Poles Apart: The Arctic & Management Studies

• Author: Dmitry Yumashev,Gail Whiteman
• Date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12337
• Published date: 01 July 2018

Poles Apart: The Arctic & Management Studies

Gail Whiteman and Dmitry Yumashev

Lancaster University

INTRODUCTION

‘The Arctic is screaming’.

Mark Serreze, Director, National Snow and Ice Data Center, USA

(quoted in Borenstein, 2007)

If the Arctic is screaming, it’s hard for management studies to hear. A search using the

word ‘Arctic’ in the archives of the Academy of Management Journal,Academy of Management

Review,Organization Studies,Organization Science,Administrative Science Quarterly reveals a blank

space. Maybe you haven’t noticed – this isn’t a premiere destination for management

school faculty. But its absence keeps us – a Canadian and Russian transdisciplinary

team – awake at night.

Russians refer to the Arctic (ffhrnbra) as ‘RhaØybØedeh’ (Far North) and

‘þagjkzhe’ (Beyond the Pole). Canadians call it the ‘Great White North’. The Saami,

Nenets, Khanty, Evenk, Chukchi, Aleut, Yupik and Inuit call the Arctic ‘home’. The oil

and gas industry call it the ‘Last Frontier’. But management scholars don’t tend to call it

anything. We seek to change that.

This may not be easy. Like any discipline, management scholars have well-trodden

paths, and ours rarely goes north of 608. Yet scientists from other disciplines (oceanogra-

phy, biology, ecology, climate, anthropology, glaciology) love the thrill of the remote.

From our own experiences and through shared storytelling, we recognize that research

in the Arctic is not for the fainthearted. We know numerous scientists who got stranded,

faced polar bears, survived submarine fires under the ice and helicopter crashes on land.

Address for reprints: Dmitry Yumashev, Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, Lancaster University

Management School, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK (d.yumashev@lancaster.ac.uk).

V

C2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 55:5 July 2018

doi: 10.1111/joms.12337

For your comments about this di scussion, please visit http://www.so cadms.org.uk/

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