Climate change impacts such as a warmer planet, extreme weather, droughts, wildfires, floods, and rising sea levels threaten the very survival of many communities across the world, especially populations of color that are already vulnerable. Most accounts of the Anthropocene do not acknowledge its racial dimensions and ignore the critical role that slavery and colonialism played in creating this new geological epoch (Pulido, 2020). Even emerging management research on potential solutions to the climate crisis such as sustainable technologies (Voegtlin & Scherer, 2017), sharing economy (Kathan et al., 2016), and circular economy (Murray et al., 2017) often ignore the disproportionate vulnerabilities faced by communities of color and the implications of these solutions for them.

To address this lacuna, we focus on environmental injustices and racism to highlight processes and structures that disproportionately harm historically marginalized communities of color. The paper is motivated by the following questions: What are the silences and erasures in discursive constructions of the Anthropocene? How are these reproduced in sustainability discourses in management and organization studies (MOS)? How can we create alternative imaginaries where racial and environmental justice become central concerns in our research? We contend that a climate justice agenda based on racial justice can overcome the silences and erasures of management research on the racial dimensions of social and environmental issues. We propose three shifts to facilitate a move toward a racially just research agenda in MOS: a shift in focus from studying elite institutions to researching grassroots organizations concerned with climate and racial justice, a shift from an uncritical endorsement of global technologies to studying local adaptations by communities of color, and a shift from offering decontextualized climate solutions to unraveling racial histories that can help us address racial and climate injustices in the Anthropocene. Altogether, these shifts contribute to a paradigmatic transformation toward critical epistemologies for social and environmental research and education in MOS. Grounded in feminist and postcolonial epistemologies, the proposed climate justice agenda based on racial justice facilitates a perspective “from below” producing knowledge for and with historically marginalized communities of color.

The paper is structured as follows. First, we describe how the Anthropocene emerged within racial capitalism with its legacies of slavery and colonialism. Second, we review extant scholarship on environmental justice and racism and discuss historical injustices inflicted on disadvantaged communities of color. Next, we describe how social and environmental issues have been conceptualized in MOS and point to the absences and erasures of race and racism in the burgeoning literature that addresses the so-called grand challenges. We then propose a new research agenda for MOS and describe three shifts that are necessary to accomplish it. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposed agenda for management research and education.

Racial Capitalism in the Anthropocene

Earth scientists have conceptualized the Anthropocene as a new epoch in the geological history of Earth where human activity has become the dominant cause of environmental change (Lewis & Maslin, 2015; Steffen et al., 2011). Specifically, soil erosion associated with urbanization and agriculture, changes in carbon and nitrogen cycles, global heating, sea-level rises, ocean acidification, habitat loss, and diffusion of human-made materials in the geological strata are some of the ecological changes associated with this era. The Anthropocene concept rapidly spread across the humanities and social sciences and has become a “hot topic” across many fields (Haraway et al., 2016).

However, the concept of the Anthropocene reinforces the assumption of human domination over nature, which is responsible for the ecological crises in the first place (Crist, 2013; Ergene & Calás, 2023). The illusion of human exceptionalism is a dangerous one because it continues to privilege technical solutions for managing ecological crises (Calás et al., 2018). The Anthropocene concept also reproduces and consolidates colonial structures of power while reproducing Eurocentric understandings of human nature, where being human in Enlightenment reasoning inevitably meant white, male European (Simpson, 2020).

Feminist scholars have problematized the “Anthropos” at the center of the concept of the Anthropocene arguing that it is the figure of the universal “Man” that has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster (Ergene et al., 2018; Glabau, 2017; Haraway, 2016). The “Anthropos” has never been a neutral term but is a normative category that grants privileges and entitlements to gendered and racialized bodies (Braidotti, 2019). Specifically, this figure of the Anthropos “monopolizes the right to access to bodies of all living entities” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 39) by normalizing a “cis-male, individuated, Eurocentric subject that has, historically, overlooked the lives of women” (Sayers et al., 2021, p.3). Grounded in feminist epistemological questions of “Whose science? Whose knowledge?” (Harding, 1991) and situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988), feminists have also challenged the premise of “panhuman” responsibility underlying the Anthropocene discourses. These scholars argue that a universal “we” ignores deep inequities between the privileged few who have benefited from centuries of fossil-fuel driven development that has created the ecological crisis, and historically marginalized populations who have contributed the least to the problem, but from whom the Anthropocene demands equal accountability (Di Chiro, 2016).

The Anthropocene is also a racial regime based on the genocide of Indigenous populations, historical and modern slavery, colonial expansion, extraction of minerals, military and economic imperialism, and a racialized international division of labor (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021). The concept of the Anthropocene is not politically or racially neutral; instead the transition of “Colonial Man” to “Anthropocene Man” represents a privileged subjective space where “coloniality and anti-Blackness are materially inscribed into the Anthropocene” (Yusoff, 2018: 41). Thus, the Anthropocene is an outcome of a capitalist political economy which for centuries has prioritized wealth creation for a privileged few, enabled and sustained by historical and modern slavery, colonialism, and exploitation of nature (Ergene et al., 2021).

Racism in the form of “racial capitalism” was central to the expansion of fossil-fuel driven capitalist development in the historical formation of the Anthropocene (Pulido, 2020). Migrant labor played a crucial role in creating the sources of value during early capitalism, a fact that is generally ignored in historical accounts of capitalism (Robinson, 1983). Slavery and colonialism were constituents of early capitalism—the capital to finance colonial ventures was generated through the slave trade. Slavery and racism were thus enabling conditions of industrial capitalism whose legacies persist in contemporary practices of modern slavery (Banerjee, 2021a; Cooke, 2003). Colonial modes of dispossession are widespread in the extractives industries with more than 2000 violent conflicts involving mining companies and Indigenous communities that are ongoing in the former colonies of Africa, and Asia as well as in the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand (Martinez-Alier et al., 2016). It is no coincidence that most of these conflicts are occurring in countries that are former colonies. It is also no coincidence that the mining companies involved in the conflict are headquartered in or financed by the former colonizing countries.Footnote 2 The racialized nature of these conflicts has also been well-documented in the literature (Banerjee et al., 2023).

It is also important not to conflate historical slavery with European attempts to exterminate Indigenous populations in the settler colonies. For example, different racial logics were used to define Indigenous people and slaves in the United States: racializing the bodies of African slaves as Black was based on a particular racial logic that increased the wealth of slave owners through the reproduction of slaves. In contrast, Indigenous people were categorized as “savages” and “less than human” because such categorization justified the logic of eliminating them and confiscating their lands (Banerjee, 2021b). Thus, as feminist scholars argue, differentiation of bodies, not homogenization, is a key aspect of racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018). While both Black lives and Indigenous lives matter equally, they have been exploited in different but parallel systems of racist violence, and hence any anti-racism movement calling for inclusion and equality should not undermine Indigenous land claims in settler colonies. Contemporary forms of racial capitalism can be seen in the racialized division of labor in global supply chains, extraction of resources from Indigenous lands, as well as “the simultaneous exploitation through differentiation of the workforce alongside a celebration of particular forms of commodified difference” (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 9). Racial capitalism also underlies various forms of modern slavery, such as human trafficking, forced labor, and bonded labor through the extraction of value from Black and Brown bodies.

Furthermore, in terms of climate change, the atmosphere has been used unequally since the Industrial Revolution, which implies that industrialized countries bear the bulk of the responsibility for global carbon emissions (Lewis & Maslin, 2015). The wealthiest 10% of the world’s population is responsible for 52% of cumulative carbon emissions, while the poorest 50% contribute to just 7% of global emissions (Oxfam International, 2021). Implying that all humans have contributed to the formation of the Anthropocene depoliticizes racialized and gendered inequalities, obscures the role of colonialism, and masks the violence of racial capitalism (Saldanha, 2020; Simpson, 2020). Histories of slavery, geographies of race and racism, genocide, and subjugation of Indigenous knowledges are all erased in constructing universal humanity that must now confront the problem of planetary destruction mainly created by the population in countries of the global North (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021). To counter these silences and erasures, we draw on insights from the environmental justice and racism literature as discussed in the next section.

Environmental Justice and Racism in the Anthropocene

Environmental justice and racism scholarship have its origins in grassroots activism and engaged sociological research (Holifield et al., 2018; Martinez-Alier et al., 2016). The environmental justice movement emerged as a response to a series of ecologically damaging events that took place in the US during the late 1970s and 1980s, such as DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) contamination of waterways by a manufacturing plant in Alabama, and the creation of PCB-contaminated (polychlorinated biphenyls) landfills in North Carolina (Mohai et al., 2009). These and other environmental hazards directly affected the health and livelihoods of low-income Black and other historically marginalized communities. The environmental justice movement highlighted these racial injustices and called for urgent remedial action (Taylor, 2014a).

The early environmental justice literature highlighted the uneven and unjust distribution of toxic and hazardous waste targeted at Black communities (Bullard, 1983). A 1987 nationwide study found that zip codes of residences of people of color were the strongest predictor of locations of commercial hazardous waste facilities in the US (United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. 1987). This report led to a burgeoning field of research on environmental racism, defined as “racial discrimination in environmental policymaking, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of color from the leadership of the ecology movements” (Chavis 1982 in Mohai et al., 2009: 406). Environmental racism is also a form of injustice as we discuss in the next section.

Approaches to Environmental Justice and Racism

Past research has explored different approaches to environmental justice including distributional justice, recognitional justice, procedural justice, and the capabilities approach to justice (Holifield et al., 2018). Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, scholars drew from the concept of intersectionality in Black feminist thought to extend our understanding of environmental justice and racism (Pellow, 2016).

Distributional justice refers to the equitable allocation of environmental costs and benefits including the distribution of material goods such as resources, income, and wealth (Menton et al., 2020). Research on distributional justice has highlighted disparities between minority and white communities concerning the location of facilities producing and storing toxic and hazardous materials (Bullard, 1983; Mohai & Bryant, 1992). Businesses deliberately chose locations to site their hazardous facilities where they would face the least resistance, which invariably meant poor communities of color with few resources to oppose their plans (Bullard, 2019). Environmental hazards significantly worsened the conditions of minority communities thereby perpetuating the unjust distribution of environmental costs and benefits.

Recognitional justice involves acknowledging differences between people and respecting their ways of living with and their concerns about the natural environment (Whyte, 2018). Oppression of certain groups of people resulting from environmental injustice arises from a rejection of difference (Young, 1990). The starkest example of this rejection of difference is the occupation of Indigenous lands in the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Large corporations enabled by the state have used Indigenous lands for their resource extraction projects with devastating environmental and social consequences for Indigenous communities whose livelihoods have been destroyed (Banerjee, 2021b). Conflicts over land and resources in the Akwesasne Mohawk Reserve, which has a long history of US-Canada border crossing disputes, are a case in point. The area has become one of the most polluted areas in the US after decades of illegally dumped toxins like PCB by General Motors and ALCOA, which destroyed the Mohawk's fishing waters and their way of life (Arquette et al., 2002). By disregarding the values and needs of native tribes, the State and corporations are the perpetrators of environmental racism arising from recognitional injustice (Whyte, 2018).

Procedural justice is concerned with the democratic participation of all actors in institutional processes (Walker, 2012). Research on procedural justice documented the systemic exclusion of marginalized communities in environmental decision-making and policy when ironically, these communities suffer the costs and burdens of the decisions made (Bell & Carrick, 2018). Procedural justice operates at national, regional, and local levels of government and aims to provide principles for a fair environmental decision-making process. For instance, Hunold and Young (1998) proposed five principles to ensure procedural justice: genuine inclusiveness by ensuring representation, a continuous consultation process, elimination of power asymmetries in decision-making processes, shared decision-making authority, and authoritative decision-making by affected communities that cannot be overturned by public officials.

However, the mere presence of procedures does not guarantee equitable outcomes, because structural inequalities restrict or deny access to marginalized populations and power asymmetries are not easy to eliminate (Bell & Carrick, 2018). Such functional approaches to justice elide the role of the state in producing unjust environmental outcomes that adversely impact particular racial groups. The Flint lead poisoning water crisis is a case in point: despite widespread awareness of the health hazards posed by contaminated water, public authorities delayed remedial measures citing budgetary issues. Race was a factor in the slow response: the population of Flint is largely composed of low-income Black families. Scholars argue that the Flint case is an example of environmental racism where Black bodies are devalued and seen as unworthy (e.g., “Outcast,” “Underground,” and “Threat”) from the perspective of the state (Benz, 2019; Pulido, 2016). Race also played a key role in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Not only did Black neighborhoods of New Orleans suffer the most devastating impacts from the hurricane itself, but these communities also disproportionally suffered from post-hurricane recovery due to non-allocation of resources, decisions to rebuild or return to the swamp, and lack of representation in decision-making (Mohai et al., 2009; Rivlin, 2023). More than 18 years after the Hurricane Katrina, Black residents of the city are still awaiting justice.

A capabilities approach to justice shifts the focus from inputs such as resources and wealth to the capabilities required to produce outcomes like wellbeing, education, and employment opportunities, participation in democratic decision-making and other activities for individuals to function as equal citizens in democratic states (Day, 2018). Theoretically grounded in the capability approach of Nussbaum and Sen (1993), the premise of this view is that individuals differ in their ability to convert resources to positive outcomes based on their circumstances and background. A capabilities approach calls for equity in outcomes such as access to clean air and water, education, nutritious food, arable land, and so on. There is a vast body of research that shows how communities of color do not have access to basic amenities and shoulder much of the burden of environmental injustice (Mohai et al., 2009; Pulido, 2016).

Finally, more recent scholarship has focused on the intersectional approach to environmental justice drawing on insights from the concept of intersectionality. This notion was first developed by the Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) to highlight the multiple forms of oppression that Black women experience. Crenshaw (1991) argued that dominant conceptions of discrimination neglected the distinctive experiences of Black women from white women or Black men. These experiences intersected with other forms of injustice because various social categories of difference put “particular bodies at risk of exclusion, marginalization, erasure, discrimination, violence, destruction and othering” (Pellow, 2016, p. 225). “Deeply intersectional” environmental justice explicitly recognizes these categories of difference and analyzes the exploitative intersecting structures that marginalize particular groups while privileging powerful ones (Malin & Ryder, 2018). Ducre (2018) further developed a Black feminist imagination that employs an intersectional frame of race, gender, and ecology to explain the intolerable material conditions of poor Black women—abandoned housing, urban decay, and experience of violence—while highlighting the critical role of Black women as key agents of environmental justice.

These different approaches to environmental justice illustrate the structural and institutional basis of environmental racism and provide a critical perspective on contemporary environmental problems and the inequities created by proposed solutions. Thus, climate change cannot be separated from climate justice given the vastly unequal climate impacts on communities who are already disadvantaged and least resilient (Pulido, 2020; Schlosberg & Collins, 2014). However, while social and environmental concerns have received attention from MOS scholars, issues of environmental justice and racism have generally been ignored as we discuss in the next section.

Social and Environmental Issues in Management and Organization Studies

Management scholars have been studying how businesses can operate for the benefit of society since the late 1960s (Walsh et al., 2003). Starting with a broad perspective that examined interactions of business and society (Steiner, 1971), scholars have developed concepts like corporate social responsibility (Carroll, 1979) and stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984) to theorize and address the social impacts of business. Management research that engaged with the natural environment had similar aspirations where concepts like sustainable development (Gladwin et al., 1995) and corporate sustainability (Bansal & Song, 2017) were used to understand the environmental impacts of business. As this work began to appear in the leading management journals, research on social and environmental issues shifted from the periphery to the mainstream.

However, the focus on the organizational implications of social and environmental issues in much of MOS remained silent on environmental and racial injustices that gave rise to the civil rights movements of the 1960s and the grassroots environmental movement of the 1970s, which were key events that influenced the intellectual traditions of other academic fields like sociology and anthropology. In our field, there was hardly any engagement with Black feminist thinkers like Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins all of whom drew attention to institutional and structural racism, sexism, and classism in Western societies. MOS research also largely ignored the work of ecofeminist thinkers like Maria Mies, Noël Sturgeon, Val Plumwood, and Vandana Shiva who exposed the patriarchal and colonial legacies of domination and control of nature.

In recent years, the term “grand challenges” has gained significant currency in MOS to describe crucial societal concerns like climate change, inequality, poverty, racial and gender discrimination, and the like. Yet, much of the research on these global challenges continues to perpetuate racial and power asymmetries—which one could argue are what created these global problems in the first place (see also Foster et al., 2023). There is very little, if any, awareness or engagement with feminist and postcolonial critiques of Eurocentric, individuated, and cis-male “Man” (Braidotti, 2019; Yusoff, 2018) that continues to inform the discursive production of “grand challenges.” Neither is there much engagement with the environmental justice and racism scholarship that draws attention to racial injustices in institutional environmental policies and practices (Holifield et al., 2018). Such neglect of key critiques of received knowledge about environmental and social problems runs the risk of offering solutions that also ignore racial and environmental injustices as we discuss in the next section.

Race-Neutrality in Grand Challenges and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

“Grand challenges” are defined as “specific critical barrier(s) that, if removed, would help solve an important societal problem with a high likelihood of global impact through widespread implementation” (George et al., 2016, p. 1881). However, the early enthusiasm that greeted the term seems to have waned given the incoherence and lack of analytical ability of the concept, with some scholars even calling for its ‘retirement’ (Seelos et al., 2022). Much of grand challenges work draws from the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to contribute to the efforts in tackling global concerns like poverty, hunger, inequality, climate change, and gender inequality (Howard-Grenville et al., 2019).

While the SDGs are laudable, they have been critiqued due to their neglect of racial differences. Critics argue that despite the SDGs’ aim to promote inclusive societies, they are “disturbingly silent about eradicating the causes and effects of racism and racial/ethnic discrimination” and that “racism and racial/ethnic discrimination will continue to function as structural and systemic barriers to sustainable development if they are not addressed” (Okorodudu et al., 2015, p. 2). Others argue that despite the “leave no one behind” agenda and a dedicated goal for “reducing inequalities” (SDG 10), racial injustices are undermined in the overarching framework (Winkler & Satterthwaite, 2017). In 2015, several civil society organizations submitted a formal request to the United Nations calling for the inclusion of relevant assessment methods for tracking the progress of the indicators on racially marginalized groups. A follow-up request was made in 2020 in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in the US, calling for specific ways to address systemic racism across the 17 SDGs (Okorodudu et al., 2020). Yet, these demands continue to be ignored in the formal institutional agenda of SDGs. We argue that the race-neutral status of the SDGs should be a matter of concern for management scholarship. Otherwise, the solutions emerging from grand challenge research will also obscure racial injustices as we discuss in the next section.

Racial Injustices in Proposed Solutions to “Grand Challenges”

Some of the most commonly advocated solutions to grand challenges are sustainable technologies and innovations, circular economy, and sharing economy. Below, we discuss how these proposed solutions reproduce racial inequalities from the perspective of five approaches to environmental justice and racism discussed earlier.

Racial Inequities Arising from Distributive Injustice

One of the proposed solutions is circular economy, which is a relatively recent concept that attempts to integrate socio-ecological concerns with economic activity. Drawing on insights from ecological economics and industrial ecology, it describes a closed-loop economy model where raw materials are continuously re-used to eliminate new material extraction and to facilitate waste reduction. Circular economy directly addresses several SDGs, such as “responsible consumption and production” (SDG 12), “climate action” (SDG 13), “industry innovation and infrastructure” (SDG 9), and indirectly to others, such as “clean water and sanitation” (SDG 6). Circular economy as a business practice is promoted by governments across the globe including China, the European Union, Africa, and the United States, and is receiving increasing attention in management scholarship (Corvellec et al., 2022; Murray et al., 2017).

From a distributive justice standpoint, we argue that the circular economy cannot address racial inequalities, because it ignores the circular business activities’ unequal distribution of costs on the lives of low-income communities of color. The circular economy depends on material recycling for future use, but recycling can have hazardous effects on workers in the recycling industry and neighboring communities. For example, the Center for Disease Control has documented the hazardous aspects of recycling electronic waste, in particular, high levels of toxic cadmium and lead detected in the blood tests of workers (Ceballos & Page, 2014). Recycling plastics is also problematic because of the chemicals involved: a recent analysis found that over 25% of harmful chemicals are added to plastics during production (Aurisano et al., 2021). These chemicals remain embedded in the products made from recycled plastic and unsound recycling processes increase the risk of plastic contaminants leaching into landfills and water tables (Aurisano et al., 2021). Liboiron (2021) argues that the expansion of recycling on Indigenous lands is a modern form of colonialism because it assumes “rightful” access to Indigenous Lands to build recycling centers and dump toxic chemicals. Thus, while there could be material benefits from reusing and recycling materials, the environmental burden of these actions again falls on already marginalized communities where the hazardous waste facilities tend to be located (Hijazi, 2021; Taylor, 2014a).

Racial Inequities Arising from Procedural Injustices

Scholars have argued that technological innovation is a key solution to the current ecological crisis (Geels et al., 2008; Voegtlin & Scherer, 2017). Renewable energy, waste management technologies, bio-based innovation in food and agriculture, pollution prevention technologies, and innovation in transportation are topics in this domain (Rennings, 2000). These technologies and innovations are proposed as “clean growth” alternatives that can build sustainable societies (Stern & Valero, 2021). Management scholarship has explored how these innovations can be integrated at the level of the industry or the firm and how organizations can develop business models around these technologies to expand their markets (Bohnsack et al., 2014).

Yet, from a procedural justice perspective, marginalized communities tend to be excluded from decision-making processes on the expansion of “green” innovations, which usually involve high-priced technologies like solar power in homes or electric cars. Marginalized communities have limited access to these technologies because many of them lack the resources to afford such products. While some communities have collectively organized to acquire these technologies (e.g., a village community refurbished their common hall with heat pumps and small wind turbines in Northern England (Walker & Devine-Wright, 2008)), most of the technologies that might benefit these communities are not affordable (Hearn et al., 2021). More importantly, some climate polices can have negative consequences on marginalized communities. For example, while “carbon tax” incentivizes low carbon energy sources, it increases energy prices for the already disadvantaged and exacerbates inequities faced by low-income communities (Walker, 2012).

Racial Inequities Arising from Recognitional Injustices

In terms of recognitional justice, sustainable technologies often exacerbate environmental racism and injustice because of the manufacturing processes involved. For example, the extraction of lithium, a crucial element used in all batteries, is mined predominantly on Indigenous lands without acknowledging Indigenous communities’ values and interests. Native tribes have unique spiritual connections to the land that are often not respected by governments or businesses. Thacker Pass, located on the border of northern Nevada and southeastern Oregon is a case in point (Nairn, 2022). This region encompasses the largest contracted area for lithium mining in the world where mining permits have been granted for the next 41 years. Yet this area is considered a sacred site by the Fort McDermitt Paiute, Shoshone, and the Burns Paiute tribes because of a massacre that occurred in 1865. Pointing to the recognitional injustice in granting permits, a tribal member stated, “As a sovereign nation, we understand that there are federal agencies that DON’T take their trust responsibilities seriously … Government to government consultation is key for federal agencies to understand our views of the land and the culture it holds within it” (Nairn, 2022: 2). Similar injustices are inflicted on Indigenous communities who bear the brunt of devastating environmental and social consequences of mining in Chile and Argentina, who are among the top five suppliers of lithium in the world (Katwala, 2018).

Racial Inequities Evidenced by a Capabilities Approach to Justice

Another proposed solution is creating a sharing economy, which can be described as an ecosystem produced by peer-to-peer online resource-sharing platforms that connect different stakeholders, mainly buyers and sellers for various economic transactions (Martin, 2016). Also known as the “gig economy,” sharing economy is gaining widespread popularity among consumers, state, and local governments (Belk, 2014). Its proponents argue that sharing economy can lead to “sustainable economic growth” by reducing demand for ownership of products, thus reducing resource use and carbon emissions, while providing employment opportunities that stimulate economic growth (Cherry & Pidgeon, 2018). Management scholars argue that sharing economy offers innovative means to address climate change (e.g., “climate action” SDG 13) and unsustainable societal practices (e.g., “sustainable cities and communities” SDG 11) by facilitating common use of resources and collaborative consumption (Kathan et al., 2016) and promoting sustainable consumption and production (Cohen & Muñoz, 2016). For instance, Cohen and Kietzmann (2014) explored ridesharing (e.g., Uber), carsharing (e.g., Zipcar), and bike sharing as means for sustainable mobility and suggest that sharing economy can facilitate a radical shift toward sustainability across the world.

However, research shows that a sharing economy does not necessarily create value or capabilities for historically marginalized groups. A recent report found that the ridesharing service, the Citi Bike network of New York City, predominantly serves high-income and white neighborhoods: 16.5% of people of color have access to Citi Bike as opposed to 37.5% of white New Yorkers and the areas served by the program are predominantly white (Wachsmuth et al., 2019). In addition, in certain cases sharing economy diverts resources from minority communities. For instance, ridesharing was thought to supplement public transport as it provided an additional mode of transportation, but research shows that during the boom period of ridesharing apps (2010–2019), the use of public transportation decreased by 12% (Graehler et al., 2019). This reduced usage is an additional strain on public transportation because, with lower ridership, revenues (and consequently services), also decline (Birenbaum, 2021). This puts extra burden on low-income communities of color as well as elderly and people of disabilities who tend to rely on public transportation.

Racial Inequities Evidenced by an Intersectionality Approach to Justice

From an intersectionality perspective, the distributive injustices of circular economy activities (e.g., exposure of workers and neighboring communities to hazardous chemicals) are further exacerbated because of intersectional histories of racial, classist, and patriarchal oppressions. In the US, most plastics facilities are located in Louisiana along the Mississippi River, along with about 150 oil refineries and chemical facilities. Once known as “Plantation Country” given the majority of the population in the region are descendants of formerly enslaved Africans, the area is now known as “Cancer Alley” because of high levels of air and water pollution (United Nations, 2021). Environmental racism faced by these communities is a legacy of slavery: as petrochemical plants replaced plantations in the lower Mississippi, descendants of former slaves faced new injustices and systems of oppression because, as Groner (2021) puts it, “ like the plantations and land owners who came before them, petrochemical plants and their leadership have emerged as a new kind of “boss,” determining what happens not only to the land but also to the people who live there.” (p.9). Black women also suffered disproportionate rates of cancer and miscarriages because of toxic levels of ethylene oxide (Lake & Livia, 2021). Discourses of circular economy obscure these experiences of disenfranchisement and the racial segregation that determine which groups of people are forced to live and work (and die) in the hazardous environmental conditions of recycling facilities, while other groups benefit. Such intersectional histories of oppression are rarely acknowledged in social and environmental research in MOS and there needs to be a deeper engagement with these histories if MOS wants to address racial justice. Thus, grand challenges, however incoherently articulated, continue to elide questions of racial and environmental justice, and in the next section, we propose a new research agenda that deeply engages with racial injustices.

Toward a Racially Just Management and Organization Studies in the Anthropocene

To meaningfully address these challenges, we argue for a climate justice agenda that is grounded on racial justice as a central focus in MOS. Specifically, this requires analyzing asymmetrical power relations among racial groups, whether in decision-making or inequalities in the distribution of environmental costs and benefits, and theorizing from peoples’ lived experiences of ecological disruptions while recognizing the historical and intersecting oppressive conditions that further marginalize communities of color. To capture the full scope of this agenda, we propose three shifts that can foster research for socio-ecological wellbeing and just societies. These shifts we argue offer theoretical and empirical opportunities for management scholars to reveal the racial inequities arising from various injustices discussed in the previous section. Table 1 illustrates these shifts with examples of research questions that can facilitate such a shift toward a racially just MOS in the Anthropocene.

Table 1 Shifts proposed & Future research questions
Full size table

From Elites to Climate Grassroots Organizing

Past research has examined multi-stakeholder engagement such as cross-sector partnerships (Bode et al., 2019), and corporate inter-organizational collaboration in addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Williams et al., 2019). While these show the difficulties inherent in collaborative work behind any multi-stakeholder engagement, concerns of communities of color are often overlooked in these discussions. This means that management scholarship also fails to attend to the voices of communities of color, perpetuating recognitional injustice. We argue that it is paramount to explicitly engage with the everyday realities of communities of color in MOS and propose a shift from studying only elite institutions to prioritizing the voices of communities of color in climate grassroots organizing.

International policymaking organizations like the United Nations are influenced by the dominant green movement whose core concern is conservation (Rainey & Johnson, 2009; United Nations, 1968). The green movement in the US and Europe is predominantly white as can be seen from the recent climate marches in those regions. A report on environmental NGOs, government agencies, and foundations found that ethnic minorities occupied less than 12% of the leadership positions in these organizations (Taylor, 2014b). While this lack of ethnic diversity in environmental organizations is troubling when people of color are the most affected by climate change, it is not surprising, given that the green movement has been historically viewed by communities of color “as a disguise for oppression and as an elitist movement” (Rainey & Johnson, 2009: 151). In contrast, the environmental justice movement is motivated by racial injustices concerning the unequal distribution of costs and benefits of environmental concerns (i.e., distributional injustice) as discussed earlier (Holifield et al., 2018; Martinez-Alier et al., 2016). Moreover, the tactics of some environmental organizations may not appeal to Black people: a white activist courting arrest by police in an Occupy Wall Street or climate march might be seen as a valid mode of protest by groups like Extinction Rebellion or Friends of the Earth. Courting arrest will be met with less enthusiasm as a tactic by Black activists given the structural racism that exists in policing. Thus, an environmental justice approach to studying green movements in MOS needs to explicitly address the racialized aspects of climate organizing to promote both environmental and racial justice.

Rooted in the environmental justice movement, climate justice activism has been an influential multi-stakeholder movement in the US and across the globe that draws attention to the disproportionate impact of climate change on communities of color all across the world (Martiskainen et al., 2020; Rainey & Johnson, 2009). MOS research can focus on climate grassroots organizing and study multi-stakeholder collaborations that prioritize the voices and needs of communities of color. Prior critical work in MOS has studied territorial movements organized by local communities to challenge resource extraction (Banerjee et al., 2023; Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2022a, 2022b; Kraemer et al., 2013). Similarly, MOS can draw insights from the many large and small climate justice organizations and analyze their extent to which communities of color participate and benefit from the work of these groups.

For example, UPROSE, “an intergenerational, multi-racial, nationally-recognized, women of color led, grassroots organization” in Brooklyn, New York, leads community-based planning and development around mitigation, adaptation, and resiliency (“UPROSE” 2021). UPROSE collaborates with the Rand Corporation, the Life Line Group, and the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance on a grassroots participatory research project to build climate resiliency in Sunset Park, Brooklyn (Aguirre, 2021). Understanding climate justice organizing such as that of UPROSE can provide management scholars a perspective “from below” (Banerjee, 2021b; Harding, 2008) and make central the concerns of communities of color. This we argue is necessary to begin developing racially just scholarship in our field.

From Global Technology to Local Adaptation by Communities of Color

Sustainable technologies and responsible innovations in energy, water, and agriculture are proposed to be key solutions to address climate change (Geels et al., 2008). However, as discussed earlier, while these technologies can help mitigate worsening ecological issues at a global level (e.g., aggregate carbon emissions), they may be inadequate to address the local needs of the communities of color who are affected the most. This is because structural conditions of racial and socioeconomic disparities are not considered when designing these technologies. Part of the problem is the absence of voices of communities of color in the decision-making processes (i.e., procedural injustice) as discussed in the previous section. To address this mismatch, we argue that prioritizing existing racial inequalities in examining these technologies' value and efficacy for communities of color is necessary for climate justice. We call for a shift from global technology as a “one-size fits all” model to local adaptation as a transition to equitable and just societies.

A climate justice approach considers the specific needs of communities because the vulnerabilities of diverse communities within the same region differ depending on existing racial inequalities (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014). Environmental injustice in the case of Hurricane Katrina is a case in point: while both the Lower Ninth Ward (comprising majority Black populations) and the French Quarter (majority white) are in New Orleans, existing socioeconomic inequalities magnified disparities in recovery efforts where the more affluent French Quarter received the most funding despite the Lower Ninth Ward suffering the worst effects of the hurricane (Rivlin, 2023). This example shows that an intersectional approach to climate justice is necessary to address differential needs of diverse communities in formulating solutions.

Drawing on insights from the work of grassroots climate justice organization can help management scholars study processes of local adaptation of technologies, concerns around access as well as successes and limitations they pose for addressing specific needs of communities of color. For example, WE ACT, a Black community environmental justice organization located in New York, facilitated the installation of solar panels in affordable housing buildings located in Northern Manhattan neighborhoods including Washington Heights and Harlem, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, prevent blackouts, and lower utility costs of 511 residential units (WE ACT, 2019). In New Orleans, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice funds and educates local community groups and coordinates joint renewable energy projects with historically Black colleges and universities as well as with local governments (DSCEJ 2021). These examples provide opportunities for management scholars to engage meaningfully with local adaptations of sustainable technologies and innovations by communities of color. Such engagement reflects a capabilities approach to justice that can offer insights into developing racially just and sustainable societies where racial equity in outcomes such as wellbeing and access to clean energy and transportation become central concerns in MOS.

From Decontextualized Solutions to Racial Histories of the Anthropocene

While a focus on solutions that can lead to a more sustainable future is necessary, understanding how global problems and proposed solutions are embedded in racial histories can provide insights into the racial formations of the Anthropocene. Specifically, grounding research on histories would show the intersectionality of multiple oppressive conditions that produce environmental injustices for communities of color and illustrate how legacies of slavery, segregation, and various forms of colonialism are constitutive of current societal challenges. We argue that such accounts are necessary to ensure that racial injustices are not reproduced in any proposed solutions. We call for a shift from uncritically accepting decontextualized solutions to engaging with racial histories in social and environmental research in MOS in order to account long histories of racism together with other intersecting oppressions in the formation of the Anthropocene.

Following the feminist philosopher Nancy Tuana (2019), we argue that MOS needs to develop “genealogical sensibilities” of race when working with climate change and related environmental events. By genealogical sensibilities, Tuana (2019) calls for grounding research in racial histories that articulate “lineages of the values, concepts, and practices that ground current climate regimes […] animated by racism” (2019: 4). For example, in explaining how carbon emissions are interlinked with racial exploitation, Tuana shows the historical intersections of racism and environmental exploitation in coal mining during post-civil War U.S. South. Forced labor using Black prisoners convicted of vagrancy after the Civil War was the basis of the wealth of the coal mining industry, which had lethal health effects leading to the premature deaths of an entire generation of Black workers, a stark example of distributional injustice.

Accounting for racial histories of the Anthropocene will enable MOS to address how environmental racism is constitutive of racial capitalism (Pulido, 2016). Apart from the coal industry, there are many examples of how the wealth of many large corporations like US Steel or other industries such as petrochemicals (Allen, 2003) has been built on the back of enslaved Black bodies who have also suffered the most from the environmental impacts of industrialization. Such engagements with racial histories will enable MOS to “untangle the weave of racism as it circulates in the causes of and responses to anthropogenic climate change” (Tuana, 2019: 3) and to work toward solutions that do not perpetuate racial exploitation.

Unfortunately, slavery and forced labor are not things from the past—these abhorrent practices are ongoing in different parts of the world (Caruana et al., 2021). For example, companies operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are accused of using forced child labor in their cobalt mining operations (Kelly, 2019). Cobalt is a valuable mineral extensively used in lithium-ion batteries for renewable energy alternatives and DRC produces more than 60% of the world’s cobalt. Accounting for histories of both climate change and the proposed technological solution of renewable energy would reveal how both discourses are deeply racialized and highlight the need for a just transition to a sustainable economy. Uncovering the historical racial formations of the Anthropocene, as well as the other shifts proposed previously, has profound implications for MOS. We discuss these in the next section.

Implications for Management and Organization Studies

Drawing from various critical intellectual sources, in particular from critiques of the Anthropocene, the concept of racial capitalism, and environmental justice and racism scholarship, we have argued for a climate justice agenda that is grounded on racial justice in social and environmental research in MOS. This agenda has important implications for management theory and education by facilitating a perspective “from below” in three ways: (1) by promoting continuous engagement with postcolonial and feminist theories; (2) by advancing research for and with communities of color; and (3) by bringing visibility to grassroots work done by historically marginalized groups of color. Below we discuss how this agenda can be addressed as well as the institutional barriers that prevent MOS to become a racially just discipline. We conclude by discussing implications for management learning and education.

Developing a Perspective “From Below” in MOS

Continuous Engagement with Postcolonial, Critical Race, and Feminist Theories

Previous research has called for a shift toward critical epistemologies for a meaningful engagement with the socio-ecological crisis in the Anthropocene (Ergene et al., 2021). Scholars have argued that management research needs to be decolonized while also critiquing the patriarchal and capitalist drive for economic growth underlying the majority of existing theories (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021; Ergene et al., 2018; Nyberg & Wright, 2020). Our agenda for climate and racial justice, which is situated in feminist and postcolonial epistemologies, addresses these calls and involves a paradigmatic transformation of social and environmental research in MOS. Specifically, all three shifts we proposed earlier facilitate making visible the intersecting racial, colonial, patriarchal, and classist oppressive conditions that marginalize already disadvantaged communities today. This provides MOS research a critical epistemological view “from below” and enables “studying up” along power asymmetries (Banerjee, 2021b; Harding, 2008). Research on sustainability and climate change in MOS that engages with feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories will highlight such asymmetrical power relations.

Researching for and with Communities of Color

Our climate justice agenda guides MOS research toward creating knowledge for and with the historically disadvantaged communities of color, entailing a major transformation in what to prioritize in research. Specifically, the first and the second shifts proposed—studying climate grassroots organizing and local adaptation of technology by communities of color—require MOS scholars to engage with community-based collaborations on the ground. Such a shift implies studying and understanding marginalized communities’ needs, interests, and priorities, rather than those of corporate managers or shareholders. This is the true grand challenge because it confronts long-established norms of MOS. This is the first step, we argue, toward constructing a “decolonial imagination” (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021) or a “Black feminist spatial imagination” (Ducre, 2018), and consequently, a racially just MOS.

Bringing Visibility to ‘Distributed Experimentation’ Undertaken by Communities of Color

Studying grassroots movements contributes to the sustainability literature by highlighting “distributed experimentation,” which are practices “that generate(s) small wins, promote(s) evolutionary learning, and increase(s) engagement, while allowing unsuccessful efforts to be abandoned” (Ferraro et al., 2015: 373). For instance, food sovereignty movements can be seen as distributed experimentation that aims to create small-scale agriculture that can meet the demands of local communities, thereby breaking the dependency on industrialized food systems based on carbon-intensive practices (e.g., the international peasant movement “La Via Campesina”). Similarly, on the energy front, climate justice organizing promotes the development of community-based renewable energy projects, especially solar and wind (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014; Walker & Devine-Wright, 2008). Instead of assuming that “power and authority are located at the top and from there flow down to impact the bottom” (Dittrich, 2022, p. 188), future research conducted from our proposed agenda would highlight the concrete work done by people who are disproportionately affected by climate change.

Institutional Barriers Preventing MOS to Become a Racially Just Discipline

Developing a perspective from below requires a paradigmatic transformation that has many challenges. As critical management scholars have previously articulated, the long-established norms and values of MOS prioritize a managerial view that promotes organizations’ economic performance while preventing meaningful engagement with climate change and climate justice (Nyberg & Wright, 2020). Furthermore, tenure and promotion practices in most business schools prioritize publications in high-ranked and high-impact factor journals that insist on theoretical contributions rather than contributions to communities’ socio-ecological wellbeing (Ergene et al., 2021). And while “grand challenges” seem to be the new buzzword in the Academy of Management conferences, we wonder if the grand challenge is really about publishing research on grand challenges in the so-called “elite” journals in our field, rather than address societal issues or the needs of marginalized communities.

Perhaps, we need to call into question what counts as scholarly activity to even begin envisioning a racially just MOS. Who is included and excluded in these unquestioned institutional norms and practices? The needs, interests, and priorities of communities of color are excluded when we do not develop research questions with them. The non-managerial research, often conducted by BIPOC women, are excluded when we follow the mainstream and cite the “big names,” who generally tend to be white males. As scholars located in business schools in the US and UK, we want to challenge these entrenched norms and call for more relevant and meaningful research for and with historically marginalized populations. Our call also goes out to journal editors and reviewers to break the shackles of publishing norms that limit our imagination to filling miniscule and ultimately pointless gaps in the literature to demonstrate a theoretical contribution, while restricting our ability to engage with societal challenges.

What if we were to direct our attention to creating impact on the ground instead of obsessing about “impact factors” of journal publications? Initiating and maintaining community relationships take time and require personal and emotional commitment. Can we change the tenure and promotion criteria to value developing relationships more than the citation numbers that define early career scholars’ research “impact”? What if we advise PhD students to develop their research projects that serve the interests of local communities of color instead of urging students to “find research gaps” and to “draw research questions from the literature”? These transformations in research practice should also reflect what and how we teach in our classrooms, as we discuss in the next section.

Management Learning Education for Climate Justice

The institutional challenges discussed above also constrain our ability to teach future generations of business school students about histories of colonialism and slavery. Despite calls for “diversity” in higher education, business school curricula reinforce colonial and gendered narratives and remain unrepresentative, inaccessible, and privileged. In calling for a “bold agenda” for management learning education (MLE), Greenberg and Hibbert (2022, p. 163) argue that management educators need to “reckon with the racial, gendered, and class underpinnings of many management theories and integrate these perspectives into MLE.” A business school curriculum that reflects deep engagement with environmental justice and racism goes beyond being “inclusive” or “diverse” and calls for a radical questioning of the cultural authority of the canon itself. Explicit engagement with hidden histories of racism and injustice requires including the voices of Black and Indigenous scholars as part of the knowledge we teach in classrooms (Doucette et al., 2021). Thus, our paper also implies a paradigm shift in MLE, from excluding and denying racial histories to centralizing them by foregrounding “othered” knowledge systems. The structural consequences of colonialism and slavery need to be taught in our classrooms in relation to current problems like climate change, economies of natural resource extraction, and dispossession.

For example, as climate change is becoming part of the business school curriculum, it is imperative that students learn about the racial inequalities of climate impacts in addition to corporate climate strategies and global mitigation and adaptation initiatives. This can be done by including case studies of climate impacts on marginalized populations across the world, inviting climate activists as guest speakers, and assigning projects and assignments that require students to understand the underlying colonial and racial histories in the climate crisis and its contemporary solutions. In teaching topics like CSR and stakeholder engagement, we can include case studies of conflicts over resource extraction and discuss the colonial and racial legacies that underlie these struggles.

Lack of attention to race in our research is also reflected in the absence of voices from people of color in our curriculum. A 2014 survey of university students in the UK found that 42% of Black students did not believe their curriculum reflected issues of diversity, equality, and discrimination, and expressed frustration that courses designed by non-Black instructors did not account for diverse backgrounds and views (Universities UK, 2019). Student-led campaigns on ‘Why is my curriculum white’ and ‘Why isn’t my professor Black’ across the UK highlighted the Eurocentrism of the curriculum and called for the inclusion of more diverse voices.

To conclude, the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene is produced and maintained by the past and present practices of racial capitalism and its legacies of slavery and colonialism. Management research on social and environmental issues overlooks these critical histories, and by doing so, perpetuates these racial and environmental injustices in the solutions proposed. It is time to redress these historical injustices by adopting a climate justice agenda based on racial justice in both research and teaching. This new agenda requires prioritizing the voices of communities of color in grassroots climate organizing and projects for local adaptation. Management and organization studies in the Anthropocene can only be enriched by embracing racial and climate justice; they are inextricably linked and one cannot be achieved without the other.