The Purpose-Driven Organisation in Times of Climate Crisis

This book provides an authoritative, evidence-based understanding of the implications of climate change for organisations, and offers valuable insights into how to craft and embed a sustainable purpose.

The book draws upon the newly-emerging cadre of ’purpose professionals’ who are charged with shifting their organization from being shareholder-driven to stakeholder-driven through the development and implementation of organizational purpose. It represents a unique collaboration between world-leading climate scientists and management experts, explaining in clear terms how organisations have been implicated in climate change, and the consequences of failing to act now. Based on science, it sets out the case for organisations to effect a radical shift away from a shareholder imperative to become purpose driven, and provides actionable, evidence-based insights into how to achieve change successfully. In the first part of the book, climate scientists outline the key scientific evidence about how the earth’s climate has changed in the past one hundred years, and use case studies to explain how this will affect policy, the public, and organisations across different geographical regions and sectors. In the second section, organizational experts explain the regulatory context and policy drivers for the shift to organizational purpose. The third part focuses on organizational actions and priorities, drawing on latest research findings to explain what purpose is, and how to lead change effectively to overcome the obstacles to becoming purpose-led.

Written with a practitioner readership in mind, this book is an invaluable resource for senior leaders, corporate social responsibility practitioners, policymakers and business and management students studying modules in purpose-driven leadership and climate change as well as a wider lay readership.

Katie Bailey is Professor of Leadership and HRM at Northumbria University and Emerita Professor of Work and Employment at King’s College London. She is a widely published, international award-winning scholar, focusing on meaningful work, employee engagement, temporality at work and human resource management. She was lead editor of Employee Engagement in Theory and Practice (2013, Routledge) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work (2019) as well as lead author of Strategic Human Resource Management (2nd Ed, 2018).

Katie Manning is a lecturer in Climate Change Business, and Society in the department of Geography at King’s College London, UK. Her work focuses on cross-disciplinary, and systems approaches to climate change, drawing on the political, economic, and social dimensions of climate mitigation and adaptation. Katie received her PhD from the University of Oxford, looking at the role of human adaptation to past climatic change and having worked in the field of palaeoclimatology for over a decade has more recently shifted her attention to the challenge of contemporary and future climate change.