EXPRESS: What if Society Collapses? Re-envisioning Management Scholarship through Radical Hope

Contemporary strategy and organization research rarely takes the possibility of systemic collapse, i.e. a path-dependent and irreversible breakdown of ecological and social systems, into account. Instead, it assumes that the world will endure in a recognizable form. In this essay, we question this assumption and ask what it would mean for strategy and organization scholarship if collapse were considered a real possibility. Drawing on Lear’s concept of radical hope in the face of cultural devastation, we argue that taking collapse seriously opens the possibility of rethinking the ontological, epistemological, and axiological foundations of our profession. We propose adopting a multifocal perspective inspired by radical hope to engage simultaneously with the dynamics of collapse in the present and with the uncertain forms of social organization that may emerge beyond it in our research, teaching and outreach activities.