Search results

This paper aims to understand if buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services, a digital type of credit that targets young consumers, acts as a protective or a risk factor for food insecurity among young consumers in Australia.

The study uses survey data from a representative sample of young consumers aged 18–24 from all internal states and territories in Australia. Propensity score matching is used to test two hypotheses: BNPL drives young consumers to food insecurity, and food insecurity leads young consumers to use BNPL.

There is evidence that BNPL use is driving young Australian consumers to experience food insecurity, but there is no evidence of food insecurity driving the use of BNPL services.

The evidence of BNPL driving young consumers to experience food insecurity calls for the adoption of practices and stronger regulation to ensure that young users from being overindebted.

Although the link with more traditional forms of credit (such as personal loans) and consumer wellbeing has been explored more broadly, this project is the first attempt to have causal evidence of the link between BNPL and food insecurity in a high-income country, to the best of the authors’ knowledge. This evidence helps to fill the gap about the protective or risky nature of this type of digital financial product, as experienced by young Australians.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we map the emerging climate narratives from the 1970s. Second, we examine how these narratives have shaped climate governance in addressing the consequences of climate change. Our analysis is based on a set of 12 interviews with climate change experts from various fields, including climate science, environmental policy, and environmental sustainability. The theoretical framework primarily draws from narrative analysis (Bruner, 1991; Riessman, 2005; Freeman, 2015), with a specific emphasis on its application within climate change studies (Bottici, 2010; Bushell et al., 2015; Fløttum and Gjerstad, 2017).

The period of analysis starts from the 1970s. A period marked by growing concern and the creation of national and global organizations to address the effects of climate change. Semistructured interviews were conducted with a sample of 12 experts in the field using narrative analysis. We adopted an inductive approach, allowing climate narratives to emerge organically from the interview data, and facilitating the emergence of new topics and perspectives.

Through interviews with climate experts, this study identifies three key narratives and critical shortcomings related to climate governance. The dominant climate narratives identified are apocalyptic environmentalism, greening capitalism and degrowth. Notably, greening capitalism and degrowth emerge as a dichotomous framework for understanding and interpreting climate change. By exploring these climate narratives, we highlight five critical shortcomings related to climate governance: increasing citizen participation through a bottom-up governance model, reforming the environmental subsidy framework, strengthening the science-policy interface, decoupling economic growth from energy dependence and developing innovative technological models beyond traditional green growth approaches. As a result, climate governance remains confined to these binary frameworks, and the challenges that were promised to be addressed decades ago largely remain unresolved.

The value of this study lies in the fact that, on the one hand, it uses narrative analysis to investigate climate governance, and on the other hand, it does so through interviews with different actors. All this facilitates a holistic approach, and from a 50-year historical perspective, this study traces an evolutionary line of narratives and identifies the critical points of climate governance.

The purpose of this paper is to pay tribute to the work of Bruno Latour and its relevance for organization scholars particularly, by relentlessly going beyond the reified category of “organization.” We rely in particular on our own experiences of conducting fieldwork with Latour in our hands and expose our journeys, sometimes feeling naked, embarrassed and naive. By following traces of actions, paying attention to things and appreciating plurality, with Latour we have discovered the politics of organizing and the aesthetic matter of things.

We use our own methodological experience to describe how Latour’s work has helped us concretely. We structure our methodological reasoning around three excursions in the field, corresponding to our different fieldwork journeys. For each excursion, we rely on descriptions and reflect on how we have traced actions, paid attention to things and appreciated plurality, as set out in the introduction.

We render through excursions our Latour moments, that is, critical moments in fieldwork, where we get stuck and embarrassed and where Latour’s texts with simple questions help us move. Against the critique of ANT as being apolitical and unable to account for the body, we explain how we have precisely, through our ANT investigations, intersected between politics, aesthetics and organizing through three main ways of displacing us in the field: leaving a priori categories and questioning what we see; placing our view somewhere and moving it in an oligopticon-like way; and “thick thinging.”

The paper is a tribute to Latour’s work and wants to contribute to emphasizing his relevance for understanding not only organization in general but also the politics and aesthetics of organizing. We reassemble our fieldwork journeys and, despite their being personal to us, we believe that our learnings are recognizable and recognized by other scholars. We conclude with a research suggestion relevant to organization scholars.