Seminar at the IUC Dubrovnik (April 3-7, 2017) & Special Issue

Seminar Organizers & 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)

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 organizations 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 globalization. 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 skeptical, advocating tougher legal norms or fiscal implications. Finally, lawyers pointed out that (successful) standardizations 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 “privatization of sustainability”.

In this light, this year’s seminar at the IUC Dubrovnik 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
• Organizational 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
Potential contributors to the seminar at the IUC Dubrovnik are encouraged to submit an abstract of 1-2 pages before February 28th, 2017 electronically via online submission system of Management Revue using ‘IUC Dubrovnik’ as article section: http://www.management-revue.org/submission/

All contributors to the seminar are invited to submit their paper for the special issue of Management Revue. Full papers must be submitted by July 31st, 2017. All contributions will be subject to a double-blind review. Papers invited to a ‘revise and resubmit’ are due October 31st, 2017. 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

Special Stream of Management Revue (MREV)
Echoes of an Era – A Century of Organisational Studies

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

Hundred years ago, Henri Fayols “Administration Industrielle et Générale”, a milestone in the history of organizational thought, was published. This centenary motivates the editors of the Management Revue to launch a stream on the history of organiational 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 organizational 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 over and over again – 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 “SI Organisation Studies” as article section.

Looking forward to your contribution!
Wenzel Matiaske