Business & Society Special Issue Call for Papers
"Stakeholder Engagement:
Opening up Participation, Inclusion, and Democracy"
Guest Editors:
Matthias Wenzel, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany
Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany
Laura Marie Edinger-Schons, University of Mannheim, Germany
Itziar Castelló, Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, UK
Frank de Bakker, IÉSEG School of Management, France
Deadline: January 31, 2022
Read the full Call for Papers here: https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/BAS/CfP_Stakeholder_Engagement-1611936667513.pdf
Stakeholder engagement remains an underrepresented and underdeveloped field in business and society research in particular, and management research more generally. Early in the 21st century, at a time when the corporate social responsibility agenda is being pressured by a devastating pandemic, increasing inequalities, and fake-news discourses, stakeholders such as employees, consumers, business partners, activists, and citizens are increasingly engaged in organizational activities such as strategy-making, product development, work coordination, and corporate social responsibility initiatives. In addition, as prior work has shown, stakeholder engagement offers to produce desired outcomes such as creativity and innovation, efficiency and efficacy, value creation, and a social license to operate. Yet, mainstream management research continues to reproduce a managerialist bias by implicitly foregrounding organizational elites as decision-makers who act in the best interest of all stakeholders, without challenging the limits of this taken-for-granted assumption. In the face of an ever-increasing plethora of tools for engaging stakeholders in organizational processes and the need for engaging especially the powerless voices in business and society, we need a better understanding of how stakeholder engagement is performed and with what consequences.
This Business & Society special issue seeks to shed light on how actors in and around organizations perform stakeholder participation, inclusion, and democracy, and with what consequences. Some sample questions to guide submissions include, but are not limited to:
- What are the mechanisms, practices, tactics, strategies, and forms of organizing through which stakeholder participation, inclusion, and democracy are performed in and around organizations?
- How are different dimensions of stakeholder engagement interrelated?
- How is stakeholder engagement performed over time?
- How do actors cope with or work through the polyphony, tensions, and open-endedness that arise in stakeholder engagement?
- In light of the systematic exclusion of workers from organizational decision-making, which stakeholders get engaged in organizational activities, who does not get engaged, and why?
- Which outcomes, both desirable and problematic, both expected and unexpected, both individual, organizational, and societal, does stakeholder engagement produce? Do these outcomes differ for symbolic vs. substantive forms of stakeholder engagement?
- How do national or regional contexts shape the emergence and outcomes of stakeholder engagement? How can multinational corporations harmonize potential conflicts?
- How does stakeholder engagement differ across different types of firms, such as small and medium-sized enterprises vs. multinational corporations or social ventures versus for-profit corporations? Why is this so?
- Which individual, organizational, or societal factors and conditions enable, constrain, or disable effective stakeholder engagement?
- How does stakeholder engagement relate to current topics such as social intrapreneurship, corporate social innovation, collective impact, participatory governance, new forms of organizing, and open strategy?
The special issue welcomes submissions that unpack the enablers, dynamics, and outcomes of stakeholder engagement in its manifold manifestations and dimensions on any or even across multiple levels of analysis. Given the rather limited attempts to integrate stakeholder participation, inclusion, and democracy, we particularly encourage submissions that examine these concepts in concert. This fascinating area of research invites not only conceptual, but also empirical work in all of its facets, including qualitative, quantitative, configurational, and experimental research designs, among others.
The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2022.
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Matthias Wenzel
Professor
Leuphana University of Lüneburg
Lüneburg
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