Sub-theme 46: Reassembling Management Ethics and CSR
Call for Papers
Developing on the success of EGOS 2011 sub-theme 'Critical Perspectives on Management
Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility', this sub-theme aims at bringing together again people who share an interest in
critical approaches to management ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). The core idea of this sub-theme is not
to have more standard, positivist, and affirmative debates but to construct management ethics and CSR critically. The sub-theme
is meant to highlight a fundamental weakness of conventional approaches to CSR that has been its fixation with win-win situations
and search for empirical evidence. After more than 40 years of research, the links between management ethics and corporate
social responsibility (CSR) remain ambiguous and questionable. Typically sharing similar mainstream concerns for profitability
and even sometimes similar critical concerns for social betterment and environmental responsibility, management ethics and
CSR research have developed along similar lines of thought, as illustrated by the references they share, but they have not
really engaged with one another. We thus aim at encouraging scholars to reconsider the philosophical, theoretical and methodological
aspects of the engagement between CSR and management ethics. Such engagement should lead to a critical reassembling of dominant
paradigms of CSR and ethics. Management ethics and CSR tend to maintain and reinforce managerial hegemonies, a subservience
to corporate interests and markets. The core idea of a stream on 'Reassembling Management Ethics and CSR' is to challenge
this hegemony and construct the relationship between management ethics and CSR critically.
Yet, a critique of
dominant paradigms is by itself not sufficient. After critically disassembling management ethics and CSR, there is a need
to reimagine and reassemble our conceptions of CSR and management ethics directed towards emancipation and positive social
change. This involves the creation of novel and critical insights into the role management ethics and CSR play within the
framework of managerialism and profitability. The sub-theme focuses on the function management ethics and CSR have in maintaining
and enhancing asymmetrical power relations at organizational level. We welcome theoretical and empirical submissions inspired
by a diverse range of methodologies, from any multi- and inter-disciplinary perspectives.
Submissions should address (but are not limited to) the following or related questions:
- How do the practice of management ethics and CSR relate to each other: for example, do they support each other, contradict one another, neutralize each other, or protect themselves from one another?
- How have management ethics and CSR been used, misused, and abused to support the prevailing managerial paradigm (e.g. through an objectification, instrumentalization and operationalization of morale and ethics)?
- How do management ethics and CSR serve as reinforcing discourses that maintain and underpin asymmetrical power relations at organizational level?
- How have management ethics and CSR become communicative tools to determine realities for stakeholders?
- How do management ethics and CSR contribute towards maintaining and reinforcing asymmetrical, exploitative, imperialistic and/or neo-colonial power relations between corporations and their stakeholders from developing countries?
- How do management ethics and CSR articulate individual and corporate responsibilities?
- Are there any alternative engagements of ethics and organizational practices particularly worth being emphasized from a critical point of view?
- How can management ethics and CSR be applied as an emancipatory tool to overcome organisational asymmetries enshrined in managerialism?
Participants are encouraged to contact the convenors to discuss possible contributions.