Guest Editors:
Nicholas Burton, Northumbria University
Kevin Tennent, University of York
There is continued and increasing academic interest in responsible business - and how this interacts and informs management and organization strategy and practice (eg, Porter and Kramer, 2011). Recent scholarship and practice has put the UN Sustainable Development Goals and other corporate responsibility initiatives, such as B-corporation accreditation, centre stage in driving forward the agenda (eg. Voegtlin & Scherer, 2017; Moroz, et al., 2018).
At the same time, scholarship in management history has examined the origins and directions of corporate responsibility (eg, Hoffman, 2007; Marens, 2008; Singleton, 2018) and the literature on ‘social movements’, the forerunners of contemporary concerns, is especially rich and diverse. For example, see work on cooperatives (eg, Wilson, Webster and Vorberg-Rugh, 2013), credit unions (Ward and McKillop, 2005), mutuality (Batiz-Lazo and Billings, 2012), social entrepreneurship (eg, Murphy, et al., 2018), and religiously-grounded movements such as the Quakers (Prior and Kirby, 2006, Robertson, Korczynski and Pickering, 2007), to name a few. Though this wide range of work focuses largely on historical events and chronologies, what contemporary scholars of socially responsible management can learn from this rich and varied history has received much less attention. This special issue seeks to redress this balance.
This special issue represents the beginning of a deeper conversation about the contours of the relationship between responsible business, business ethics, and management history. Thus, we invite contributions from a broad range of management and organization disciplines on the following topics, but not limited to:
Time Scale:
Papers first presented: January 2019Pre-submission review: October 2019
Submission: January 2020
Final Revisions: January 2021