https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618765553 Organization Studies 1–20 © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0170840618765553 www.egosnet.org/os Climate Change Is Not a Problem: Speculative Realism at the End of Organization Norah Campbell Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Gerard McHugh Trinity College Dublin, Ireland PJ Ennis University College Dublin, Ireland Abstract In this paper, we trace the compounding and escalation of frames to try and encompass the reality of climate change. These frames capture significant aspects, revealing new contours and extreme organizational challenges. However, what if climate change is unframeable? We locate three ontological dimensions of climate change – its unboundedness, incalculability and unthinkability – that make this case. This means that climate change is not a problem that organizations can encompass, divide or draw lines around – some ‘thing’ that can be recuperated into existing institutional, infrastructural and interpersonal frameworks. Instead, it is calling forth forms of organization without any precedent. We argue that the philosophy of speculative realism, specifically the work of Quentin Meillassoux, reveals climate change as a new World for which we do not have categories. We deploy Meillassoux’s concepts which are non-human and rational to think through what climate change is ontologically. Meillassoux’s work is characterized as the reintroduction of the old philosophical idea of the absolute, and we use it as a possible way to overcome the equivocal status of climate change without succumbing to despondency and passivity. Rather than a negative, overwhelming threat, climate change gives us what we call a bleak optimism: the realization that climate change has already happened, and that human civilization must learn how to die in a way that is a creative and just foreclosure of the Earth’s organizational forms. Keywords Anthropocene, climate change, ontology, Quentin Meillassoux, speculative realism, the absolute Corresponding author: Norah Campbell, Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland. Email: norah.campbell@tcd.ie 765553OSS 0 0 10.1177/0170840618765553Organization StudiesCampbell et al. research-article 2018 Article