TY - JOUR

T1 - The Mission (Im)possible of Climate Action through Quixotic Institutional Work

AU - Delmestri, Giuseppe

AU - Schüßler, Elke S.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

PY - 2025/2/22

Y1 - 2025/2/22

N2 - The ‘iron cage’ of the (neo-) liberal-capitalist system prioritizes economic returns over climate protection. Formerly powerful nation-states are subordinated to the rule of markets, whereas business elites have been freed from substantial responsibility for social and environmental concerns. While we agree in principle with the Point that a reassertion of state power may facilitate more decided climate action, our Counterpoint adopts a cultural institutionalist perspective that highlights the embeddedness of actors in a broader cultural order. From this perspective, actors enact scripts while often lacking substantive agency towards protecting the natural environment. Cultural change in meanings, myths, practices, and rituals is needed to remodel the currently dominant scripts and templates of modern, liberal-capitalist ‘world society’, including the script of state actorhood. We suggest the notion of ‘quixotic institutional work’ as a way of envisioning and prefiguring alternative cultural templates when both the physical and the social reality start showing cracks due to the climate crisis. Quixotic institutional work follows the logic of appropriateness rather than consequential purposiveness, and thus constitutes a different, often overlooked and mocked, form of agency for systems change relevant in the light of powerful forces towards maintaining an unsustainable world order.

AB - The ‘iron cage’ of the (neo-) liberal-capitalist system prioritizes economic returns over climate protection. Formerly powerful nation-states are subordinated to the rule of markets, whereas business elites have been freed from substantial responsibility for social and environmental concerns. While we agree in principle with the Point that a reassertion of state power may facilitate more decided climate action, our Counterpoint adopts a cultural institutionalist perspective that highlights the embeddedness of actors in a broader cultural order. From this perspective, actors enact scripts while often lacking substantive agency towards protecting the natural environment. Cultural change in meanings, myths, practices, and rituals is needed to remodel the currently dominant scripts and templates of modern, liberal-capitalist ‘world society’, including the script of state actorhood. We suggest the notion of ‘quixotic institutional work’ as a way of envisioning and prefiguring alternative cultural templates when both the physical and the social reality start showing cracks due to the climate crisis. Quixotic institutional work follows the logic of appropriateness rather than consequential purposiveness, and thus constitutes a different, often overlooked and mocked, form of agency for systems change relevant in the light of powerful forces towards maintaining an unsustainable world order.

KW - climate change

KW - cultural institutionalism

KW - institutional work

KW - new institutionalism

KW - system change

KW - Management studies

KW - Entrepreneurship

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85218702258&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1111/joms.13209

DO - 10.1111/joms.13209

M3 - Journal articles

AN - SCOPUS:85218702258

JO - Journal of Management Studies

JF - Journal of Management Studies

SN - 0022-2380

ER -