Published on: December 3, 2025 at 3:10 pm
Long before sustainability, environmental, social, and governance (ESG), corporate social responsibility (CSR), and organizational purpose became buzzwords in the business world, Indigenous peoples were embodying similar values that take all stakeholders into consideration, according to Academy of Management Scholar Stephen Cummings of Victoria University of Wellington. He predicts that lessons from those groups will have a major impact on sustainable business management in 2026.
The third-annual Indigenous Academy of Management and Organizational Studies (IARIMOS) took place at the University of Melbourne’s Dilin Duwa Centre for Indigenous Leadership in Australia in October 2025. In 2026, the week before the Academy of Management’s Annual Meeting in Philadelphia July 31-Aug. 4, the fourth edition of IARIMOS will be at Ivey Business School at Western University in Canada. The first two conferences were hosted by the University of Ottawa’s Telfer Business School.
“The formation and growth of this conference, and associated rise in Indigenous scholars and their non-Indigenous allies researching Indigenous approaches to management and leadership, is reflective of a growing movement of people looking for alternative approaches to business and organization,” Cummings said.
“More people are questioning what the purpose of business is, why and how should we practice it, and who are we doing it for?” he said.
2026 will see the publication of Indigenous Management: Knowledges and Frameworks, a book that brings together contributions from researchers who have presented at, or are associated with, IARIMOS. The book is a curated collection of essays and research articles on how Indigenous approaches could make our lives collectively better. It brings together nearly 80 contributions from more than 100 authors from all over the world.
Some common threads weave through the book’s many pieces, according to Cummings:
• Reflections on alternative forms of governance that seek to engage a range of community and environmental stakeholders.
• Exploration of goals beyond short-term financial measures.
• Alternative timescales against which success should be measured.
• Old and new views on the relationships that organizations’ leaders and managers should be building to improve the well-being of communities, the environment, and generations to come.
• Ceremonies or rituals that acknowledge connections to places of origin and shared responsibilities.
“With a world that seems to have been fracturing and becoming more focused on individualism and disparity in recent years, we are predicting that long marginalized, disregarded, and overlooked Indigenous approaches will continue to be rediscovered and drawn upon as existential beacons of hope in 2026 and beyond,” Cummings said.
