AOM 2025 Symposium Announcement
What's Unsustainability? An Uncomfortable Discussion and a Call for Action for Management Scholars
📅 Tuesday, July 29, 2025
🕥 10:15–11:45 CEST
📍 Bella Center, Hall B – B4-m2
While the concept of sustainability has become firmly embedded in management research, its counterpart - unsustainability - remains largely underexplored. This symposium invites a critical and timely conversation: What exactly is unsustainability, and why has it remained so conceptually vague within our field?
Rather than treating unsustainability as a simple negation, this session aims to unpack its ontological and ethical dimensions. It asks us to consider:
- What kinds of initiatives actively make or keep societies less sustainable?
- How can we account for interventions that improve one dimension (e.g., environmental) while harming another (e.g., social)?
- How do context, time, and power shape these outcomes?
Drawing from current theory and real-world practices, the symposium will explore how unsustainability is embedded in the way projects are conceived, justified, and institutionalized - including examples such as money laundering and ethically compromised leadership. It will conclude with a discussion on how scholars in OSCM and SIM can meaningfully incorporate these insights into their research agendas.
This session is an invitation not only to reflect, but to act - by developing a more rigorous, explicit, and critical understanding of the forces that undermine sustainability, even within well-intentioned efforts.
We hope you'll join us for what promises to be a challenging but necessary conversation.