Management in the Anthropocene: rethinking boundaries through becoming-with

Abstract

This theoretical essay explores management as a bifurcated body of knowledge and practice, grounded in the double fracture that deeply shapes the Western worldview. By situating management within the epochal context of the Anthropocene, we highlight how organized human action is central to the production and reproduction of this phenomenon. We propose becoming-with as a theoretical-epistemological lens for building new research agendas and engaged action, seeking to rethink the boundaries between nature and culture, matter and spirit, human and non-human, and their implications within and for the field of management. We conceptually operationalize our proposal around four practices to address the urgencies and challenges of contemporary times: hesitating, civilizing, localizing, and reactivating. We briefly share how these practices have been mobilized within the cosmopolitical challenges of our ongoing field research on the ecology of management practices in a Brazilian Conservation Unit. We propose these practices as possibilities for the management sciences to move away from the logics of control and subordination while inhabiting the crises of the Anthropocene. In their place, we suggest a becoming-with that acknowledges multispecies interdependencies and cultivates modes of care, responsibility, and collaboration that respond to the intricate web of ecological, social, and cultural relations.

Keywords:
Anthropocene; Management sciences; Management and socio-environmental crisis; Cosmopolitics; Becoming-with

Resumo

Este ensaio teórico explora a gestão como um saber e uma prática bifurcados, fundamentados na dupla fratura que marca profundamente a cosmovisão ocidental. Ao situar a gestão no contexto epocal do Antropoceno, destacamos como a ação humana organizada se torna central na produção e reprodução desse fenômeno. Propomos o devir-com como uma lente teórico-epistemológica para construir novas agendas de pesquisa e ação engajada, buscando repensar as fronteiras entre natureza e cultura, matéria e espírito, humano e não humano, bem como suas implicações no e para o campo da gestão. Operacionalizamos conceitualmente nossa proposta em torno de quatro práticas para responder às urgências e aos desafios da contemporaneidade: hesitar, civilizar, localizar e reativar. Brevemente, compartilhamos como essas práticas têm sido mobilizadas nos desafios cosmopolíticos que atravessam nossa atual pesquisa de campo, ainda em curso, com a ecologia das práticas de gestão em uma Unidade de Conservação Brasileira. Propomos essas práticas como possibilidades para que as ciências da Administração, ao habitar as crises do Antropoceno, possam se afastar das lógicas de controle e subordinação. Em seu lugar, sugerimos um devir-com que reconheça as interdependências multiespécies e cultive modos de cuidado, responsabilidade e colaboração que respondam à intrincada teia de relações ecológicas, sociais e culturais.

Palavras-chave:
Antropoceno; Ciências da administração; Gestão e crise socioambiental; Cosmopolítica; Devir-com

Resumen

Este ensayo teórico explora la gestión como un saber y una práctica bifurcada, fundamentada en la doble fractura que configura profundamente la cosmovisión occidental. Al situar la gestión en el contexto epocal del Antropoceno, destacamos cómo la acción humana organizada se torna central en la producción y reproducción de este fenómeno. Proponemos el devenir-con como una lente teórico-epistemológica para construir nuevas agendas de investigación y acción comprometida, buscando repensar las fronteras entre naturaleza y cultura, materia y espíritu, humano y no humano, así como sus implicaciones en y para el campo de la gestión. Operacionalizamos conceptualmente nuestra propuesta en torno a cuatro prácticas para responder a las urgencias y desafíos de la contemporaneidad: dudar, civilizar, localizar y reactivar. Compartimos brevemente cómo estas prácticas han sido movilizadas en los desafíos cosmopolíticos que atraviesan nuestra actual investigación de campo, aún en curso, con la ecología de las prácticas de gestión en una unidad de conservación brasileña. Proponemos estas prácticas como posibilidades para que las ciencias de la administración, al habitar las crisis del Antropoceno, puedan alejarse de las lógicas de control y subordinación. En su lugar, sugerimos un devenir-con que reconozca las interdependencias multiespecies y cultive modos de cuidado, responsabilidad y colaboración que respondan a la intrincada trama de relaciones ecológicas, sociales y culturales. .

Palabras clave:
Antropoceno; Ciencias de la administración; Gestión y crisis socioambiental; Cosmopolítica; Devenir-con

INTRODUCTION

I need first of all to emphasize the formidable challenge constituted by political ecology; briefly, the idea of a public, collective production of knowledge around situations that no particular expertise can be sufficient to define, and that require the active, objector and propositional legitimate presence of all who are “implicated.” According to Bruno Latour, the point is making the situation escape the reasons authorized by the matters of fact, as well as the values deducible from a “general interest” that allows arbitration. The situation must be produced as a matter of concern, which means that it must group around it those who are “implicated.” Now, we know, there are so many means of fabricating an apparently open situation, in which all powers to object and propose are accepted, but under conditions in which, in fact, the data are vitiated, the forces are unequal (Stengers, 2018, p. 451, [emphasis added]).

Born in Earth System Sciences, the term “Anthropocene” was created as a proposal to name a new geological age in which the impact of the human species on the planet would become equivalent to the telluric forces (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Steffen et al., 2007). Since its proposition, speaking academically about “Anthropocene” as a socioecological phenomenon, and not just a biophysical phenomenon (Angus, 2023), has implied dealing with an ecosystem of authors and their urgent theoretical productions, concerned and anxious about the future, which go beyond the scientific field in which the concept arose. We understand this conceptual polysemy and/or dispute as an Anthropocene controversy, borrowing the term from Latour (2016). A controversy can be characterized as a process of formation and negotiation of scientific facts in which the heterogeneity of positions, arguments and evidence emerges under different voices, actors and interests. From this path - in which the so-called Anthropocene does not qualify as a matter of fact, but as a matter of concern -, several stories are continuously narrated about the times in which we live, under other titles, which in turn emphasize different aspects.

That said, it is possible to consider that the field of Administration has belatedly adhered to the Anthropocene controversy (Figueiredo et al., 2020). However, one of the points raised in this essay is that, although we were late in introducing these discussions, it is essential to consider the central role that organized human action occupied and occupies in the production of the possible new geological age (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Steffen et al., 2015). Contemporary management practices produce increasingly intensified situations of social inequality, discrimination, corporate crime, environmental disaster-crime (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021; Chanlat, 2022; Ergene et al., 2021; Gherardi & Laasch, 2022; Leite & Fantinel, 2024), among other extreme situations that endanger human and non-human lives around the planet (Irigaray et al., 2023). We argue that these situations are reproduced—at least in part—by imaginaries and practices of administrative practice, which functions as an ideological doctrine that suppresses the collective sense of existence (Aktouf, 2005; Gaulejac, 2007; Ramos, 1989), whose developments in neoliberal society are increasingly intensified (Dardot & Laval, 2016; Fougère & Solitander, 2023).

Therefore, we understand Administration as a typically modern and, therefore, bifurcated science (Fantinel, 2025). Since its genesis, there has been a foundation on the classic nature-culture split, epistemically justified by the precepts of capitalist progress (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021), which are consolidated in a world built on promises that support beliefs in progress based on economic growth, technological development, among others. This movement oriented toward a logic of control and optimization at the service of economic expansion, far from being neutral, converts knowledge into an instrument at the service of capital, naturalizing practices that reinforce an exclusionary economic and social order. Therefore, captured by this logic, the sciences themselves see themselves as active partners that legitimize the production of a situation of socio-environmental catastrophes, which requires rethinking scientific practices so they can escape the trap of their own instrumentalization (Stengers, 2015, 2023).

We understand the idea of bifurcation based on the thought of philosopher and mathematician Alfred Whitehead, with what he called the “bifurcation of nature.” According to the author, the modern operation produced, on the one hand, the image of an inert nature, ready to be explained and domesticated by the omnipotence of modern scientific discourses; and, on the other hand, it relegated to the subjective and “secondary” spheres the modes of experience permeated by qualities, values, spirituality, culture and politics (Whitehead, 1994). This bifurcation resonates in that which Ferdinand (2022) identifies as a Western double fracture—between nature and culture (environmental fracture), and between reason and irrationality (colonial fracture). Both express the urgency to rethink science as a risky composition between ecology, politics and culture, and not as a practice of remoteness (Stengers, 2023).

Therefore, we want to discuss how administrative sciences reproduce this split, as part of a critical response to the complexities that emerge from the multiple expressions of contemporaneity. Our scientific field is presented, in these times, as an arena in which these ruptures are manifested (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021). Therefore, our essay addresses management as a bifurcated knowledge and practice, deeply impacted by this Western double fracture. Thus, management is situated at the center of the socioecological phenomenon of the Anthropocene not only as a product and producer of such changes, but as a space of potential transformation, in which new possibilities of relationship between more-than-human lives are designed. Administrative sciences—as a field of knowledge—are not only a reflection of the economic and political dynamics of the Anthropocene, but also a point of convergence in which the fractures between nature and culture, between subject and object, are intensified and reconfigured.

Thus, we understand that, in order to locate (and be able to respond to) the crises and collapses of the Anthropocene, administrative sciences can learn from the cosmopolitical proposition (Stengers, 2018)—by recognizing the plurality of agents and knowledges involved in management processes, without hierarchizing or claiming control over the different perspectives that cohabit the world—and, more specifically, from the perspective of becoming-with (Haraway, 2023), as it invites us to rethink management as a field of interactions and relationships that are not linear, nor controllable, but dynamic and transformative, where the future is not given, but co-constructed through everyday practices. Such lessons can propose alternatives to address the crisis of these frontiers, inviting administrative sciences to be in the interstices. Therefore, it is not a matter of simply integrating or adding other forms of existence to administrative theory, but of thinking it based on practices of coexistence, of “doing together,” which is distinct from the logic of domination and subordination.

The selection of authors we adopted to compose the central framework of this essay stems from an epistemological alignment that seems particularly fertile to consider the assumptions of administrative science. Whitehead (1994, 2006), by criticizing the bifurcation of nature, offers us a key to understand how modernity established artificial divisions that are directly reflected in the logic of efficiency and control that structures Administration. In turn, Stengers (2005, 2015, 2018, 2023), by problematizing science as an authoritarian voice and proposing the risk of “composition” instead of remoteness, inspires us to rethink the modes by which Administration can inhabit the Anthropocene crises in a less control-centered manner. Haraway (1995, 2021, 2022, 2023), by introducing becoming-with as an epistemological and political practice, can help us shift management to a multispecies and relational register, fundamental to imagine cosmopolitical alternatives.

We chose these authors - little adopted in the area of Administration—precisely because their criticisms provide a possibility of epistemological shift. Instead of reinforcing consolidated categories, they enable us to explore the concreteness of practices and the situated character of knowledges, a point which we consider essential for the production of an applied social science. Therefore, this choice is not aimed at offering a “pantheon” of alternative authors, but rather at providing a transdisciplinary dialogue that can decelerate administrative sciences in their managerialist automatism, enabling them to become more responsive to the interdependencies and urgencies of the Anthropocene.

What we discuss in this essay may be an interesting and alternative response to fundamental elements that mark neoliberal society, managerialist ideology and its developments in science practice in Administration. With Haraway (2021, 2022, 2023), we understand that being is always being with (more-than-human lives) in continuous transformation, and that our lives are informed by these multiple relationships in constant becoming-with them. Therefore, it is an alterity around an ethics of care (Haraway, 2021), in which the responsibility to act is always intertwined by multiple situated forms of life (Haraway, 1995). It is about developing the ability to respond to located issues/inconveniences in conjunction, in the construction of unlikely partnerships in the face of what reality imposes on us. Considering this perspective, we propose learning from becoming-with as a possibility of building futures that can possibly be lived, in a constant state of remaining with issues/inconveniences that claim the urgency of being thought together in terms of their multiple consequences (Haraway, 2023).

By proposing the concept of becoming-with, we seek to offer a theoretical key that not only articulates these complex interactions between humans and non-humans, but also suggests the construction of cosmopolitical agendas of organizational research and action. Thus, we contribute to the dissemination of critical reflections by exploring how becoming-with can reconfigure organizational practices and theories in this context marked by technological fractures and emergences. Finally, we invite decelerating and reactivating administrative science in the Anthropocene by briefly demonstrating how we are adopting practices (hesitating, civilizing, locating and reactivating) in the face of cosmopolitical challenges that permeate our field research on the management of a Conservation Unit. Thus, management can be understood not only as an exercise in control and optimization, but as a situated practice that recognizes the complexities of the relationship networks that constitute the social, economic and ecological spheres.

THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE CRISIS OF BIFURCATED SCIENCE: THE BEWITCHED ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE

Modernity, a complex period that peaked in the 18th and 19th centuries (Latour, 2020; Weber, 2009), marked a profound transformation in social, economic and environmental structures around the world (Mignolo, 2017). The rise of Enlightenment reason, the emphasis on individuality, and confidence in scientific progress outlined the modern mindset in light of an epistemic perspective that justified the appropriation of territories and ways of life (Ferdinand, 2022; Mignolo et al., 2008; Stengers, 2023). The colonial ship, which left Africa for the New World, bringing in its hold enslaved bodies to work in the plantation regimes, inaugurates modernity by informing the colonies with European standards of civilization and rationality as a universal path to human prosperity (Mignolo, 2017); the production of the Western double fracture (Ferdinand, 2022).

The Cartesian ego cogito, represented by René Descartes’ well-known expression “I think, therefore I am,” inaugurates in the history of modern science the rational thinking as a basis for the establishment of truths, leading to expressive ontological, epistemological and socio-environmental consequences (Haraway, 1995; Latour, 2020). Gradually, a rationalist prism that increasingly sees the world only through reason (Eurocentric), which underestimates any life experiences beyond the abstraction of individual consecrated in the ego cogito. It is a perspective embodied in a specific subject/body/place (Haraway, 1995); a rationality that is based on the idea of domination of lives to achieve its purposes of domination (Stengers, 2023).

The birth of management as a scientific knowledge is closely related to the modernization process and the consolidation of bureaucratic rationality in industrial societies (Weber, 2009, 2013). With the massive transition of people from the countryside to the cities, the formation of the first industries and consumer societies, a fertile soil is established for the rise of an administrative science (Shenhav, 2003; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). In general, management is born and solidified in this historical context as a modern and bifurcated practice; and the Administration sciences, as scientific knowledge, whose objective is to instrumentalize resources (human, natural, financial, technological resources) for perpetuating the progress of capital (Ramos, 1989).

As we can see, there is an important parallel here between scientific and economic dimensions (Stengers, 2023). By drawing parallels between the expansion of capitalism and the rise of a Protestant ethos, Weber (2013) demonstrates how modern rationalization was marked by a process of disenchantment with the world. In place of charisma, tradition, and customs, in modernity now prevailed rational-legal-bureaucratic authority; a type of institutionalized domination that happens through the progressive intellectualization of life (Weber, 2009, 2013) and the domination of bodies (Foucault, 2014). It is in this context, of modern rationalization, domination and disenchantment, that hegemonic administrative science rises and consolidates.

The realization of the modern project of progressive rationalization is characterized by Weber (2013) as the disenchantment of the world, a kind of replacement of traditional modes of understanding reality by pre-modern societies with a secularized understanding centered on reason, efficiency and maximization of results. On the one hand, the disenchantment described by Weber reverberated in the construction of a type of society in which modern scientific knowledge is central to the determination of social relations. On the other hand, the same disenchantment is articulated with a civilizing need to dominate the world, life, nature, in the name of progress and the perpetuation/domination of European reason (Latour, 2020; Mignolo, 2017; Stengers, 2023).

Stengers, dialoguing with the process of disenchantment described by Weber (2013), argues that understanding the rational enterprise as a way of replacing the magical and the religious represents an excessive simplification, which can be suitable for producing narratives that justify technical and instrumental domination. Modern reason and neoliberal capitalism could then be seen not as the destitution of enchantments, but rather as new forms of enchantment that bewitch the world with faith in science, technology and economic progress (Pignarre & Stengers, 2013). In place of traditional religious or magical enchantments, modernity would have produced and constituted itself through the belief in the human capacity to understand, control and transform the world through scientific knowledge and technological innovations (Latour, 2020).

In this interpretation, we could characterize not only neoliberal capitalism as a kind of modern spell, but also the very managerial ideology, based on the belief that individuals are entrepreneurs of their lives (Dardot & Laval, 2016; Gaulejac, 2007) and on the sacralization of the market as a guiding principle of organized life (Chanlat, 2022). Managerial ideology, now constituting the social fabric in contemporary life, empties the political and collective sense of human experience (Dardot & Laval, 2016) by immersing subjects in the logic of self-exploitation of a society of performance (Han, 2015) in which the interests of capital prevail, justifying any means to achieve economic ends (Gaulejac, 2007).

Such administrative science—hegemonically centered on functionalism (Korica et al., 2017), instrumental rationality (Ramos, 1989), homo economicus (Fougère & Solitander, 2023) and the colonization matrix (Teixeira et al., 2021)—plays an important role in this process by legitimizing the neoliberal orientation toward market progress, although its control mechanisms are often updated around more palatable discourses. These are discursive changes that still perpetuate management as a practice that must instrumentalize resources for the progress of capital (Aktouf, 2005; Santos, 2023). Therefore, administrative sciences fail to promote a management that truly considers the ethical, cultural, political, social and environmental dimensions integrated in their practices (Gaulejac, 2007; Gherardi & Laasch, 2022; Paula, 2016), also contributing to the exacerbated exploitation of so-called natural resources and to the neglect of socio-environmental issues (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021; Chanlat, 2022).

Modern science and management, which achieved a supposed mastery of nature during and from the Industrial Revolution (Mignolo, 2017), today reveal to the world the possibility of the Anthropocene. Predatory marks of human action can already be considered the main vector of planetary change (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Steffen et al., 2007). We argue that, despite the lack of consensus in Earth System Sciences about the beginning of the Anthropocene and whether it can really, in the objectivity of stratigraphic measurements, be considered a new geological epoch (Steffen et al., 2015), modern organizations have played a fundamental role in sustaining the socio-environmental crisis derived from it (Figueiredo et al., 2020). In addition, the climate change effects are already manifested in different events that materialize, regardless of the nomenclature for the event itself, that the problems are here to stay (Haraway, 2023).

The concept of bifurcated nature, critically formulated by Whitehead (1994), shows one of the pillars of modern rationalization. By establishing the separation between a nature conceived as an objective entity, subject to calculation and domination, and the modes of experience associated with cultural qualities, values and practices, modernity has given the sciences an impoverished and fragmented understanding of the world (Whitehead, 2006). Stengers (2011, 2023) notes that this division, while excluding experience and affections from legitimate knowledge, allowed Science to consolidate as an authorized and authoritative voice about reality. This claim to authority, supported by the ideal of pure objectivity, has contributed to naturalizing modes of exploitation that disregard the interdependence between humans and non-humans, reinforcing the conditions of the current ecological and climate crisis.

Hegemonic administrative science, by operating based on a logic of maximizing efficiency and control, not only perpetuates the separations described in the previous paragraph, but reinvents and reinforces them. By treating the so-called natural resources as inert and isolated objects to be managed for the perpetuation of capital, it disregards the interconnections between more-than-human worlds. Based on this bifurcation, we can understand that modernity has not only established a grammar of rationalization of the world, but also a process of disenchantment that sustains the separation into different spheres. However, in the face of the emergence of the Anthropocene, such spheres are challenged to confront one another and seek new forms of composition and reconciliation (Chakrabarty, 2019).

For all these reasons, we argue that hegemonic administrative science has solidified as a knowledge oriented toward efficiency and control in favor of the market, development and progress. In this process, it not only reproduced, but reinvented the isolation between the so-called “natural world” and the “social” world, as if they were discrete and autonomous spheres that only impact each other mutually. It is here that the criticism of Whitehead (1994, 2006) on the bifurcation of nature becomes relevant: by bringing to the center of the debate the modern split between what would be “objective” and “natural” and what would be “subjective” and “cultural,” showing how Science—and, with it, hegemonic administrative science—has adopted a view that not only simplifies but, in practice, annihilates the complex interrelations between these spheres. This operation was central to sustaining the modern project of domination, in which the separation between spheres (not only between nature and culture, but also between economics and ecology, reason and emotion, human and non-human, male and female, white and non-white, scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge) legitimizes practices of exploitation and control. Such splits, far from describing reality, produce hierarchies that authorize Administration to manage life by the logic of subordination and exclusion, silencing other modes of knowing and living the world.

Thus, the production of a nature from the perspective of the “natural resource” was transformed into something that could be technically dominated and controlled, while culture and subjectivities were relegated to other fields that are epistemically more distant (Ferdinand, 2022). In this sense, modern grammar, confident in separation and control, created a model of knowledge that not only ignored the interdependencies between worlds, but also made it possible, and even desirable, for Science to become an instrument of domination—in the case of administrative science, of different bodies, whether or not they were human. Administrative science, immersed in this rationalization project, reinforces this fragmentation, treating social and ecological issues as something that can be separated, isolated and “managed” technically, moving away from politics. Rather than asking how to rethink the interactions between these domains, this ideology of modern management — focused on maximizing resources and results —operates as a “modern spell,” which tries to convince us that technical knowledge is sufficient to deal with the complexity of our organized relations with the planet, caring only residually about the damage it causes.

Accordingly, the intersection between scientific practices, management practices and socio-environmental crisis shows the responsibility of organizations and administrative sciences to (re)imagine their theoretical, epistemological, ontological, ethical and political foundations (De Cook et al., 2019; Leite & Fantinel, 2024). Planetary landscapes have been/are being radically modified with these organizational movements of human domination, causing an ecological imbalance on the planet (Haraway, 2023; Stengers, 2015; Tsing, 2021). Therefore, we reinforce the increasingly evident need to (re)think the production of knowledge in Administration (Ergene et al., 2021; Júlio & Fantinel, 2021; Wright et al., 2018) and its impacts on the different modes of life that inhabit planet Earth. It is here that we propose the development of knowledges that, instead of reinforcing modern bifurcations, learn to exist and compose in the interstices.

BECOMING-WITH AND THE RETHINKING OF FRONTIERS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Becoming-with is our inspiration to discuss the possibility of this rethinking of borders, of this composing in the interstices. This is a proposition elaborated by biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway, recognized for her incisive criticism of the dichotomy between nature and culture, and which discusses how modern and anthropocentric thought produces and demarcates “times of urgency.” According to the author, becoming-with is a mode of understanding that favors the complex and continuous intertwining of beings that become with others. It is an epistemic approach that implies understanding the world by a radical relationality (Haraway, 2023). This does not mean that beings simply coexist or impact one another mutually: it is not simply a “being with”; it means that we are all, human or not, constituted by active practices of becoming with, coevolving with other forms of existence. From this perspective, the frontiers between the “human” and the “non-human”—those fixed categories we have built—begin to dissolve, revealing a living, interconnected, multi-species cosmos (Haraway, 2021, 2022).

Haraway (2023) composes, for this, a tentacular thought, whose arms extend along several paths, creating connections between diverse worlds, contexts and experiences. Instead of linear thinking, which seeks to separate and categorize, tentacular thinking invites us to immerse ourselves in the complexity of the interactions that form, sustain and challenge us. It is this thinking that breaks the traditional divisions between nature and culture, between science and ethics, between the social and the ecological. Becoming-with is immersed in networks of mutual affection, exchange and care, and this is how we understand our relationship with the world: not as distant dominators, but as co-participants in the living web that constitutes the Earth. By adopting that practice in administrative science, we can begin to imagine new modes of coexistence, where solutions to global crises, such as the Anthropocene, are not based on generalist and scalable models of control, but on learning to live in a situated manner, through the complex interactions that involve us.

Becoming-with is marked by a refusal of a sad human-centered planetary end and an openness to the recognition of joyful possibilities of new situated arrangements for the production of composite lives (Maizza & Oliveira, 2022). It is about recognizing that everything is connected to something in some space-time; thinking with joy and willingness to build unlikely alliances in the face of anthropocentric apathy (Haraway, 2023). It means recognizing that our lives are intertwined with the lives of other beings and that we need to be able to respond (response-ability) to these relationships. From this perspective, the wordplay developed by the author claims significant ethics of care and alterities (Haraway, 2021). After all, who are we responsible for? Whom and what are we responding to together? For Donna Haraway, planetary crisis scenarios imply the need to build new thoughts for science practice—new ways of thinking and acting composed of compassion, joy and generative alliances.

Thinking with the becoming-with of Haraway (2023) means adopting a view that recognizes the relationalities that inform the more-than-human lives in the different modes of inhabiting the Earth. An example that demonstrates this overlap in coexistence networks is the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus on human life during the COVID-19 pandemic, which required new responsibilities and ethics from organizational practices (Júlio & Fantinel, 2021). Therefore, becoming-with involves the idea of assuming a posture of collaboration between worlds (Haraway, 2023), seeking more ethical and responsive forms of coexistence (Dolphijn et al., 2023). The point is cultivating care relationships (Maizza & Oliveira, 2022), based on multispecies respect and solidarity (Haraway, 2023). For the author, becoming-with may be a response to human-centered narratives, which mark the spells of neoliberal society and managerialist ideology (Dardot & Laval, 2016; Gaulejac, 2007).

By inviting us to transcend the boundaries of human exceptionalism that permeates modernity (Maizza & Oliveira, 2022), becoming-with demands that all practices be thought of in terms of their multiple consequences on the materiality of life (ecologies of more-than-human practices). It implies rejecting these teleological and human-centered solutions, such as the promises of a “green capitalism” or the resolution of problems through investments by one or another billionaire. More than the hasty and irresponsible preparation of quick, escapist and technocentric solutions, it implies learning to stay with the problem, as a cosmopolitical commitment to face contemporary crises assuming the complexity and ambiguity of the challenges. We need to stay with the difficult issues, living with them and seeking collective and responsible modes of action that recognize the interconnections between the forms of life implicated in the situated/localized practices. It poses a challenge in the face of the more than urgent need to develop responses to devastating events; joint and composite responses to the sad narratives of the Anthropocene (Haraway, 2023).

If the administrative sciences were initially built on the idea that nature can be treated as a resource to be managed and exploited, ignoring its complex interconnections with the social and cultural, the proposal of becoming-with offers us a new way to rethink the boundaries between these domains. Rather than dividing the world into autonomous and separate spheres, becoming-with invites us to imagine forms of shared existence, where humans, non-humans, and ecosystems are in constant interaction and mutual transformation. In the Anthropocene context, in which we are forced to consider human actions and their irreversible impacts on the planet and its various forms of life, the proposal of becoming-with proves a key to rethinking socio-environmental issues and their connections with administrative science. The ecological crisis is no longer an external problem to be solved with control technologies and techniques, but a collective challenge that requires a fundamental change in how we think about interdependence and responsibility, both in scientific practices and in administrative practices.

We suggest the incorporation of becoming-with as an alternative to the rationalist and separating logic of modernity, by proposing a more integrative and interconnected way of thinking about the role of science and management in the context of the Anthropocene. It is a way of reimagining the relationality of forms of existence on the planet, which implies, for administrative sciences, recognizing the role and responsibility of their knowledge and practices in the daily production of the Anthropocene, instead of acting as if ecological issues were “external problems” to be solved by Administration. This could mean an approach that no longer separates, for example, the fields of environmental management, ethics, ecology and social issues. At the same time, it provides the possibility of questioning the extent to which the administrative responses considered “sustainable” are insufficient for the times of urgency, as they perpetuate Western fractures (Ehrnström-Fuentes & Böhm, 2023; Nadegger, 2023). Becoming-with can afford us a way out of the bifurcation that has marked hegemonic administrative science, suggesting a perspective that recognizes the complexity of the interactions between humans, nature, and the cultures that sustain our lives. In this sense, the next topic was elaborated seeking to conceptually operationalize our proposal, which we did around four practices to respond to the cosmopolitical urgencies and challenges of contemporary times: hesitating, civilizing, locating and reactivating.

THE COSMOPOLITICAL URGENCIES AND CHALLENGES TO DECELERATE ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCES

Hesitating and civilizing: becoming-with to put administrative sciences on hold

Yes, it would be the new type of objectivity. But it would be much more challenging because the objection would not come from “nice” colleagues, interested in the same kind of dynamics as you. This would be what I call the “deceleration of science”: scientists interested not simply in taking time to think, themselves, about the consequences, but above all scientists interested in the world where these consequences will occur (Isabelle Stengers, in an interview with Dias et al., 2016, p. 163, our translation).

Inspired by the thought of philosopher Isabelle Stengers, we align becoming-with with a possibility of deceleration of scientific practices. While, on the one hand, the Belgian author proposes this deceleration, on the other hand, she also articulates in her manifesto the tone of the times of urgency. The urgencies are expressed in terms of the need to blend into the cosmopolitical mess that involves a being in the world of many diversities, whose compositions with these must be taken seriously if we want to survive the times of catastrophes (Stengers, 2015, 2023). In other words, this possibility of a “slow science,” in addition to fissuring the modern bifurcation, intends to situate scientific practices so science does not fall into a mere discursive and authoritarian sophistication. This means recognizing that scientific practices interact with several other ecologies of (more-than-human) practices in the cosmos (Stengers, 2005); in events in which the involved parties must be willing to transform themselves into the becoming-with (Haraway, 2023) the various worlds with which the regimes of truth production are established (Stengers, 2018).

The ecology of practices, a perspective to which we align ourselves in this article, deals with a rethinking of scientific practices, their ontological, epistemological, methodological and cosmopolitical foundations, as well as the risky exposure of their responsibilities in the face of planetary urgency (Stengers, 2005). According to the author, these are ways that seek to civilize the relations between scientific practices and which they have long excluded; a reinvention of scientific practice composed of practices of inclusion and ethical-ecological responsibility. Thinking in terms of an ecology of practices is to recognize that Stengersian ecology has a double meaning: natural and political (Silva, 2020). What, then, would it be to hesitate and civilize in the face of cosmopolitan challenges for administrative science becoming-with the ecologies of the more-than-human practices that constitute the cosmos?

The first point that should be noted is that cosmopolitics is not claimed around a concept; cosmopolitics is a proposition (Stengers, 2018). This means that it is not intended to end around a representative solution, but with a composition of diverse and contradictory worlds around that which is not intended to be resolved arbitrarily. While the administrative sciences focus on building hasty and scalable generalizations about the bifurcated representation of more-than-human realities—as occurs with the majority practices of corporate social responsibility (Ehrnström-Fuentes & Böhm, 2023)—, what we propose here is a becoming-with (Haraway, 2023) that hesitates around the composition of the possible.

Putting administrative science on hold calls for a becoming-with to claim a cosmopolitical commitment to civilize scientific practices around their consequences in the face of the materiality of situated life (ecologies of practices). Recognizing, for example, that the theories and discourses of corporate responsibility and sustainability result in ontological and material violence in communities of more-than-human lives, especially those that are in a more vulnerable state (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021; Ehrnström-Fuentes & Böhm, 2023). The hesitation we propose here would be to question the naturalness of our propositions, theories, concepts and methods, to think about the situated consequences of our scientific practices; to evoke cosmopolitics to put the administrative sciences on hold.

Cosmopolitics is the intrusion of a new way of thinking—a speculative philosophy inspired by Alfred Whitehead—Kantian cosmopolitanism, in a way that grounds the state as the rationalist representation of a supposed common good (Stengers, 2023). The cosmopolitical proposition is not in a hurry to reach a solution—as in hegemonic administrative science -, nor does it have in modern representation the rational field for the construction of these solutions (Stengers, 2018). Cosmopolitics is the expression of that which Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak do in their original writings and activisms (Sztutman, 2019), by considering the multiple interests of rivers, animals, plants, spirits, shamans and a whole range of dwellings in ecologies of practices in the face of the instrumentalization of these lives by civilization and modern politics (Kopenawa & Albert, 2018; Krenak, 2022). Cosmopolitics is expressed in the movement of sowing words of countercolonization, which mark the quilombola confluences of Nego Bispo (Santos, 2023). Cosmopolitics is the expression of different ways of being in the world in composition with more-than-human lives among indigenous women and plants (Maizza & Oliveira, 2022), and among hunters, Andean peoples, non-human animals and bourgeois interests (Cadena & Blaser, 2018).

Cosmopolitics would be a parliament (Latour, 2020) in which stakeholders open up to discuss and demonstrate multiple interests around one (or several) common problems, leading majority practices to be forced to question the foundations of what they do, silence and exclude (Silva, 2020). Cosmopolitics, then, would be a cosmic event composed of these divergences and these antagonistic thoughts that would no longer silence these ecologies of practices, but would be an opening for the transformation of modern practices in the face of the possible in their encounters (Stengers, 2018). By thinking about the becoming-with in these cosmopolitical inspirations, by hesitating and civilizing before the ecologies of the practices that constitute the cosmos, we invite administrative science practice to be situated in the interstices, to question the foundations that support it in philosophical, theoretical and methodological terms, and, instead of excluding, to produce a science that composes in becoming-with these different ecologies of more-than-human practices (Haraway, 2023; Stengers, 2023).

Hesitating and civilizing distant the challenge we assumed in the composition of our field research with the ecology of management practices in a Conservation Unit required us to understand that this ecology of practices is constituted by different ways of inhabiting the territory (e.g., traditional communities, plants, animals, tourists, entrepreneurs, public officials, religious manifestations, associations, laws, economic forces, institutional pressures, etc.). Therefore, even dealing with a concept that, as a rule, is standardized as anthropocentric and universal, we understand the responsibility of management as a transitory and situated result that emerges from the encounters of more-than-human agencies (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022). In this regard, the so-called “shared management” of Conservation Units proves less as a solid and representative structure and more as a field of precarious negotiations, co-produced and cohabited, with evident deficiency of the legal apparatus and limits of administrative practices to deal with cosmopolitical complexities (Cabacine & Fantinel, 2025).

Instead of silencing these various more-than-human agencies and their zones of conflicts and interactions, as still happens in much of the Administration research on the relations between humans and nature (Ehrnström-Fuentes & Böhm, 2023; Nadegger & Wegerer, 2024), we seek to epistemologically and methodologically compose a movement of researching-with, becoming-with (Haraway, 2023). Thus, we aim to question the practical and situated responsibilities of management in the face of the ecologies of environmental preservation/conservation practices. This implied mobilizing theoretical categories and methodological practices that would enable us to question our positions as producers of knowledge; hesitating in the face of the uncertainties and weaknesses of our own formulations; and civilizing the ways of doing research, making them more sensitive, inclusive and responsible in the face of the extractive models institutionalized in our field (Bothello & Bonfim, 2025). Thus, we understand research as a situated practice and the production of knowledge as a collective composition (Stengers, 2023), a cosmopolitical challenge that posed the need to locate and reactivate our bodies and our minds.

Locating and reactivating: becoming-with to compose

Becoming-with, slow science, cosmopolitics, the ecologies of practices are paths by which we seek to offer possibilities for a reactivation in administrative science practice. Reactivating implies the risky, yet powerful and joyful proposition for a composition of worlds (more than human), productions of relationships (Stengers, 2023). Inspired by the collective resistance movements of neopagan witches, Isabelle Stengers advocates a sorcerous countermovement to reactivate these diverse collective practices and worlds, in their powers to re-enchant zones of experiences in knowledge production practices (Stengers, 2023). Reactivating these resistances (Sztutman, 2018), mixing in the magic that emerges from the fumes of forgotten stories (Costa, 2017), is a movement of collective inspiration that marks the Belgian author’s thinking in the face of the legacy of deaths caused by modernity (Dias et al., 2016). Both Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers argue for the construction of a situated and localized science, attentive to the materialities of the ecologies of practices in specific contexts, in contrast to the universal precepts of modernity (Haraway, 2023; Stengers, 2023).

Instead of the supposed modern objectivity, which universalizes reason around the male/white/European subject and his methodological omnipotence (whether in the field of Administration or not)—the hasty generalizations that categorize bifurcated science—, Donna Haraway proposes localized knowledges as an ontological and epistemic alternative. It is not a matter of refusing objectivity in itself, nor of falling into the traps of social constructionism, but of attesting to the power of a joyful science that recognizes “objects” as agencies that are always in motion of composition (Stengers, 2023). It is not a matter of falling into an absolute relativism, but of recognizing the objective power of “partial, locatable, critical knowledges, supported by the possibility of connection networks, called solidarity in politics” (Haraway, 1995, p. 34, our translation).

According to the author, localized knowledges are means of producing knowledges and practices situated in specific materialities, informed by cultural, ecological, social and political experiences composed of different more-than-human collectives (Haraway, 1995). She emphasizes the importance of recognizing and valuing these knowledges as legitimate sources of knowledge, as opposed to the dominant discourse that tends to favor certain types of knowledge considered neutral and universal. By underscoring localized knowledge, Haraway seeks to decentralize the power and authority associated with modern hegemonic discourses, promoting what she calls “shared conversations in epistemology.”

In our field research, by seeking to locate and compose the production of knowledge, we contrast the generalist methodologies and the rationalist prism of administrative science (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021), as well as the anthropocentrism that guides common understandings about management practices (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022). We chose to compose with the ecologies of practices of the Conservation Units because they constantly involve the limits of the nature-culture dichotomy and its overlaps with management, whose practices are closely related to the different ways of surviving and belonging in the territory (Cabacine & Fantinel, 2025). We were inspired by multispecies studies (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010; Van Dooren & Rose, 2016), in their potential to show more-than-human agencies, to show that management practices are co-produced and, therefore, cannot be reduced to the agency domains that are exclusive of human animals (Fantinel, 2023).

In more pragmatic terms, in the field we mobilized conversations “shared epistemology,” involving dialogues with animals, plants, waters, geosites, hunters, fishermen, farmers, biologists, agronomists, ecologists, entrepreneurs, environmental drivers, technologies, laws, among others. These conversations were always mediated by limits and potencies, partial and, in some cases, even precarious connections. Still, recognizing these limits, our approach hesitates: it locates the production of knowledge as a natural-cultural connection (Haraway, 2023), always situated and not reducible to generalizable models. We also hesitate in the face of the ontological violence that we denounced throughout this essay, recognizing that conservation/preservation territories are cohabited by multiple existences (Cabacine & Fantinel, 2025). Therefore, the cosmopolitical implications for management understandings prove too complex to be addressed solely on our own terms. At first, given these complexities, we even sought to deny the very idea of management in our research. However, after successive reflections, we recognized the power of reactivating it: not as a normative and universal concept, but as a situated, precarious practice co-produced in the ecologies that we inhabit.

We argue that the reactivation of administrative sciences implies epistemically composing with the ecologies of localized practices, recognizing that we are not alone in the world (Stengers, 2018). This means an effort to focus on the composition with knowledges, practices and territories that escape the bifurcated instrumental logic of administrative science (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021). It is a matter of recognizing the richness of resisting/disenchanting/countercolonizing by telling stories other than the sad anthropocentric, modern and colonial narratives (Haraway, 2023; Santos, 2023; Stengers, 2023). Therefore, we advocate new ways of producing administrative science slowly to reactivate in a situated manner; a science that allows itself to compose with becoming-with (Haraway, 2023) ecologies of practices (Stengers, 2005), in the agencies that are produced in the interstices of diverse ontological/epistemological collectives, in the importance of what Isabelle Stengers calls producing relationships and bonds (Stengers, 2023). This inspiration enabled us to advance in the construction of a research that composes with the ecologies of practices of the Conservation Units, in contrast to the silences and violences that are standardized in studies on management and organizations (Ehrnström-Fuentes & Böhm, 2023).

Reactivating and locating the administrative sciences are possibilities of connections around the becoming-with the production a science that hesitates in the face of the modern bifurcation; these are thoughts that constitute new thoughts; questions that generate new questions; stories that allow new stories to be told; a way of remaining with the problem (Haraway, 2023). These are shared conversations in epistemology (Haraway, 1995), situated in ecologies of knowledges and practices that are jointly responsible for the urgency of the here and now, for the urgency of a new science whose practices are not intended to be claimed as authoritarian or hegemonic (Stengers, 2023). These are promising possibilities for building new futures (Krenak, 2019, 2022), as to which it would be opportune to countercolonize the whole idea of development by resignifying it through the art of getting involved (Santos, 2023), of becoming-with (Haraway, 2023).

Becoming-with contrasts profoundly with the fragmented view of hegemonic administrative science, which, as we have shown, tends to treat nature and culture as separate spheres that can be independently manipulated. The narratives of management and administrative practice, immersed in the sphere of neoliberal discourses (Fougère & Solitander, 2023), are centered on perspectives that undermine our ability to act/respond (Haraway, 2023). They put us in the cynical and at the same time desperate wait for a modern and anthropocentric miracle that solves the problems it created (Stengers, 2023). In another direction, what we are proposing in this essay is a joyful thinking, a staying in confusion, which claims a cosmopolitical commitment (Stengers, 2018) to blend into these many worlds located in their possibilities of building alliances (Haraway, 2023); the challenge of producing a science that hesitates, a science capable of decelerating in the face of the demands of a knowledge industry, without losing the ability to respond to the urgent issues of its time (Stengers, 2023).

CONCLUSION

In this essay, we proposed to answer the call for a reconfiguration of the organizational practices and theories considering the critical horizon of the phenomenon of modernity, which we did by taking the Anthropocene controversy as a context. We think that the administrative sciences, although belatedly integrated into this discussion, play a crucial role in the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene, as contemporary management practices intensify social inequalities, environmental damage and the logic of exploitation. We chose to show this engagement based on the modern logic of bifurcation that reflects this fundamental split of modernity, in which science is seen as a tool to dominate and exploit the world, without recognizing the interconnections between more-than-human worlds. To respond to these crises, we suggest that administrative science appropriates Donna Haraway’s perspective of becoming-with, which proposes a way of thinking about relationships not as control or subordination, but as practices of coexistence and co-construction, which recognize the complexity and interdependence of ecological, social and economic entanglements.

With that, we aim to continue the dissemination of reflections that question the foundations of thought and action in the sciences of Administration, reflecting on how contemporary phenomena relate to the field of management, with its environmental, social and economic implications. In this context, we suggest that administrative science, when dealing with the crises of the Anthropocene, take as its starting point Donna Haraway’s proposal, which, by reflecting on more-than-human interactions, invites us to rethink administrative practices no longer as control or subordination, but as an exercise in becoming-with. This implies addressing relationships as dynamic and interdependent, far from a mechanistic and fragmented view, towards a coexistence that recognizes the complexity and overlapping of ecological, social and cultural networks. From this perspective, administrative sciences can reconfigure themselves, moving away from the modern logic of separation between nature and culture and adopting a posture of collaboration, care and ethical responsibility—essential to respond to the global challenges and multiple crises that emerge in the Anthropocene.

Finally, in more pragmatic terms, we invite the academic community in Administration to reflect on the cosmopolitical challenges and urgencies of administrative sciences in the Anthropocene, proposing their deceleration by means of a becoming-with the ecologies of practices. We argue for the ability of administrative sciences to hesitate in the face of modern generalizations and representations, valuing and reactivating localized knowledges and more-than-human compositions in contrast to the accelerated and scalable solutions that are common to field scientific practice. An invitation to compose new relationships, becoming-with, hesitating, civilizing, localizing and reactivating; which involves resisting the neoliberal and anthropocentric logic in its interstices, producing situated, plural knowledge committed to shared futures.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior CAPES) (for providing financial support for the development of this research

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• 27
  [Translated version] Note: All quotes in English translated by this article’s translator.
• DATA AVAILABILITY
  The dataset that supports the findings of this study is not publicly available.
• REVIEWERS
  Mário Vasconcellos Sobrinho (Universidade Federal do Pará, Belém / PA - Brazil). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6489-219X
• REVIEWERS
  Alexandre André Feil (Universidade do Vale do Taquari, Lajeado / RS - Brazil). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2217-3351
• PEER REVIEW REPORTT
  The peer review report is available at this link:https://periodicos.fgv.br/cadernosebape/article/view/97420/90602

Edited by

• EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
  Hélio Arthur Reis Irigaray (Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro / RJ - Brazil). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9580-7859

• ASSOCIATE EDITOR
  Fabricio Stocker (Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro / RJ - Brazil). ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6340-9127

• GUEST EDITORS
  Antonio Feliciano (Instituto Superior Politécnico de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Angola).

• GUEST EDITORS
  Carla Marisa Rebelo de Magalhães (Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon - Portugal). ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7956-0753

• GUEST EDITORS
  Claúdio Roberto Marques Gurgel (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói / RJ - Brazil). ORCID:https://orcid.org/0009-0003-7254-8980

• GUEST EDITORS
  Fernando Guilherme Tenório (Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro / RJ - Brazil). ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4082-4410

• GUEST EDITORS
  Fernando López Parra (Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito - Ecuador). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3948-5127

• GUEST EDITORS
  Javier Jasso (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Coyoacán / CDMX - Mexico). ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5305-9936

Data availability

The dataset that supports the findings of this study is not publicly available.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 Apr 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  21 Nov 2024
• Accepted
  23 Sept 2025