OS4Future: an academic advocacy movement for our future

OS4Future is an international movement of organization and management scholars that seeks to act on the climate emergency.1 Ours is a movement that complements a larger international group of scholars called Scientists for Future, who support the youth movement Fridays4Future as inspired by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. OS4Future, founded in 2019, seeks to create and inspire change through a focus on personal and academic activities: research, teaching, practice, and leading by example. Our modus operandi is to “walk the talk” when it comes to sustainability.
As organizational scientists, we are in a unique position to offer solutions to tackle societal challenges. We understand the opportunities associated with organizational and institutional transformation, as well as the complexities and challenges at a cognitive and behavioral level. We also benefit from being embedded within business schools; in this capacity, we can help reshape the purpose of business, improve decision-making processes, develop policies, and raise awareness amongst political and business leaders and society at large.
Yet at the core of the OS4Future movement is a focus on personal actions that we, as scholars, take towards sustainability. These actions are targeted at SDG 13 (the Sustainable Development Goal on Climate Action) related to strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards, integrating climate change measures into national policies, and improving education, awareness-raising, and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation and adaptation. These actions have symbolic power, where we model the behavioral changes that prefigure a zero-carbon world.