As the urgency to curb the emission of greenhouse gases and limit the consumption of natural resources continues to increase, reliance on business-as-usual activities and practices does not represent a viable operational choice for most organizations. In response, organizations develop new products, processes, and management concepts to reduce their use of natural resources including water and energy, thereby enhancing their environmental performance. We refer to these developments as green innovation, also called eco-innovation or sustainable innovation (e.g., Kemp and Oltra 2011). Green innovation has been indicated as a promising route to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of this generation, such as climate change and the uneven distribution or supply of key resources such as freshwater or clean energy (George, Schillebeeckx, and Liak 2015). However, developing, promoting, adopting, and diffusing green innovation within and across organizations at a larger scale is a challenge. Not just from a technological standpoint, as organizations scramble to come up with technologies that increase the efficiency with which natural resources are transformed, but also from a cultural standpoint. This is because green innovation entails changes to how organizing occurs: from collaborations to the relationship with internal and external stakeholders, from finding new ways to establish their legitimacy.

[…for more please view the complete CfP here…]

More recently, a growing body of literature has embraced the idea that culture can offer a valuable toolkit for the pursuit of organizational goals, including green innovations. If culture is a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that govern how individuals and organizations behave in a larger social system (Giorgi, Lockwood, and Glynn 2015; Bertels and Howard-Grenville 2012), cultural elements that can be leveraged to cultivate green innovations could be several, varying from institutional logics and issue fields (e.g., Hoffman and Jennings 2011; Oberg, Lefsrud, and Meyer 2021), institutional infrastructures (Gegenhuber, Schüßler, Reischauer, and Thäter 2022), frames (Ansari, Wijen, and Gray 2013; Lefsrud and Vaara 2019), sensemaking (e.g., Soderstrom and Weber 2019), metaphors and stories (e.g., Biscaro and Comacchio 2017), discourse (e.g., Nadkarni et al. 2022; Lefsrud and Meyer 2012), and collective imaginaries (e.g., Augustine et al. 2019). Hence, from this perspective, culture as a binding humus that can be leveraged to achieve cultivating green innovation, but could also prevent it.
Even though some studies have offered in-depth accounts on how cultural elements can be leveraged to avoid, resist, and refrain from cultivating green innovations or even pretend (e.g., “greenwashing”) to do so (Delmas and Burbano 2011), current theorizing does not allow us to fully explain the role of cultural elements in the cultivation of green innovation. It is precisely because firms are increasingly pressured to bring and advance green innovations (George, Schillebeeckx, and Liak 2015) that new scholarship at the intersection of organization and innovation studies is needed (Ferraro, Etzion, and Gehman 2015; Jennings and Hoffman 2017).

Research Topics:

Our special issue intends to create a forum for studies examining how organizations leverage cultural elements to cultivate green innovations, following the call for an “extension of existing theories, and perhaps the introduction of a new theory that explicitly addresses [the cultivation of] tangible (natural) resources” (George, Schillebeeckx, and Liak 2015, 1602). We equally welcome submissions of papers of different formats – qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods –, as well as papers offering a conceptual contribution. Possible questions of interest include but are not limited to:

Leveraging Culture to Cultivate Green Innovation Across Organisations and in Institutional Fields:

• How do organizations use broader narratives (e.g., circular economy, green transition, sustainable economy) or frames to cultivate green innovation?
• How do they balance institutional complexity to cultivate green innovation?
• How do organizations mobilize support to promote the adoption, diffusion, and institutionalization of green innovation?
• How are cultural elements harnessed by networks supporting green innovation? And which network positions and network structures do favour the cultivation of green innovation?
• What is the relation between the social evaluations (e.g., identification, stigma, legitimacy) of green innovation and their adoption? And how do organizations cultivating green innovation try to manage, influence, or steer such evaluations?
• What is the role of field-configuring events, such as congresses, conferences, or fairs in the cultivation and promotion of green innovation?

Leveraging Culture to Cultivate Green Innovation in Organisations:

• How are tensions and paradoxes emerging from the cultivation of green innovation managed within organizations? And do different types of green innovation (e.g., processes, ideas, products) produce different tensions, requiring specific harnessing of cultural elements?
• How do individuals leverage frames to champion green innovation within the firm?
• How do frames of green innovation change through the innovation process and how are these frames negotiated within the organization? How is green innovation negotiated in meetings?
• How does green innovation obtain legitimacy and consensus within the firm?
• How do (emerging) technologies shape how managers and individuals make sense or give sense to green innovation?
• What are the personal characteristics of managers and employees that successfully champion green innovation? And how do managers and employees use their network to successfully champion green innovation?

Special Issue Editors:

• Georg Reischauer, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.
• Claudio Biscaro, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
• Lianne Lefsrud, University of Alberta, Canada.

View the compete CfP here.
Submission deadline (full papers): 30 September 2022.
Expected date of publication: end of 2023/beginning of 2024.

This Special Issue invites empirical and conceptual papers that examine and theorize the relationship between the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN,
2015) and Human Resource Management (HRM). We welcome perspectives from HRM and
cognate fields such as employment relations and organizational psychology in dealing with
issues around people management, work and employment. There is growing interest in
management literature in exploring how HRM can reframe policies and practices in a more
sustainable way and thus contribute to achieving the UN’s SDG (c.f. Ghauri and Cooke, 2022),
as they contend with the consequences of past organizational actions, most notably global
heating. However, there is considerable variation in how organizations operating in different
parts of the world are confronting these challenges and how HRM can contribute to achieving
SDGs, which remains relatively under-investigated. The special issue seeks to bring together
new work in this area.

[…for more please view the complete CfP here…]

This Special Issue of the GHRM aims to spotlight the growing influence of the SDGs on HRM,
leadership and employment relations topics especially with regard to the challenge of how to
implement change for sustainable development in organisations. We welcome papers that will
challenge current mainstream business and HRM models and expect that new research will
cover and go beyond issues of the SDG-HRM relationship relating to congruence and
diversion, paradox and tensions and the strategic implications for HRM role, leadership and
workplace policies and practices (employment relations). For example, by asking demanding
questions not just about the emerging “Sustainable HRM” debate and the three main (CSR,
Green, Triple-Bottom-line) approaches developed, but which also more critically reflect on the
underlying concepts of Sustainability and Common-Good and the resulting broader role of
HRM in facilitating societal change as suggested, for example, in the new “Common-Good
HRM” model. Finally, we hope to enrich our knowledge of the influence of the SDGs as a
benchmark more generally, by discussing the implications for HRM concerning, for example,
HR role and purpose, strategic decision making, stakeholder engagement, talent
management, workplace participation, employee engagement, and workforce health and wellbeing. The journal’s tradition of theoretical pragmatism allows more space for novel theorizing than is typically associated with endeavours of this nature, and accordingly, we would welcome work that introduces, applies and extends new theoretical advances from other areas of the social sciences, and, indeed, across the broad domain of business and management studies.

Contributions could focus on one or more of the following questions – but are not limited to
these:

• What are the strategic implications of the SDGs for HRM?
• How do the SDGs enable or hinder the ability of HRM to address grand challenges?
• To what extent can HRM policies and practices be redesigned to reduce social inequalities?
• How do the SDGs as a benchmark change the role and purpose of HRM?
• How do HR managers deal with the paradoxical tensions of sustainable change?
• How do employees react to sustainability agendas at the workplace?
• What are the implications for specific HR functions such as employee training, learning and
  knowledge transfer or performance assessment?
• How can the SDGs be balanced with organizational performance goals?
• What is the role of HRM leadership in the implementation of sustainability agendas?
• What role does support from HR managers play in the acceptance of organisational transition and contribution to the SDGs?
• How can the SDGs contribute to issues of workplace democracy and employee agency?
• Are the concepts of Sustainability and the Common-Good still too theoretically vague?
• What impact do investor agendas have on HRM and sustainability?
• Building and applying new theory to better understand the links between HRM and sustainability.

Special Issue Editors:

• Ina Aust, Université Catholique de Louvain LSM, Belgium.
• Fang Lee Cooke, Monash University, Australia.
• Michael Muller-Camen, WU-Vienna, Austria.
• Geoffrey Wood, Western University, Canada.

View the compete CfP here.
Submission deadline (full papers): 30 November 2022.
Expected date of publication: 2023.

We anticipate submissions including (but not limited to) the following topics:

Employee Relations

• Motivating the future digital workforce
• Work-life-balance, work-life separation, and work-life-blending
• Dealing with mental health issues in digitized work
• Dealing with social isolation in digitized work
• Dealing with the digital divide from a temporal and spatial perspective
• Temporary groups (pick-up groups) transforming into long-term team
• Intercultural communication and intercultural challenges

Human Resource Management

• Distant leadership and management of the digitalized workforce
• The implications of AI and algorithmic leadership
• Leadership for cloud-worker, click-worker, crowd-worker, and digital nomads
• Gamification of performance measurements in digital work
• Balancing self-leadership and intrinsic motivation with self-exploitation
• Empowerment and motivation of the employees digitally
• Skill development, learning, and talent identification in the digital environment
• The design of virtual recruiting (e.g., gamified assessment center, virtual onboarding)
• Establishing human automation resource management in the organization

Digital Work

• Digital professions and practices
• Balancing trust and surveillance in digital work and remote work
• Augmentation of the work interface
• Utilization of big data to empowering the digital employees
• Platformization of digital work
• Digitalized professions and work forms
• Virtual and borderless organization
• Foster (open) innovation and intrapreneurship
• Fostering an organizational culture, work climate, commitment, and retention in a virtual organization
• Dissolution of company borders into the borderless organization
• Employee participation, collaboration, workers councils, and unions in a global digital world
• Avoiding the digital Taylorism and tackling the power shift in the new work forms
• Establishing employee-focused strategies and creating a sustainable business model
• Professionalization of a hybrid workplace
• Juridical and regulatory issues concerning remote and digitalized work
• The role of the HR department in this digital world

If you have any further questions do not hesitate to contact the Minitrack Chairs:

• Tobias Scholz | University of Siegen
• Juho Hamari | Tampere University
• Stephanie Orme | Emmanuel College
• Brian McCauley | Jönköping University

View conference website: here.
View the complete CfP here.
Paper Submission Deadline: 15 June 2022.
Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: 17 August 2022.
Deadline Registration: 1 October 2022.