Dn an article that has become a classic in economics and management sciences, the British economist Ronald Coase (1910-2013) was interested in “ the nature of the firm », that is to say, what explains why companies emerge in a society. Rather than defending a historical genealogy of this entity that has become so powerful in our modern world, Coase was mainly interested in what constitutes the original nature of the company: a matter of coordination.
The company is born because individuals cannot always coordinate their transactions. This response refers to what philosophers call “ontology”: being interested in what makes up the essence of things, in the ways of constructing categories of the world. Paradoxically, in this article, there is no “nature” in the sense of scientific ecology, but a matter of transactions between living organisms and their environments.
At best, we guess a “state of nature”, or a flattened and isomorphic world where individuals reduced to their simplest attributes have difficulty coordinating their actions and adjusting their transactions. This very particular ontology is the basis of a theory of organizations where the company becomes the nodal point of the world.
The Anthropocene shakes up this reductive image of organizations and their conditions of existence. It is about approaching organizations differently and the way they investigate the ecological changes they are undergoing. Central interest should be given to “sentinel organizations”, that is to say organizations placed on the front lines of concrete, tangible and sensitive manifestations of climate change and ecological collapse. There is, in fact, an abundant literature, in ecology and social sciences, which has been interested in ecological or climatic “sentinels”.
Reactions as strong as binary
These sentinels often define natural entities (lakes, forests, coral reefs, islands, animals) which are (or are voluntarily placed) on the front lines of ecological, climatic or health tipping points. Let us think, for example, of these chickens which are placed and monitored on farms in China and which, by falling ill, trigger a health alert. Or even to these glaciers studied closely by geomorphologists to analyze climatic discontinuities. But these early situations, at the outposts, are not only occupied by living organisms or terrestrial entities; they are also done by socio-economic organizations, such as ski resorts, for example.
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