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Registrations open from July 07 to October 20 !

Change or collapse ?

Beyond its international dimension, the RIODD is characterized by an interdisciplinary research dynamic, independent of any pressure or lobby, and thus the association willingly develops a critical and even ‘impertinent’ analysis in the best sense of the term. For its 18th anniversary, the RIODD starts from an observation, that of the astonishing distance between the often positive, reassuring, even naive speeches on the responsibility of the organizations and the necessary ecological ‘transition’... and also the numerous researches in environmental sciences, in particular those of the experts of the IPC about the global warming, giving a certain weight to the frightening, even dramatic prospect of a collapse of the current functioning of our modes of production and distribution (as well as the social organization which is associated to them). Thus, between the theme of the ‘green transition’, a kind of new era of industrial revolution with renewed prospects for profit and growth, and the theme of ‘collapse’ in the line of collapsology studies, research in the field of ‘sustainable development’ is in serious tension. In a way, we are back to the alert and the dilemma introduced by the Meadows report (1972), after a few ambiguous decades, oscillating between the impression of a mobilization of actors from the political, economic and citizen worlds, and the very real degradation of the biosphere. It is around these paradoxes and tensions that we propose to focus this RIODD 2023 symposium. How can we reweave a social compromise, a capacity to live together, while taking into account the ecological predicament ?

The deadlines for submissions are:

- Papers: May 12, 2023 May 26, 2023

- If you wish to submit a paper in a thematic session, identify this session in the drop-down menu when submitting in "My submissions".

This symposium will have to be the occasion to support these observations; to confront the points of view underlying the diagnoses centered on our economic system, on our social system, but also on their relations; to seize the exposed analyses in order to propose a pragmatic state of affairs questioning the very expression ‘sustainable development’ in a perspective of transformation of systems. These debates will contribute to initiate the construction of links with researchers in experimental sciences, who are often not present in congresses devoted to development issues in the social sciences. More globally, the symposium will allow us to reflect together on the necessary but difficult conceptual and practical upheaval that must take place in the Anthropocene era.

First, we must rethink the relationship between the economic, social and environmental spheres. If the question of ecological limits has now become clearly established, its measurement and social acceptance continue to be questioned. These questions ultimately lead us to examine the economy on its very object : the satisfaction of needs. Indeed, the analysis of the ‘institutional process between man and his environment in order to satisfy his needs’ (according to the definition of economics suggested by Karl Polanyi [1957]) seems to suppose that we have a better grasp, collectively, of what these social needs may be... beyond the chimerical figure of a homo œconomicus characterized by an unlimited desire to consume (marginal utility constantly increasing as a function of the quantity of goods consumed). Scientific thoughts on the rebalancing of work/leisure (or work/life), frugality, degrowth, find their place here. Basically, it will be a matter of trying to grasp the way in which social science thinking can help us to conceive a representation of the functioning of organizations and of the economy that manages to satisfy social needs without posing as a prerequisite an ever-increasing extraction of natural resources. These questions apply to rich countries as well as to poor and emerging nations.

This question of satisfying social needs under natural constraints also clearly raises the issue of inequalities. Inequalities related to the climatic chaos that seems to be underway, spatial and monetary inequalities that may be geographically distributed as well as actors belonging to different social classes. Yet thinking about these inequalities can also be a lever likely to stabilize the ecological footprint without social explosion. Indeed we can suppose that a fairer distribution of wealth, between countries and between social classes, is one of the central stakes of the acceptability of a global reduction of the growth dynamics which seems hardly avoidable...

Rethinking the functioning of the economic and social system implies thinking about the actors of this system, their interests, their logic of action, their powers and their relationships. It is a matter of identifying the right level(s) and levers for action to bring about coordinated and in-depth changes in the functioning of these systems. Several questions arise : that of the scales and their articulation: international, national, or local logic? The type of actor: public, private, SMEs or multinationals? The question of implementation methods: by market mechanisms or by restrictive political frameworks? The return of the notion of planning (which has long been considered as belonging to a sad past) is, for example, a particularly interesting axis. More profoundly, at the conceptual level, it would be necessary to identify the relationships of power and cooperation present, whether through the concept of ‘ecological class’ (Latour & Schultz, 2022) or through efforts to break down the traditional human/non-human separation that is so deeply rooted in the social sciences but that is now definitively untenable (Dunlap and Catton, 1978; Descola, 2005; Morizot, 2021…).

Among these actors, the question of the role of productive organizations is crucial. What can we expect from them ? How can we measure the reality of their commitment to different and sustainable production methods ? This theme of the links between companies and society, in the broadest sense, has undergone a new stage of development with the promulgation of the French ‘Pacte’ law and the modification, albeit marginal, of the definition of the purpose of the activity of organizations: extended social purpose, mission-based company, accountability… Are these elements of evolution in the relationship between business and society the seeds of a more profound evolution? How can we equip stakeholders to make these mechanisms work and to match them with concrete effects? How can we measure in accounting terms what a responsible company would be (CARE accounting comes to mind, of course) ? How to allow consumers to act, through their consumption activity, for an evolution of productive structures ? These are all questions to be investigated within the framework of an analysis of the ever-evolving role played by the company in society, a role that today tends to be framed by more and more regulatory measures, and therefore by an undeniable, albeit timid, return of State actors - a sign, if any were needed, of the failure of a purely free and voluntary conception of CSR.

This need for necessarily profound and rapid changes of our social and productive system questions the principle of democracy. Beyond the actors and the levels of action, it is essential to make room for the increasingly palpable questioning of the democratic issue that constitutes the functioning of the capitalist enterprise. Numerous studies and proposals (more or less successful, more or less conclusive) aim at making the firm a more democratic space, of a real confrontation between actors all concerned by the necessity of a transformation of the productive system. What can we expect from corporate democracy? How can it be a response to the weakening of public relations or the difficulty of ‘national’ regulation of ecological issues ? Is the firm a political object or subject ? Does it have the vocation to replace the State within the framework of so-called missions of general interest ? Doesn't the lack of democratic control of the ruling circles, which are often brought to exert extremely strong pressure on public policies, by legal and sometimes illegal means, constitute a considerable challenge for our societies? Doesn't the firm often make the law ? More generally, how does this proliferation of thoughts on the ‘governance’ of firms allow us to make progress on the representation of the contours of these firms as institutions within the social sciences?

These thoughts on the sustainability of our economic and social system should not avoid thinking about the alternatives (more or less radical).

This can take a utopian turn or allow us to identify current alternative experiences (the model of the commons, of the ‘beni comuni’, the social and solidarity economy, the circular economy, the collaborative economy or even the autarkic models - of food self-sufficiency, for example) in order to understand and weigh the authenticity of their alternative character, their durability and their possible extension, and also to grasp what is at stake: return to a better balance between institutional forms of centrality, symmetry, exchange and reciprocity? Hybridization of these forms? Is it a simple fashion effect without institutional reality? Resocialization of actors then again endowed with an ethical and political capacity that neo-liberalism deprived them of? Here again, both conceptually and practically, in the light of recent legislative developments, there should be no shortage of points of confrontation and reflection.

These few paragraphs outline the magnitude of the changes needed to transform our economic and social system in order to avoid a collapse of the current system, although we cannot exclude that it is a necessary condition for the advent of a new era. The articulation and embedding of the economic, social and environmental spheres, the redefinition of social needs, the way to manage inequalities, the redefinition of the systems of actors and of the link between business and society, as well as the influence of business on democratic systems are only some of the openings proposed to the participants, some breaches open to contribute to lay the theoretical and empirical foundations of a reformed or recast economic and social system. A system capable of leading to a relationship adapted to our environment and able to draw a way of living, producing and consuming, together that is ‘compatible with the permanence of an authentically human life on Earth’…