Call for Papers

For this sub-theme, we continue the debate we started during our sub-theme at the EGOS Colloquium 2023 and wish to further explore and discuss the emerging field of Responsible Management-as-Practice (RMAP). Located at the intersection of sustainability, responsibility, and ethics, Responsible Management (RM) is concerned with how these three notions are inserted into novel and useful ways of managing and its relations with societal challenges. Therefore, our sub-theme wishes to explore how innovative and creative day-to-day practices in organizations can contribute to tackling the social, economic, and environmental challenges we currently face. As such, it aligns with the overarching theme of the symposium on “creativity that goes a long way”. RMAP might be rooted in different practice theories and ethical perspectives, such as the Ethics of Virtues (Phronesis) and the Ethics of Care (Responsiveness). More than a discourse, RMAP must be able to deal with competing values and interests that emerge in societal and organizational life. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions that address RMAP from various theoretical, methodological, and empirical contexts.
 
Managing responsibly entails the capacity to deal with competing values and interests. From the Ethics of Virtues perspective, it means “ability to see the common good and put it in practice” (Tsoukas & Cummings, 1997: 665). This practical wisdom, also known as phronesis (Aristotle, 1999), requires people to adopt a critical, reflexive and emancipatory position to act responsibly (Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015). A virtue ethics perspective (Alzola et al., 2020) focuses on the development of positive character traits in individuals to create a common good within the organization, thereby contributing to ethical decision-making and the overall ethical environment. From an Ethics of Care perspective (Tronto, 2012, 2015), “Management practices are not only concerned with what managers ‘do,’ but also with the consequences of their “doings,” and thus responsible managing is inscribed within situated practices of responsibility, sustainability, and ethics” (Gherardi, 2020: 6). Both open room to a processual understanding on how we must reconsider the ways we organize ourselves, our organizations, and more broadly our society (Durieux et al., 2023) to address today’s grand challenges (George et al., 2016). To address these, researchers in ethics, sustainability, and responsibility have recently turned their attention towards mundane daily practices (Shin et al., 2022), tools and materiality (McGrath et al., 2021), RM competences (Laasch et al., 2023), the paradoxical tensions it entails (van der Byl et al., 2020), research on social enterprises (Bacq et al., forthcoming), alternative forms of organizing (Peredo, 2023), on sustainable business models (Baldassarre et al., 2020), or phronesis (Bispo, 2022).
 
Turning to practice theories may indeed hold great promise of conceptual and methodological advancement. In this subtheme, we are interested in all research that seeks to explore how novel and creative day-to-day practices in organizations can contribute to tackling grand challenges. As the idea of RMAP invites us to focus on integration of sustainability, responsibility, and ethics in managerial practices (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022), we use it as an umbrella concept to foster hybridization and fruitful debate between all research perspectives that can advance the discussion on RMAP, understood as a focus on the practice of addressing grand challenges.
 
Practice theories have greatly impacted social sciences and have become a well-established field of research in MOS over the past twenty years (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022). They may be defined as a broad family of conceptual tools and methodologies for researching and understanding everyday practices as arrays of human and non-human activity (Gherardi, 2020). Practices are not circumscribed units but rather connections-in-action (Gherardi, 2019). These theories develop the idea that phenomena such as knowledge, meaning, science, power, language, organized activity, and social institutions are rooted in the everyday practices organizational members engage in (Nicolini, 2012). As Nicolini (2012, p. 171) contends, “the nature and identity of objects cannot be apprehended independently of the practice in which they are involved – just as we cannot make sense of our practices without taking into account the materials that enter it. Objects, materials, and technology need thus to be studied ‘in practice’ and with reference to the practices in which they are involved.” As such, this framework thus proposes a processual and dynamic lens that has also been highlighted under the notion of ‘in-use’ (Jarzabkowski & Kaplan, 2015).
 
Therefore, for this sub-theme, we would like to stimulate the debate and explore and discuss RMAP. We build our call on recent contributions such as Gherardi and Laasch’ (2022) posthumanist perspective, Gond and Brès’ (2020) approaches to ‘tools-in-use’ and the paradoxical tensions it creates that offer exciting avenues to study RMAP empirically. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions that address RMAP from a variety of theoretical perspectives and empirical contexts.
 
Submissions may address (but not limited to) the following questions:
 
The design of creative practice:

• What are the effects on the adoption of certain creative practices on organizing for responsibility?

• How is responsible managing accomplished in a situated practice, which creatively assembles humans, nonhumans, tools, technologies, rules, and discourses?

• Which activities are performed within the situated RM practice that we describe, and with which consequences in terms of sustainability, responsibility and ethics?

 
The link between responsible practices and their context:

• How do social, cultural, political, and historical contexts influence which managerial practices are considered as ‘responsible’?

• How can responsible management practices deal with competing interests in a creative way?

• How can we understand and explain RM from a decolonial, intersectional, and critical approach?

• How do Ethics of Virtues and the Ethics of Care help us to look at RM from different lenses?

 
The practice of responsible practices:

• How can responsible management practices help managers to creatively deal with dilemmas of grand challenges?

• How does our understanding of these practices highlight silenced dimensions or forgotten paradoxes?

• How are human bodies, the materiality of managerial instruments and discourses entangled in RM practices?

 
The research of RM-as practice:

• How to observe and study responsible management practices? What are the promising tools and methodology?

• What are the new approaches to study and disseminate responsible practice such as action research, engaged scholarship, decoloniality, feminist approaches, post-human perspective, or critical performativity?

• How can we further theorize the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of RMAP?

References

• Aristotle (1999): Nicomachean Ethics. 2^nd edition, translated by T. Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

• Baldassarre, B., Keskin, D., Diehl, J.C., Bocken, N., & Calabretta, G. (2020): “Implementing sustainable design theory in business practice: A call to action.” Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 273, 10 November 2020, https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-cleaner-production/vol/243/suppl/C.
• de Souza Bispo, M. (2022): “Responsible managing as educational practice.” Organization Management Journal, 19 (4), 155–166.
• Durieux, C., De Ridder, M., Rousseau, A., Ejzyn, A., & Claeyé, F. (2023): “Social Representations of Responsible Management: An Alternative Measure of Sustainability?” In: S. Kacanski, J. Kabderian Dreyer, & K.J. Sund (eds.): Measuring Sustainability and CSR: From Reporting to Decision-Making. Ethical Econony, Vol. 64. Cham: Springer, 61–71.
• George, G., Howard-Grenville, J., Joshi, A., & Thihanyi, L. (2016): “Understanding and Tackling Societal Grand Challenges through Management Research.” Academy of Management Journal, 59 (6), 1880–1895.
• Gherardi, S. (2019): How to Conduct aPpractice-Based Study. Problems and Methods. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
• Gherardi, S. (2020): “A posthumanist epistemology of practice.” In: C. Neesham (ed.): Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Cham: Springer, 1–22.
• Gherardi, S., & Laasch, O. (2022): “Responsible management-as-practice: Mobilizing a posthumanist approach.” Journal of Business Ethics, 181, 269–281.
• Gond, J.-P., & Brès, L. (2020): “Designing the tools of the trade: How corporate social responsibility consultants and their tool-based practices created market shifts.” Organization Studies, 41 (5), 703–726.
• Jarzabkowski, P., & Kaplan, S. (2015): “Strategy tools-in-use: A framework for understanding ‘technologies of rationality’ in practice.” Strategic Management Journal, 36 (4), 537–558.
• Laasch, O., Moosmayer, D.C., & Antonacopoulou, E.P. (2023): “The interdisciplinary responsible management competence framework: An integrative review of ethics, responsibility, and sustainability competences.” Journal of Business Ethics, 187, 733–757.
• McGrath, P., McCarthy, L., Marshall, D., & Rehme, J. (2021): “Tools and technologies of transparency in sustainable global supply chains.” California Management Review, 64 (1), 67–89.
• Nicolini, D. (2012): Practice Theory, Work, and Organization: An Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Peredo, A.M. (2023): “The unsettling potential of Indigenous organizing.” Organization, 30 (6), 1211–1221.
• Shin, H., Cho, C.H., Brivot, M., & Gond, J.-P. (2022): “The Moral Relationality of Professionalism Discourses: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Practitioners in South Korea.” Business & Society, 61 (4), 886–923.
• Tronto, J.C. (2012): “Partiality based on relational responsibilities: Another approach to global ethics.” Ethics and Social Welfare, 6 (3), 303–316.
• Tronto, J.C. (2015): Who Cares? How to Reshape a DemocraticPpolitics. New York: Cornell University Press.
• Tsoukas, H., & Cummings, S. (1997): “Marginalization and recovery: The emergence of Aristotelian themes in organization studies.” Organization Studies, 18 (4), 655–683.
• Van der Byl, C., Slawinski, N., & Hahn, T. (2020): “Responsible management of sustainability tensions: A paradoxical approach to grand challenges.” In: O. Laasch, R. Suddaby, R.E. Freeman, & D. Jamali (eds.): Research Handbook of Responsible Management. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 438–452.
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