Special issue call for papers from Social Responsibility Journal
Eighth years has passed since the issue of not the “standard” but just the “guidance” called ISO 26000. As a national standardizer, I served in the mirror technical committee reviewing the draft to its final stage and witnessed different reactions in different levels of company, national and international level towards its appearance. Although welcoming by many but there were a lot of hindrance and resistance to its publication as well. However my personal belief is that it never turned out to be a strong standard governing the global markets to solve some of the ever increasing sustainability issues that our world is struggling with.
Many of the concepts of social responsibility have been overly dealt with especially the social ones. So many PhD thesis have been written providing a statistical analysis on a gathered data set and in this situation it seems that many principal issues are hidden. As an instance a tobacco company claims to be socially responsible by providing social benefits maybe to hide the deadly outcomes of their existence. Or palm oil companies do the same claiming that their function creates a lot of jobs which contributes to the local economy; again another example of negligence towards sustainability of the world.
A globalized world needs understanding about the effects of wasting material through poor quality in a far corner of the world on the other parts, the butterfly effect. What social responsibility as a facet of world sustainability needs is creation of models by scientists to demonstrate what is best for the world economy, or by engineers to improve efficiency which will leads to higher economic income for the sake of the firms and more importantly to a better environment for the sake of the society as a whole.
Although there has been much debate about social responsibility and its relationship to sustainability – in this journal and widely elsewhere – what is missing from the discourse is a full contribution from scientists and engineers towards social responsibility. Consequently I have been encouraged to edit this special issue of the journal in order to redress this imbalance. The aim is to accept innovative papers on different aspects of social responsibility which consider related technological and scientific issues. Therefore the focus of this call for papers is towards engineers and scientists working on different aspects such as environment, energy, water, quality management and so on. A list of suggested topics is:
• Air pollution strategies and techniques to be performed by companies or countries to deal with particles like lead, mercury, NOX ,…
• Efficient operations in utilization of resources
• Organisation’s incentives to adapt or mitigate climate change
• Production risk management with a focus on consumers health and safety
• Production health and safety management for labour
• Waste management strategies
• Water crisis and water management and discharges to water, ….
• Energy efficiency incentives
• Renewables technology and innovations including solar, wind, …
• Medical research integrity and risk management
• Waste management
• Dealing with any other kinds of pollution including noise, electromagnetic emissions, hazardous diffusions and infections, light and radiation…
Final submission deadline for this issue is 30 September 2018. It is anticipated that this special issue will be published during 2019 and submissions are encouraged on any related issue. Anyone wishing to discuss a contribution is invited to discuss this with the Guest Editor of this issue:
Shahla Seifi, University of Derby, UK
[email protected]