EBEN Finland Book Webinar

Responsible management - responsible to whom? Animals, ethics and rethinking business beyond the human

Animals are deeply embedded in contemporary business: They work, create value, move through supply chains and are shaped by organisational decisions. Yet they remain surprisingly absent from mainstream business and management thinking.

Drawing on the new book, Animals and Business: An Interspecies Approach to Responsible Management, this webinar asks what changes when animals are treated not simply as resources or ethical concerns, but as participants in organisational life. The authors, Helen Wadham and John Lever, will also reflect on the unusual collaborative process behind the book, developed with expert contributors whose perspectives helped challenge and reshape their own thinking.

Through short reflections from the authors and two of the book’s collaborators, Nona Borgström and Doris Schneeberger, they will explore how an interspecies perspective unsettles familiar ideas about responsibility, work, consumption and value, and what this might mean for business ethics, responsible management and management education.

The session will be discussion-led, with plenty of time to question, disagree and think together about what responsible management might look like once the human is no longer the only subject in view.

The session will take place on Monday, November 16 at 16:30-17:30 (Finnish time), 14:30-15:30 (UK time).

Please enroll in advance by Sunday, November 15 through this link EBEN Finland Book Webinar Registration – Täytä lomake

We will send Teams link to all participants.

Link to the book: https://www.routledge.com/Animals-and-Business-An-Interspecies-Approach-to-Responsible-Management/Wadham-Garcia-Rosell-Lever/p/book/9781032955650

Webinar discussants:

Book authors:

Helen Wadham is a Reader in Sustainability and Head of Doctoral College in the Faculty of Business and Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her research examines responsible management and the purpose of business. She has a particular interest in human-animal relations, interspecies work and care, informal organizing and community-led approaches to change. She is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

John Lever is a Reader in Sustainable and Resilient Communities in the Faculty of Business and Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His research focuses on religious food markets and sustainable food systems, a key theme across these strands of work being farm animal welfare and interspecies relations, John is a sociologist by training and fellow of the Norbert Elias Foundation.

Book collaborators:

Nona Borgström is a PhD student at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Equine and Small Animal Medicine at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is especially interested in multispecies and multiprofessional interactions in social and healthcare settings, scent detection training, One Welfare and ethics.

Doris Schneeberger has been a Research Associate at the Institute for Change and Management Development at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria since 2019. Her research focuses on the role of nonhuman animals in organisations, integrating topics from organizational studies, animal ethics, psychoanalysis and the ethics of artificial intelligence.