Special Issue Editors:
Rachel Cohen, City University of London, UK
Stephan Kaiser, Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany
Elisabeth Naima Mikkelsen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Anne Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Stefan Süß, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany

Submission deadline (full papers): 15 December 2020
Expected date of publication: February 2022

This Special Issue invites empirical and conceptual papers that examine and theorize the phenomenon of remote work from different perspectives.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic more people than ever are working from home. For many this change has been sudden and far from ideal as some lack technical equipment, find their social interactions digitalized and many have to care for children or older relatives. Some tasks are only partially suitable or are unable to be performed from home which highlights both the possibilities and limits to the spatial reorganization and domestication of work. This real-life experiment has motivated an upsurge in research from colleagues in organizational studies, labor, HR and allied fields. Research on remote work is well established, but it is likely that new findings will emerge that extend our knowledge, both as a product of expanded attention over Covid-19 and because the phenomenon is worldwide in scope. We expect that new research will span individual psychological issues, sociological relationships, leadership challenges, the organization of work and practices of HR management:

First, we know that working from home impacts the individual and the effect varies between individuals. Remote work can help to mitigate work–life conflict by allowing flexible integration of work and private domains (Allen et al., 2013). However, employees react differently depending on their integration or segmentation preferences (Kreiner, 2006). Second, research underlines the role of the individual’s virtual competence as it affects his/her well-being (Wang and Haggerty, 2011), since working from home is often associated with the demanding use of modern communication and information technology (Allen et al., 2015; Schmoll, 2019). Third, multiple studies have highlighted gender-differences in workers’ capacity to draw work-life boundaries and, especially, that men are better able to separate themselves from family life while working at home (Felstead and Jewson 2000). Studies also find that mothers may seek home-based work, especially self-employment, to manage domestic work (Ekinsmyth 2013).

News reports suggest that during the current lockdown of schools and nurseries women find themselves carrying a burden of work, care and even teaching. This is likely to reinforce or exacerbate gender-inequalities and produce stresses and strains at home. Finally, current experience highlights important class differences, reflected in the different spaces available for work (e.g. the availability, or not, of ‘spare rooms’, garages or home-offices) (Felstead and Jewson 2000; Phizacklea and Wolkowitz 1995).

Remote work is also a big challenge for leaders required to manage interaction in teams. Virtual leadership changes the demands on managers and employees, interaction via digital media changes collaboration. Phenomena such as the professional isolation of employees are well known (Cooper and Kurland, 2002; Golden et al., 2008), and managers must address this. Remote work has been found to be more successful if supervisor support is available and the corporate culture supports working from home (Allen et al., 2015; Hoch and Kozlowski, 2014; Lautsch et al., 2009). Additionally, remote management increasingly relies on new modes of surveillance, including electronic surveillance. Where surveillance extends across domestic electronic devices (e.g., tablets, phones, trackers) it poses questions about the potential control of employers over workers’ wider lives. At the same time, management at a distance can spark worker resistance and galvanize those seeking to organize collective resistance (including Trade Unions).

If it is to spread, companies need to organize their remote work to meet the challenges posed by activities that are not all equally suitable to perform from home given not every employee has a suitable work space. HR will have to adopt new practices for employees who work from home (Illegems and Verbeke, 2004) including changes to working time arrangements (Blagoev et al., 2018), ergonomic design of workplaces, new concepts for training and learning, but also performance evaluation and the design of career paths.

This Special Issue of the GHRM aims to shine a light on remote work as it is today. We hope to enrich our knowledge of the phenomenon of working from home more generally, by drawing together different perspectives on the individual such as psychological impacts, sociological influences, leadership, the organization of work and the demands of human resources management.

Contributions could focus on one or more of the following questions:

• How does working from home influence individual well-being, work-life conflict, commitment, and stress?
• How does working from home produce new inequalities or reproduce or exacerbate existing social inequalities – for instance those of gender, disability, ethnicity or class?
• How can greater equality be produced in working from home?
• Where do workers choose to develop boundaries between work and home and how is this consistent between new (Covid-19) home-workers and previous analyses?
• How do employees deal with the phenomenon of professional isolation?
• Which employees show resilience to the negative effects of working at home?
• What role do an affinity for technology and technical skills play?
• How does the leadership of virtual teams working from home and the coordination of work function?
• How do teams find new ways to interact under forced digitalisation?
• To what extent are managers attempting to, or successful in, institutionalising new mechanisms and spaces of surveillance?
• What are the learning effects from managers’ and teams’ engagement in interactive practices?
• What role does support from superiors or corporate culture play in the feasibility of remote work?
• What impact does working from home have on established HR practices? How can performance be assessed, what working time arrangements are necessary, how are employees and careers developed?
• What new possibilities for individual resistance are identified amongst remote workers?
• How does the organization of collective resistance operate among remote workers?
• What consequences does remote work have for the productivity of workers and teams?
• Are there ways to design work and workplaces so that they are suitable for remote work?
• How are new online routines emerging and how do informal and formal social interactions develop within these routines?
• What is the role of contextual factors that are particularly evident in the Covid-19 pandemic, such as increased caring responsibilities or social isolation?
• What differences do current studies of the Covid-19 as an extreme situation show in comparison to previous studies?
• How do managers and their teams make sense of Covid-19 as an extreme situation and how does their sense-making impact on their work-related involvement?

Submission
To be considered for publication in the Special Issue, full manuscripts (max. 10,000 words) must be submitted by 15 December 2020. The manuscripts should be written in English and submitted through https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ghrm. The submission guidelines are available through http://journals.sagepub.com/home/gjh.

Call for Papers

Guest Editors:

Simon Fietze, University of Southern Denmark
Sylvia Rohlfer, Colegio Universitario de Estudios Financieros (CUNEF), Spain
Wenzel Matiaske, Helmut-Schmidt-University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg, Germany

Special Issue

Over the past four decades, scholars from employment relations, human resource management, organisational behaviour and labour economics have published a vast body of literature concerning employee voice (Wilkinson & Fay, 2011). Employee voice is thereby understood as the opportunity to participate in organisational decision-making and to have a say to influence the own work and the interests of managers and owners (Barry &Wilkinson, 2016) or – in the case of employee silence – to withhold these views and concerns (Morrison & Milliken, 2003). Employee voice and silence have been linked to organisational performance and the development of competitive advantage (Barry & Wilkinson, 2016) and are a key ingredient for the positive relationship between strategic human resource management and organisational performance (Wood & Wall, 2007) which also implies a link between employee voice and innovation. Employees with the opportunity to communicate individual ideas to management and to participate in decision-making give them the possibility to express ‘creative ideas and new perspectives, increasing the likelihood of innovation’ (Grant, 2013, p. 1703; Zhou & George, 2001).

Recently, scholars are paying more attention to current topics and relate them to employee voice. One stream of research is addressing the advancing technologies and consider the digital revolution and its impact on employee voice. There is no doubt that digital technology is fundamentality changing the way we do business (Mennie, 2015) and in consequence forms, tools and channels ‘voice’. The few studies on employee voice and digitalisation are mainly dealing with social media at work and its opportunities for management to get in dialogue with employees. Holland, Cooper, and Hecker (2019), for instance, discuss conceptual issues and opportunities social media provides in the development of employee voice. In a similar vein, Barnes, Balnave, Thornthwaite, and Manning (2019) show how a union’s use of social media might facilitate greater member participation and engagement. However, more empirical evidence and conceptual considerations are needed to better understand and explain digitalisation and employee voice (or: ‘e-voice’).

Therefore, the aim of the special issue of management revue – Socio-Economic Studies is to focus on digitalisation at work and its challenges and opportunities for employee engagement, voice and silence in cross-disciplinary discussions. We welcome empirical studies as well as theoretical papers. Some context to discuss are listed below:

• To what extent do technologies impact employee voice and silence?
• To what extent do employees make use of technology to ‘raise their voice’?
• What role do trade unions play when it comes to electronic (e.g., social media) employee voice?
• What is the impact of electronic (e.g., social media) voice on traditional mechanisms of employee voice?
• What is the effectiveness of electronic (e.g., social media) voice? How does it compare to the outcomes of traditional mechanisms?
• Why do electronic (e.g., social media) employee voice systems fail?
• What is the ‘dark side’ of electronic (e.g., social media) employee voice/silence?

These are just some ideas and not an exhaustive list.

Deadline

Full papers for this special issue of management revue – Socio-Economic Studies must be submitted by 31 October 2020. All contributions will be subject to double-blind review. Papers invited to a ‘revise and resubmit’ are due 31 March 2021. The publication is scheduled for issue 1/2022. Please submit your papers electronically via the online submission system at http://www.mrev.nomos.de/ using ‘SI Employee Voice’ as article section.

Manuscript length should not exceed 10,000 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 journal’s website (http://www.mrev.nomos.de/guidelines/).

Healthcare was a domain at ease with the cascade or techno-push model of innovation, with a special attention on experimentation structured by legal test protocols. The management of innovation in healthcare has attracted renewed attention with the reference to AI, “big data”, biotechs, medtechs and with the reference to user-centric innovation (as most often illustrated with medtechs and biotechs). Research in healthcare is as complex and risky as ever, but time frames for the development of innovation have adapted to the new realities of AI and biotechs, and the scope of experimentation to new stakeholders. Disruptive innovation in healthcare is a crucial driver for the evolution for this industry over the last years.

Top-down and user-centric innovation management are not in opposition; they complement each other in different areas of healthcare research, and at different stages of innovation processes. Both processes coexist for the management of innovation today and have to invent how to complement each other. The twin reference to deeptechs and to digitalization has also reshaped how to process research and generate innovation in healthcare: new stakeholders now jump into the domain without prior vicinity with the its specificities as regards safety, legal issues or mandatory experimentation and validation protocols (as illustrated in medtechs, where lots of innovators directly come from computer sciences and other domains in physics).However, the stakeholders contributing to these processes do not follow the same rationales, and do not always understand each other. These aspects now require new and adapted practices in the management of innovation. This evolution develops also in an external environment framed by the rapid aging of world population, the difficult access to medical care for some social groups due to increasing budget constraints by national Governments, and the urgency incurred by specific diseases (e.g. the COVID pandemic).

This special issue focuses on new practices for the management of innovation in all subareas of healthcare. The special issues covers the development of user-centric innovation and of experimentation to healthcare, with a special focus on its complementarities with traditional cascade top-down (techno-push) innovation. User-centric innovation in healthcare makes it also possible to test new business models with the appropriate stakeholders. The healthcare domain is original because it provides field research to analyze the dynamics in the Triple or Quadruple Helix (State, research, industry, actual people) and the interactions between them in local ecosystems. It provides also a relevant domain to question the status of „user“ in user-centric innovation.

The aim of this special issue

To collect high-quality papers addressing and contributing to the debate about the main criticalities of the innovation management in healthcare systems and organizations.  Drawing from the research directions presented earlier in this section, this call for papers seeks empirical and conceptual contributions that critically analyse the current state of top-down and user-centric innovation management in the healthcare sector. We welcome contributions about the articulation between these two approaches, and about the renewal of innovation management practices incurred by current technological disruptions, by the presence of more diverse stakeholders, and by the arrival of new innovation actors without any prior vicinity with healthcare (as medtechs most often illustrate it).  Other topics may cover the main macro-, meso, and micro-level conditions (e.g., institutions and regulations, and pricing and reimbursement, adaptation of existing business models, introduction of innovative business models, supply-chain management) of innovation management in healthcare.

We also welcome papers exploring new methods to conduct research and analyse data in light of new innovations and technological disruption in the healthcare industry.

Authors are invited to submit theoretical and empirical papers that would contribute to fulfilling the aims of the special issue.

Publication Schedule

• Manuscript submission: 31 December 2020
• Reviewer reports: 30 March 2021
• Final paper submission: 30 July 2021
• Anticipated publication date of the special issue electronic from October 2021
• Anticipated publication date of the special issue print March 2022
• All submissions must be done through ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ejim

Guest Editors

Francesco Schiavone, University of Naples Parthenope, Department of Management and Quantitative Studies, Italy, francesco.schiavone@uniparthenope.it
David W. Versailles, Paris School of Business, newPIC Chair, France, dwv@newpic.fr Valerie Merindol, Paris School of Business, newPIC Chair, France, vm@newpic.fr
Uta Wilkens, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) – Institute of Work Science (IAW) – Chair for Work, Human Resources and Leadership, uta.wilkens@rub.de

Call for Papers