Organizing in the Era of the Anthropocene: The Role of Human Agency in Building Resilient SESs

Naming our current geological epoch the Anthropocene reflects human impact on social, physical and ecological systems as unprecedented in scale and scope. It also highlights the critical role of human agency and human organizing for reversing current trends. Aiming to contribute to research on this important topic, this paper builds on work from the natural sciences and conceptualizes organizations as part of interconnected social-ecological systems (SESs). To lay theoretical foundations for future research, we develop a comprehensive conceptual framework of first- and second-order system properties, illustrated by the case of the superweeds epidemic transforming agriculture globally. We advance organizational sustainability research by highlighting the critical, yet understudied, property of human agency to a system’s resilience and adaptive capacity.