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Studies of corporate citizenship have considered how corporations shape the delivery of basic rights. While liberal commentators argue that corporations can act as protectors of citizenship rights where state regulation is lacking, more radical commentators claim that corporations seek to obstruct the rights of citizens. In this article we build on theories of hegemony to argue that corporate citizenship can be more fruitfully understood as an attempt to incorporate citizenship activities in order to benefit corporate agendas. To explore how this process plays out, we examine how companies have sought to influence the political debate over climate change in Australia. Through analysis of corporate documents, media coverage and interviews with senior managers, we identify how corporations use practices of campaigning and exemplifying to build a common identity with citizens and synchronize corporate and citizen interests. This involves the recasting of citizens as active constituents, responsible consumers, ethical employees and ecopreneurs. Through this process, citizenship becomes increasingly incorporated within the value creating activities of corporations.

Considering the worsening climate crisis, we argue that our present conditions require a particular approach to the past in order to disrupt current intellectual trajectories. We enrol Walter Benjamin's concept of history, via the writings of Svetlana Alexievich and Margaret Atwood, with the aim of bringing a criticality to the present to make us reconsider the ways we think about and act in our present world. Based on Alexievich and Atwood's work, we develop research conceptualizations of forgotten and alternative histories to open up a space to consider a future climate-changed world beyond the dominant tropes of inevitable dystopian apocalypse and clever technological adaptation. We offer the concept of 'hope without optimism' in encouraging management and organization studies scholars to develop a discipline fit for the Anthropocene.

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet's life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations.

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet's life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations.