Gaia storytelling: Management learning as terrestrial politics

Abstract

This paper addresses calls for developing eco-centric approaches to sustainable management learning that challenge the anthropocentric technocratic foci of established models. A growing concern is that despite declarations of climate emergencies, programs making a sustainable turn perpetuate rather than challenge the status-quo. A key issue is that they rely on an ontology of separateness which further detaches humans from nature. To propose an alternative approach that re-embeds human in nature through an ontology of relatedness, we develop the concept Gaia storytelling. It combines Arendt’s notion of storytelling with Latour’s notion of Gaia. Gaia storytelling dissolves the anthropocentric culture-nature binary that dominates current thinking by attuning itself to the politics of relations and how this politics performs the world through complex entanglements that involve multiple agencies. Storytelling for Gaia is seen as a way to give purpose and direction in life when this life is seen as interdependent on and created from multiple tangling agencies. Two stories that emerged from management learning exercises are discussed for developing Gaia storytelling: an auto-ethnography of a supermarket allows attuning to how our stories are affectively enacted into being through constant story selling; a storytelling workshop of regional sustainable development is used to discuss the possibilities for creating spaces of appearances that can work for Gaia. Finally, we discuss Gaia storytelling with reference to three principles: (1) natureculture, (2) common space, and (3) performativity.