One Welfare: Rethinking well-being in Organization Studies through a multispecies lens

In this Connexions essay, we advance a multispecies research agenda for theorizing well-being within Organization Studies (OS). Research must urgently move beyond the bounded human subject to consider the power-laden, relational, and interconnected multispecies dynamics through which everyday well-being practices, and their absences, are (re)produced within organizational practices. As an interdisciplinary team of scholars from Animal Organization Studies, Anthrozoology, Veterinary medicine, and Social Health Sciences, we expand the traditional anthropocentric scope in OS to include humans’ relationality and mutual vulnerability with the health and well-being of animals and nature. We critique the neglect of these intimately interconnected relationships in dominant OS well-being theorizing and aim to expand the current discourse. Thus, we endorse a multispecies well-being approach of One Welfare from veterinary and animal health sciences, which recognizes the intricate interdependencies between health, welfare, and, ultimately, the well-being of humans, animals, and broader ecosystems. As such, it offers a more holistic framework for addressing community well-being, particularly in contexts that rely on working animals. To demonstrate the state of the art in the OS discourse, we examine publications on well-being in Organization to offer insights on limitations in terms of multispecies inclusivity in the current literature. We argue that focusing on human well-being apart from interconnected well-being of animals and nature creates a theoretical gap to understand the practice-based relational impacts, such as in multispecies work. Our contribution is to highlight these limitations and extend the One Welfare lens that sees human well-being as interlinked to other species into OS.