Place branders express a desire for their work to aid in addressing crises such as climate change through sustainable developments that assist with brand positioning, yet little is known about how place branding professionals manage tensions and contradictions that arise between sustainability and investment development. This paper qualitatively explores how place branders talk about ecological sustainability at a place branding conference. We pose the research question, how do place branders communicatively construct the meaning of place branding for sustainability? Our key finding is that place branders reframe ecological crises as an “exclusive” business and brand-building opportunity. Rather than viewing this as “business as usual,” we use defamiliarization as a method of disrupting common sense and presenting the familiar as “strange,” and we employ degrowth ideas as a tool for doing so. We show how place branding for sustainability is constructed as a matter of making a place attractive to businesses that can generate green growth, and how this is done by suppressing aspects that challenge this view. In doing this, we provide a deeper insight into how certain, pro-growth-oriented sustainability practices are communicatively maintained, and into the struggles branders face when tasked with place branding for sustainability.

How may a “craft-orientation” facilitate a shift toward an ecologically sustainable economy that does not perceive the pursuit of economic growth as a self-evident good? Responding to this question, this paper is rooted in the argument that efforts to increase economic growth collide with ecological sustainability goals and pose a substantial threat to human prosperity. Drawing on key insights from scholarship on craft, we establish the notion of craft-orientation, understood as (i) activity guided by the desire to do a job well for its own sake, (ii) prioritization of human engagement over machine control, standardization and efficiency, and (iii) an epistemic rather than instrumental relationship to objects of production. By linking this orientation to postgrowth ideas, we advance knowledge of the relationship between craft and sustainability in three related ways. First, we add craft-orientation to the postgrowth toolbox by conceptualizing craft as a mode of organization that embodies and concretizes postgrowth ideas. This particularly involves the need to rethink efficiency and labor-intensiveness, the role of technology, and the localization of production and consumption. Second, addressing craft scholarship that seeks to understand the relationship between craft and sustainability, we strengthen the relevance of craft in discussions on sustainability by linking it with the concept of postgrowth. Third, grounded in the ontological assumption that the formulation of alternatives is performative, we situate our conceptualization of craft within current societal movements and show how these movements create enabling conditions for the future influence of craft-orientation as an important mode of organizing for postgrowth society.

A growing number of publications focuses on business in relation to degrowth. Such research, for example, considers what it would take for businesses to become degrowth-compatible, what business practices need to be in place, and how businesses would have to relate with nature, human and non-human beings. Although degrowth business scholarship has come a long way in the past couple of years, many key questions have yet to be posed and addressed more systematically. The present contribution uses the new philosophically informed ‘deep transformations’ theory of degrowth to propose a holistic research agenda that can guide future degrowth business research. Rooted in the four planes of social being (material transactions with nature, social interactions, social structures, and inner being) underpinning this theory, combined with a framework classifying three types of knowledge (system, transformation, and target) about the present, short- and medium-, and long-term futures, the contribution identifies and systematically orders a series of questions for degrowth business scholarship to consider.

With the world facing severe ecological degradation, we hear calls for radical change more and more often. One of these calls is for degrowth in materially wealthy nations, including the Nordics. Degrowth fundamentally challenges the modern assumption that economic growth is good for humanity and the planet, and therefore necessitates change in civil society, state and production. In the contemporary growth-oriented society, business is a common mode of organising production and a powerful driving force. Businesses pursue profit and growth and are therefore often portrayed as incompatible with degrowth. However, for a degrowth society to come about, everyone needs to do their part; this includes businesses and businesspersons. In this chapter, we explore ways in which business can participate in degrowth transformations and be part of a degrowth society. Rather than assuming that business is either incompatible or compatible with degrowth, we suggest that there is a need for a more nuanced approach to understanding radical change in modes of production and consumption, an approach that acknowledges and transcends the multiple binaries. To illustrate our argument, we offer an example of a business that produces craft wild berry wine in northern Sweden. We conclude that, for genuine change to take place, businesses' actions need to be combined with appropriate policies and cultural change.

It is well known that management concepts tend to spread from corporate to public organizations. Branding is an example of such a concept, with suggestions that it can address not only economic but also social issues, often referred to as “inclusive branding.” This ethnographic study explores how branding is received and spreads in a Swedish city, and analyzes efforts to use branding to tackle inequality and segregation. Our findings reveal that the initial focus on social problems was glossed over in favor of following corporate branding ideals, but also that city communicators expressed critique, confusion, and doubt regarding the relevance of branding to their work. Surprisingly, this did not slow down but rather energized the branding process. Through an interactionist analysis, we suggest that rather than addressing social problems, branding in cities may give rise to an Eigendynamik, signifying a self-energizing inner dynamic fueled by a tension between “frames,” specifically between the branding frame and the civic frame of the city. This theorization lays the groundwork for contributions to the understanding of inclusive branding: it can start with good intentions to address civic issues but may get swept up in corporate branding concepts and activities that are ill equipped to deal with social issues. More generally, complementing established notions of translation and colonization, our study provides a novel understanding of how management concepts migrate from corporate to public organizations through what we call frame-induced Eigendynamik. Overall, we contribute by shedding light on the role of self-energizing processes as reasons why organizational members engage with management concepts even when they struggle to see their relevance to their work.

This chapter seeks to explore the intersections between occupational cultures, bystanders, and social justice and inclusion based on the empirical example of policing. Specifically, we pursue the question: what is the role of police officers as bystanders to occupational police culture and how does that influence inclusion? Against the backdrop of occupational culture, we put forth four key aspects of policing (social legitimacy, hierarchy, loyalty, masculinity) that are relevant for making sense of bystandership with respect to inclusion/exclusion in police occupational culture. Further, we present four stories about the experiences of police officers contending with the inclusion of minorities, each featuring a different type of bystandership (silent, indifferent, whistleblowing, and powerless). We argue that bystander engagement plays an essential role in maintaining the social legitimacy of the police, and in particular processes of inclusion and exclusion. Yet, due to the particularities of police organisations, including norms that prescribe, hierarchy, loyalty, and that privilege traditional masculinity, speaking up as a bystander may be complicated. In other words, the organisational culture and structure surrounding policing create challenges for bystanders and for creating occupational cultures that support bystander engagement. We therefore-in contrast to individualised solutions such as bystander training-call for a stronger focus on occupational culture for facilitating bystander engagement.

The place-branding and -marketing literature has focused extensively on place-brand formation and management. It has acknowledged that emerging and especially diverging meanings (i.e., diverging from the official place-brand identity) are often regarded as a failure of branding processes, which should be addressed by city, region, and country brand managers (economic-development and destination-management organisations, public authorities). The different models of place-brand formation (top-down branding, brand politicking—pursuing progressive alignment to the official brand—and brand co-creation) have yet to deal with diverging brand meanings. This chapter argues that such diverging meanings are a central part of the brand—especially for keeping the place alive—and make it adaptive in transitioning communities. In this regard, place-brand management should support changes of the perceptions of the place and move away from outdated stereotypes and crystallised place images.

This conceptual chapter investigates how knowledge moves across different “social fields” (Bourdieu, 2005b). We propose a certain social Gestalt new knowledge discussion creates the dialogically constructed antenarrative field. An antenarrative field is a social space for knowledge exchange where agents speculate on future scenarios’ potential for realization, and our notion of the antenarrative field helps understanding how knowledge gains recognition en route from one field to the other. We illustrate our idea of the antenarrative field by observing the persuasion efforts by the Scandinavian NGO PRODegrowth. This NGO, a lowly positioned player in the political field, promotes economic degrowth to business agents, representing the “economic field” (Bourdieu, 2005b) where growth is imperative. The encounter of executives and activists constructs the antenarrative field as a new social space. We combine Boje’s thinking tool of antenarrative (Boje, 2008), a story that might turn recognized in the future, and Bourdieusian field theory. The antenarrative field emerges by means of discussing the realistic reachability of degrowth and is thus being constructed as a potential diffusion hub for further organizations and fields not yet involved in the discussion. Reachability talk hinges on how well agents can promote their knowledge and is the condition for knowledge travel between different agents and fields. Reachability talk is a means for agents to convey their knowledge to other groups, especially when holding an inferior position in terms of social power. The assumption that reachability might be a main criterion for the successful travel of storied knowledge has societal implications: not only is this criterion hinged on the support of the powerful (reachability is framed according to economic parameters), it might also hinder knowledge travel not conforming to possible business applications.

Sexuality in the Swedish Police is based on the experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual police officers and the author's observations of police work. Written at the intersection of organizational, gender, and police studies, the book analyses how processes of exclusion and inclusion of LGB sexuality coexist in the Swedish police, how these processes are related to the culture and characteristics of police work, and how police management attempts to create an inclusive organization. How and under what conditions does the exclusion and inclusion of LGB officers and LGB sexuality take place in the Swedish police? By delving into this question, the author seeks to answer, among other things, how it is that there are so few openly gay male police officers and how barriers to inclusion can be understood. The book contributes to a better understanding of the problems and activities associated with diversity issues, particularly with a focus on sexual orientation, but also more generally; many of the insights in the book can be used to understand the inclusion and exclusion of other groups in society. A key insight from the book is that inclusion and exclusion are collective processes characterized by struggle, a struggle that according to the author can be understood through the concept of “peripheral inclusion”. Sexuality in the Swedish Police will be of great interest to scholars and students as well as practitioners with an interest in diversity issues and policing. The book is also relevant to those working in or interested in diversity, inclusion, and equality in other similarly "masculinized" organizations, such as the armed forces and certain sports organizations.