Call for Papers

This sub-theme explores organizational responses to an increasingly complex geopolitical and regulative environment. The geopolitical conflicts and tensions – for example, between Russia and NATO or US-China relations –, together with anti-globalization trends, and climate and cyber risks are creating evermore challenging environment for businesses and institutional investors to operate in. At the same time companies face intensified pressure in the EU to meet a range of regulatory demands for sustainability. Human rights due diligence regulation is moving from voluntary UN guiding principles on business and human rights to codified laws in countries like Germany and France, and at EU level.
 
Furthermore, in the United States the Securities and Exchange Commission and some States such as California are pushing for ESG demands while many red states such as Florida are pushing back against ESG “woke-ism”. Public regulation of sustainability – whether it concerns climate change or diversity – is being contested in ways that we have not seen before, and the divisions between businesses and governments as well as businesses and politics are changing. Deciphering the changing geopolitical and regulatory demands for sustainable business conduct requires that business and government develop new skills and expertise.
 
We already know a lot about the relationship between public and private regulation. This has been a subject of increasing interest amongst management and organization scholars. Research has explored ways in which governments can enhance corporate responsibility (Steen Knudsen & Moon, 2022; Kourula et al., 2019) and how businesses can influence political decision-making (Katic & Hillman, 2022). Scholarship has also demonstrated the importance of national context (D’Cruz et al, 2024, Järvelä et al., 2024). For example, businesses are embedded in societal rules (Matten & Moon, 2020) and even broader transnational governance takes different national forms (Marques & Eberlein, 2021).
 
Furthermore, research has demonstrated a multitude of ways in which public and private governance interacts (Cashore et al., 2019; Järvelä, 2024), and how sometimes this leads to mutual reinforcement (Schrempf-Stirling & Wettstein, 2022) or dissipations of responsibility (Hamann, 2019). However, we find that the new challenges and tensions, intergovernmental conflicts, the intensified regulatory pressures, and the growing need for addressing climate change and the pushback against this require a rethinking of public and private regulatory solutions and organizational responses.
 
This sub-theme is interested in exploring the organizing perspectives on the new global and local tensions and responses, and new rules and actors, for example, the new technology around sustainability solutions. How does the changing geopolitical and regulatory landscape influence organizations, organizing and the dynamics between organizations? We invite scholars from across different disciplines and multidisciplinary approaches. We are interested in bringing together different theoretical avenues to examine the organizational perspective in facing sustainability governance challenges. We also invite rich contextual understandings in how different kinds of organizations manage extensive pressures and develop solutions.
 
Possible questions include, but are not limited to
 
At macro-level:

• How do different theories related to organizing the business-government interface talk to each other? How do the theories interface with one another? What are some challenges and limitations of these approaches?

• What kind of theoretical lenses are useful to better understand the management of complex sustainability problems in organizations?

• How do different regions and actors respond to the global tensions? Are there differences between Global North and Global South?

 
At meso-level:

• What kind of new technological solutions are available for dealing with the governance of sustainability? What challenges and opportunities do these solutions pose?

• How do businesses navigate the growing human rights due diligence demands in their supply chains? Have different voluntary standards advanced the application of new regulation, and what is the organizational relationship between voluntary and mandator regulation?

• How are organizations managing the growing complexity of different sustainability standards? How do to decide which to apply?

• How do organizations navigate through the contested field of politics? What kind of political influence is needed or used in the era of new geopolitical challenges? Do companies resort to corporate political activity (CPA) or CSR, or is there some new avenue forward that does not fall into either category?

• What are the organizational impacts of the growing regulative pressures?

 
At micro-level:

• How do managers deal with the pressures posed by climate change, wars and disease in their professions?

• Who are new actors in the production and maintenance of the new sustainability regimes in organizations?

• Can local responses be globalized and what kind of tensions do local embeddedness to growing global pressures?

References

• Cashore, B., Steen Knudsen, J., Moon, J., & van der Ven, H. (2021): “Private authority and public policy interactions in global context: Governance spheres for problem solving.” Regulation & Governance, 15 (4), 1166–1182.

• Hamann, R. (2019): “Dynamic de-responsibilization in business–government interactions.” Organization Studies, 40 (8), 1193–1215.
• Katic, I.V., & Hillman, A. (2023): “Corporate Political Activity, Reimagined: Revisiting the Political Marketplace.” Journal of Management, 49 (6), 1911–1938.
• Kourula, A. (2022): “Contesting Social Responsibilities of Business: Experiences in Context.” Human Relations, 75 (1), 203–209.
• Kourula, A., Moon, J., Salles-Djelic, M.L., & Wickert, C. (2019): “New roles of government in the governance of business conduct: Implications for management and organizational research.” Organization Studies, 40 (8), 1101–1123.
• Matten, D., & Moon, J. (2020): “Reflections on the 2018 decade award: The meaning and dynamics of corporate social responsibility.” Academy of Management Review, 45 (1), 7–28.
• Marques, J.C., & Eberlein, B. (2021): “Grounding transnational business governance: A political‐strategic perspective on government responses in the Global South.” Regulation & Governance, 15 (4), 1209–1229.
• Schrempf-Stirling, J., & Wettstein, F. (2023): “The Mutual Reinforcement of Hard and Soft Regulation.” Academy of Management Perspectives, 37 (1), 72–90.
• Steen Knudsen, J., & Moon, J. (2022): “Corporate Social Responsibility and Government: The Role of Discretion for Engagement with Public Policy.” Business Ethics Quarterly, 32 (2), 243–271.
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