Guest Editors:
Simon Fietze, University of Southern Denmark
Wenzel Matiaske, Helmut-Schmidt-University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg (Germany)
Roland Menges, Technical University Clausthal (Germany)

Special Issue

Trust is the currency that creates markets. This is knowledge of the merchants at the latest since modern markets have emerged along the medieval trade routes. Quality and reliability in the business are also building blocks of trust and the assumption of responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of entrepreneurial activity. Whether the latter should be integrated into social and legal relations and norms in the form of voluntary corporate responsibility, has been the subject of economic discussion since the beginnings of the discipline and since the separation of the spheres of economic and moral action in the Scottish moral economy.

Over the past decades, both supra-national organisations such as the UN and the EU have been focusing on soft law – from the global compact through the AA1000 to the Green Paper of the EU Commission – as well as the national states, to promote social and environmental responsibility for companies in the age of globalisation. These initiatives have led to lively activities and debates both in the business world and in different scientific disciplines. For companies, it has now become a “fashion” to campaign social and ecological responsibility using the concept of “Corporate Social Responsibility”. This commitment has meanwhile led to the fact that CSR activities should partly contribute to value creation instead of aligning them with corporate objectives and values. Such a development leads to the loss of trust and the assumption of responsibility becomes a “fake”.

Against this backdrop, some of the social and economic observers remained sceptical, advocating tougher legal norms or fiscal implications. Finally, lawyers pointed out that (successful) standardisations often develop not only from the “top” but also from the “bottom”, i.e. they emerge from the action routines of the economic actors as emergent effects. However, not only the recent scandals – from the ENRON case to the VW case – raise questions about the effectiveness of co-operative self-commitment as well as external control.

Moreover, corporate responsibility is related to the concept of consumer responsibility. Whereas market-optimists believe that reliable changes in consumption patterns rely on responsible individual action, more market-skeptics warn of a counterproductive “privatisation of sustainability”.

In this light, this special issue will be on theoretical and empirical contributions to the topic “Corporate responsibility: In the dilemma between trust and fake?” from economic, sociological, (economic) historical and legal perspectives. Possible topics are:

• Economic and history of ideas cases and questions of corporate responsibility
• The “pseudo” corporate responsibility
• Organisational and sociological theories and findings on corporate responsibility
• Theory and empiricism of the audit
• Theoretical and empirical studies on consumer responsibility
• Criminal law considerations for corporate actors
• Institutional factors of corporate responsibility
• The trust of social entrepreneurship

This is not an exhaustive list.

Deadline
Full paper for this special issue of management revue must be submitted by September 30th, 2017. All contributions will be subject to a double-blind review. Papers invited to a ‘revise and resubmit’ are due January 31st, 2018. Please submit your papers electronically via the online submission system using ‘SI Corporate Responsibility’ as article section.

Hoping to hear from you!
Simon Fietze
Wenzel Matiaske
Roland Menges

Managing Editor:
Wenzel Matiaske, Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg (Germany)

Hundred years ago, Henri Fayols “Administration Industrielle et Générale”, a milestone in the history of organisational thought, was published. This centenary motivates the editors of the management revue to launch a stream on the history of organisational studies. In the forthcoming volumes, and rather on an infrequent basis, we would like to publish contributions which not only introduce the reader to one or several, interrelated seminal works of organisational theory but also provide accompanying commentaries and an analysis of their history of effects.

The reason for this format is, given our discipline’s forgetfulness of history, to provide orientation, which not only serves teaching and young management scholars. While reference to classic thought contributes to scientific advancement in other fields of the social sciences, in our field some research issues are being addressed repeatedly – without putting the associated arguments and findings in an adequate historical context. In this respect, addressing the history of thought should be understood as a contribution to the advancement of management research.

We would like to avoid a strict delimitation of the era being addressed. Contributions on contemporaries of Fayol like Frederik Winston Taylor, Frank B. and Lillian Gilbreth or Henry L. Gantt und Karol Adamiecki are as welcome as contributions are on Fayol’s predecessors or successors. By no means we are exclusively committed to the “engineers of the organisation”; economists, legal scholars and particularly the labour science community and psychologists should also be given due attention. A temporal upper boundary shall nevertheless be the 1970s, when, most notably induced by Alfred D. Chandler, strategic management and the reflection on it started to thrive.

This stream will be open to submissions until the end of 2017 in the first place. It will be maintained and edited by Wenzel Matiaske (Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, Germany). Submissions shall accord with the formatting guidelines of the management revue. Please submit your manuscripts electronically via our online submission system using “Stream Echoes of an Era” as article section.

Looking forward to your contribution!
Wenzel Matiaske

Guest Editors:
Paola Vola, University of Eastern Piedmont, Novara, Italy
Sylvia Rohlfer, CUNEF, Madrid, Spain
Lucrezia Songini, University of Eastern Piedmont, Novara, Italy

The competitive landscape of the twenty-first century is dynamic, highlighting the need for organizations to be entrepreneurial. Thus, a scientific dialogue on entrepreneurial orientation and spirit in family businesses and SMEs has emerged as a relevant topic. However, the capacity to conjugate entrepreneurial spirit of family businesses and smaller enterprises with the managerialization of the organizational structure and mechanisms as well as the professionalization of people involved in the company is critical for the long-term survival and development of those firms.

Research on managerialization of SMEs and family firms points out that they are characterized by a lower adoption of managerial mechanism, as a consequence of the strong linkages between the owners/managers and the enterprise; and/or the lack of managerial knowledge at the ownership, governance and management levels. It is commonly underlined that the management in these firms is characterized by some degree of informality and that individual and social control systems are more suited to these enterprises, due to common shared values and languages, informal relationships etc. (Marlow, Taylor and Thompson, 2010; Saundry, Jones and Wimberley, 2014; Rohlfer, Munoz and Slocum, 2016).

However, some authors stated that formal mechanisms could help family owned businesses to cope with the interests and problems of both the company and the family, and their specific agency costs (Rue and Ibrahim, 1996; Schulze et al., 2003; Songini, Gnan et Malmi, 2013; Della Torre and Solari, 2013). Literature on family firms recognizes the importance of managerialization and professionalization in smoothing succession’s process.

This special issue of Management Revue and the corresponding Track 03_09 – Entrepreneurship and Managerialization in SMEs and family firms, under SIG 03 – Entrepreneurship, at EURAM 2017, provides an opportunity to take stock of developments on these issues, particularly on the adoption of management mechanisms and the professionalization of SMEs and family firms and their balance with entrepreneurial spirit.

We are looking for contributions that explore the ability of successful SMEs and family business to maintain fresh entrepreneurial spirit while consolidating management and control mechanisms, and introducing professional managers, but also for contributions that analyze the consequences of losing momentum in that balance.

Thus, we invite papers that make an important theoretical and/or empirical contribution to our understanding of such issues; international and comparative papers are particularly welcome. Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• How and why SMEs and family firms restructure and reorganize the management of the firm in the light of managerialization and professionalization?
• How can SMEs and family firms balance entrepreneurial spirit and managerialization/ professionalization? How do they maintain this balance along time and during generations?
• What is the role of family members and non-family members in balancing entrepreneurial spirit and managerialization/ professionalization?
• What is the role of women (family and non-family members) in such a balance?
• What is the role of managerial mechanisms and professional managers in SMEs and family firms’ development and growth?
• What are the implications of managerialization and professionalization on key employee relations characteristics, such as pay and conditions, employee voice and labor management relations?
• How and why owner/managers ́ approaches to managerialization and professionalization vary in relation to issues such as firm, sector, national contexts and employee characteristics, among others?
• What are the implications for owner-managers and other stakeholders, including employees?
• Which theories can best help us explain and understand managerialization and professionalization in SMEs and family firms, and the relation with entrepreneurship?

This is not an exhaustive list.

Management Revue is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary European journal publishing both qualitative and quantitative work, as well as purely theoretical papers that advances the study of management, organization, and industrial relations. Management Revue publishes articles that contribute to theory from a number of disciplines, including business and public administration, organizational behavior, economics, sociology, and psychology. Reviews of books relevant to management and organization studies are a regular feature (http://www.management-revue.org/).

European Academy of Management
The European Academy of Management (EURAM) is a learned society founded in 2001. It aims at advancing the academic discipline of management in Europe. With members from 49 countries in Europe and beyond, EURAM has a high degree of diversity and provides its members with opportunities to enrich debates over a variety of research management themes and traditions (http://euramonline.org/programme2017/tracks/sig-03-entrepreneurship-ent.html).

Potential authors
Authors are encouraged to submit research manuscripts that are likely to make a significant contribution to the literature on entrepreneurship and managerialization and professionalization in SMEs and family firms for a double-blind review process. Contributors to the Track 03_09 “Entrepreneurship and Managerialization in SMEs and family firms” at EURAM 2017 Conference are encouraged to discuss their sub- mission prior or during the conference. Even if conference participants will benefit from a fast review process, submissions are not solely restricted to conference participants.

Deadlines
Full papers for this special issue of Management Revue must be with the editors by 31 July 2017. All submissions will be subject to a double-blind review process. Papers invited for a “revise and resubmit” are due on the 30 November 2017. Final decision will be made by May 2018. The special issue will be published in late 2018.

Submission and guidelines
Please submit your papers electronically via the online submission system at http://www.management-revue.org/submission/ using SI “Managerialization” as article section.

The guest editors welcome informal enquiries by email:
Paola Vola
Sylvia Rohlfer
Lucrezia Songini

Literature

Aldrich, H. & Cliff, J. (2003). The pervasive effects of family on entrepreneurship: toward a family embeddedness perspective, Journal of Business Venturing, 18(5), 573-596.

Bettinelli, C., Fayolle, A. & Randerson, K. (2014). Family entrepreneurship: a developing field. Found. Trends Entrep., 10(3), 161–236.

Brannon, D. L., Wiklund, J. & Haynie, J. M. (2013). The varying effects of family relationships in entrepreneurial teams. Entrep. Theory Practice, 37(1), 107–132.

Chenall, R. (2003). Management control system design within its organizational context: findings from contingency-based research and directions for the future, Accounting Organizations and Society, 28 (2-3), 127-168.

Corbetta, G., Marchisio, G. & Salvato C. (2005). Fostering Entrepreneurship in Established Family Firms – Crossroads of Entrepreneurship, Springer.

Della Torre, E. & Solari, L. (2013). High-performance work systems and the change management process in medium-sized firms. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 24(13), 2583-2607.

Durán-Encalada, J. A., San Martín-Reyna, J. M. & Montiel-Campos, H. (2012). A Research Proposal to Examine Entrepreneurship in Family Business. Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation, 8(3), 58-77.

Fayolle, A. (2016). Family entrepreneurship: what we need to know. In K. Randerson, C. Bettinelli, G. Dossena, & A. Fayolle (eds.), Family Entrepreneurship: Rethinking the Research Agenda (pp. 304–306). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Hoy, F. & Sharma, P. (2010). Entrepreneurial Family Firms. New York, NY: Prentice Hall.

Jennings, J. E. & McDougald, M. S. (2007). Work–family interface experiences and coping strategies: implications for entrepreneurship research and practice. Academy of Management Review, 32(3), 747-760.

Malmi, T., & Brown, D. A. (2008). Management control system as package – Opportunities, challenges and research directions. Management Accounting Research, 19(4), 287-300.

Marlow, S. Taylor, S & Thompson, A. (2010). Informality and formality in medium-sized companies: contestation and synchronization. British Journal of Management, 20(4): 954-966.

Randerson, K., Bettinelli, C., Fayolle, A. & Anderson, A. (2015). Family entrepreneurship as a field of research: exploring its contours and contents. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 6(3), 143–154.

Randerson, K., Dossena, G. & Fayolle, A. (2016). The futures of family business: family entrepreneurship. Futures, 75, 36–43.

Rohlfer, S., Muñoz Salvador, C. and Slocum, A. (2016). People management in micro and small organizations – a comparative analysis. FUNCAS: Estudios de la Fundación. Series Análisis, no. 79.

Sharma, P. (2016). Preface. In K. Randerson, C. Bettinelli, G. Dossena, & A. Fayolle (eds.), Family Entrepreneurship: Rethinking the Research Agenda (p. xiv). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Songini L. (2006). The professionalization of family firm: theory and practice. In Poutziouris P., Smyrnios K. & Klein S. (eds.), Handbook of Research in Family Business (pp. 269-297). UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Songini, L. & Gnan, L. (2009). Glass ceiling and professionalization in family SMEs, Journal of Enterprising Culture, 17(4), 1-29.

Songini, L., Gnan, L., & Malmi, T. (2013). The role and impact of accounting in family business, Journal of Family Business Strategy, 4, 71-83.

Songini, L. & Gnan, L. (2014). The glass ceiling in SMEs and its impact on firm managerialization: A comparison between family and non-family SMEs, International Jounal of Business Governance and Ethics, 9(2): 287-312.

Songini, L. & Vola, P. (2014). The role of Managerialization and Professionalization in Family Busines Succession: Evidences from Italian Enterprises, in L. Gnan, H. Lundberg, L. Songini & M. Pelllegrini (eds.) Advancing European Entrepreneurship Research (169-196), IAP, Information Age Publishing Inc.

Songini, L. & Vola, P.(2015) The Role of Professionalization and Managerialization in Family Business Succession. Management Control, 2015/1, 9-43

Songini, L. & Gnan, L. (2015). Family Involvement and Agency Cost Control Mechanisms in Family Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, Journal of Small Business Management, 53(3), 748–779.

Guest Editors:
Sascha Ruhle, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (Germany)
Stefan Süß, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (Germany)

Special Issue

Flexibility has been an ongoing issue for various fields of research and practice and a considerable amount of literature dealing with the concept of flexibility has developed. This diversity has led to various perspectives on dimensions and aspects of flexibility. However, two major fields of flexibility can be distinguished. The organizational perspective understands workplace flexibility as the degree of adaptability of an organization in an uncertain and changing environment (Dastmalchian & Blyton 2001). In addition, workplace flexibility can encompass the individual perspective of the workforce, especially the degree of flexibility regarding aspects of where, when, and how work is performed (Hill et al. 2008). Within both streams of research, various aspects of flexibility have been addressed, such as organizational structures (Feldman & Pentland 2003), type of employment (Lepak et al. 2003; Sayah & Süß 2013), management and strategic human resource management (Wright & Snell 1998), time and location of work (Allen et al. 2013), demands towards employees (Vahle-Hinz et al. 2013) and work (Ruiner et al. 2013), leadership (Barrow 1976), and the role of Communication Technologies (Diaz et al. 2012).

Regarding the consequences of flexibility, literature often assumes positive results for both iindividualand organization, when flexibility increases. For example, evidence has been found that flexibility at work is positively related to self-reported health (Butler et al. 2009). Furthermore, it can increase organizational attractiveness (Nadler et al. 2010; Thompson et al. 2015), profit (Kesavan et al. 2014) and firm performance (Martínez Sánchez et al. 2007). However, there is also a missing consensus and ongoing discussion regarding possible consequences of flexibility. Research has identified potential downsides of flexibility, such as blurred work-life boundaries (Pedersen and Lewis 2012), the risk of stigmatization (Cech & Blair-Loy 2014), unsupportive work climate and inequitable implementation (Putnam et al. 2014). Other relationships, for example between flexibility and work-family conflict (Allen et al. 2013; Shockley & Allen 2007), remain unclear. Further, if the flexibility is only an organizational facade (Eaton 2003; Nystrom & Starbuck 1984) which is communicated but not lived in the organization, even more, negative consequences such as violations of psychological contracts might occur, especially when flexibility is used as a facade to justify the transformation of standard work arrangements to non-standard work arrangements.

Subsequently, a lot of questions remain unanswered:

• What is the core of flexibility in organizations?
• Which origins can be identified of the ongoing need for various types of flexibility?
• What types of flexibility can be systematized and how are those different types related to organizational consequences, such as success or attractiveness?
• How useful are flexible work arrangements and how can positive consequences be promoted and negative consequences be avoided, or at least weakened?
• Which consequences result from a gap between offered and truly supported types of flexibility, e.g. the role of organizational facades?
• How does embeddedness of Information and Communications Technologies in work practices enable and assist workplace flexibility?
• What are the consequences of the ongoing flexibilization of work on the economic and social level?

Potential authors

The aim of this special issue is to increase our understanding of the above-mentioned aspects of workplace flexibility, especially from an organizational perspective. We encourage empirical – qualitative or quantitative – submissions from various research fields, such as business administration, industrial and organizational psychology, work sociology and other disciplines dealing with the topic of the Special Issue.

Deadline

Full papers for this special issue of management revue must be submitted by 31 December 2017. All contributions will be subject to double-blind review. Papers invited to a ‘revise and resubmit’ are due 31 May 2018. Please submit your papers electronically via the online submission system at http://www.mrev.nomos.de/ guidelines/submit-manuscript/ using ‘SI Workplace Flexibility’ as article section.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscript length should not exceed 8,000 words (excluding references) and the norm should be 30 pages in double-spaced type with margins of about 3 cm (1 inch) on each side of the page. Further, please follow the guidelines on the website http://www.mrev.nomos.de/guidelines/ and submit the papers electronically by sending a ‘blind’ copy of your manuscript (delete all author identification from this primary document).

We look forward to receiving your contribution!

Sascha Ruhle
Stefan Süß