The course was held in May 2024, in Helsinki (Finland) and online
Course description:
Global society is facing great challenges as we have entered the Anthropocene epoch in which human activity fundamentally and detrimentally affects the Earth’s ecosystem. Many of us live under socio-economic assumptions that endless economic growth, endless population growth, and endless technological development are inherently good and desirable things. Evidence, however, strongly suggests that policies and doctrines from past centuries are no longer viable in the current circumstances. We need to re-think our core assumptions.
As a contrasting approach, we propose sufficiency: the idea that there exists sufficient (e.g., optimal) scales of production and consumption, or levels of social complexity, or technological infrastructure, or demographics, such that these levels ought not be exceeded. In lay terms, sufficiency relates to the concept of ‘enoughness’—of identifying acceptable and sustainable processes, or ranges, or limits, of various socio-political-economic metrics.
Up to now, such concepts have been largely ignored, both by academia and society at large. But in the new epoch characterized by ecological limits, sufficiency will inevitably become a topic of vital importance. The field of Organization and Management Studies (OMT) has much to contribute to this matter, both in terms of theory and practice, with an end-goal of achieving strongly sustainable societies.
In this doctoral course, we take a wide approach to the question of how future researchers in various disciplines might contribute to constructing “sufficiency solutions” to contemporary challenges.
Teachers: The course is organized by LUT Business School in cooperation with the University of Helsinki, Department of Economics and Management, and University of Michigan, along with faculty from several regional universities:
- Dr Pasi Heikkurinen, LUT University (co-lead)
- Dr David Skrbina, University of Helsinki (co-lead)
- Prof Thomas Princen, University of Michigan (co-lead)
- Prof Martin Fougere, Hanken School of Economics
- Dr Maria Sandberg, Hanken School of Economics
- Prof Karin Bradley, KTH The Royal Institute of Technology
- Dr Andreas Roos, Lund University
- Dr Jenny Rinkinen, LUT University
- Prof Marius Korsnes, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
- Dr Iana Nesterova, Roskilde University
- Dr Jarkko Pyysiäinen, University of Helsinki
- Dr Åsa Callmer, Örebro University