Working papers

Lafaille, J. and Vernay, A.L., 2025. “Opening the hood: a critical assessment of European renewable hydrogen trucking policies” (under review at Climate Policy)
Lafaille, J. and Murray, J., 2025. “Organizing in an energy-constrained world: adding energetics to the toolbox” (under review at Organization)
Lafaille, J., 2025. “No baby in that bathwater: the energy transition as a path to ecocide”
Faure, C., Lafaille, J., Trendel, O., 2026. “Reducing air pollution in Grenoble: an analysis of sufficiency vs. techno-solutionism attitudes” (target journal: Ecological Economics)

Organization studies literature on ecological crises and future organizing is plentiful but energy-related concepts often seem under-conceptualized with, for instance, the desirability of a transition to renewable energy technologies – including within a degrowth paradigm – generally unquestioned. Since serendipity made me both versed in both technical, energy-related matters and some critical social theories, I set out to clarify the terms of ongoing debates around ecological crises, human organizations, and energy. The research program I propose plan to harness recent theoretical advances in energetics to deepen our understanding of human organizations and future organizing, in particular as we are entering a period of global energy scarcity (i.e. forced degrowth). While this outlook is increasingly prevalent among critical organization scholars, to my knowledge there is no research theorizing future human organizations in a hothouse, energy-deprived future. In fact, little is known about how modern human organizations, including states and firms, behave under energy stress. Exploring such organizational futures implies interdisciplinary collaborations, notably with socio-physical scenario modelling, political sciences and anthropology scholars, and a combination of quantitative and qualitative research.