Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Interest in wealth creation in the broadest sense, beyond mere financial value, is (re)emerging, as many communities confront not only challenging economic prospects, but also associated lack or loss of essential amenities, social infrastructure, and (rural) depopulation. Scholars from various disciplines, including organizational studies and entrepreneurship, sociology, geography, and public administration, have recognized the importance of understanding organizational approaches and processes to create positive change at the community or regional level. They have revealed the considerable potential of community-based, democratic organizations, such as community enterprises (Hertel et al., 2019; Mitzinneck et al., 2024; Peredo & Chrisman, 2006), collective social enterprises (Mitzinneck & Besharov, 2019; Montgomery et al., 2012; Ometto et al., 2019), cooperatives and credit unions (Bauwens et al., 2020; Schneiberg et al., 2008), community (land) trusts (Haugh, 2022; Wang & Spicer, 2024), and community development finance institutions (Dubb, 2016; Kneiding & Tracey, 2009), to tackle persistent challenges and create multifaceted benefits.

Yet, even these organizations cannot create wealth alone. Effectively improving the well-being and vitality of different types of communities in an increasingly complex world requires interdependent stakeholder coalitions (Daskalaki et al., 2015; Hertel et al., 2026; Powell et al., 2018). To account for this breadth and collaborative nature, the concept of civic wealth creation (CWC) has been proposed. Civic wealth refers to a community’s economic, social, and communal assets and endowments (Lumpkin & Bacq, 2019). It is a broad indicator of the intellectual, affective, and material resources, capacities, and capabilities in geographic communities at various scales, ranging from neighborhoods (Kleinhans, 2017), to municipalities (Hertel et al., 2019), to regions (Haugh, 2022). It may also be used in other types of communities like virtual (Logue & Grimes, 2022), identity (Dentoni et al., 2018), or fate-based (Farny et al., 2019) communities. The term civic suggests more than just community; it implies “for the people, by the people.” It has inspired a vibrant and growing research community leveraging the framework in the fields of management, entrepreneurship, and beyond (e.g., Aureli et al., 2023; Chalmers, 2021; Dowin Kennedy, 2021; Franklin & Slawinski, 2026; Lumpkin et al., 2023).

CWC is a new way of thinking about what occurs when diverse stakeholders—communities (e.g., local leaders or community residents), enterprises (e.g., corporates or entrepreneurs), and regimes of support (e.g., funders, governmental agencies, or universities)—collaborate, negotiate, and coalesce around actions to improve their well-being and vitality through cooperation, kinship, and commerce. Stakeholder coalitions that are inclusive and collaborative are consistently able to generate more impactful and lasting solutions than solo actors offering top-down approaches to society’s challenges (e.g., Bryson et al., 2017). As a result, “[b]y encouraging diverse stakeholders to coalesce around community-building initiatives and empowering citizens to engage locally and personally in ensuring their well-being” (Lumpkin et al., 2023, p. 10), CWC has proven to be a potent creative strategy for catalyzing change.

Because CWC is broadly construed and encompasses cooperation between multiple actor categories with heterogeneous interests, logics, and assets, it lends itself to analyses transcending traditional organizational boundaries and inherently invites multidisciplinary perspectives. For instance, sociology can contribute analytical leverage on the role of societal developments in shaping the opportunity spaces for democratic organizing (e.g., Chen & Chen, 2021; Schneiberg et al., 2008), geography helps assess the influence of place-based conditions (e.g., Johnstone & Lionais, 2004; Mitzinneck et al., 2024), public administration reveals collaboration needs and governance challenges across sector boundaries (e.g., Kleinhans, 2017), political economy contributes insights on social dilemmas and self-organized rule making (Hertel et al., 2026), while entrepreneurship research adds insight into organizational processes such as resource mobilization for CWC (e.g., Hertel et al., 2021).

However, much research on community-based, democratic organizations and broad impact creation has remained within disciplinary silos. In this sub-theme, we are interested in breaking these molds and want to foster cross-pollination between disciplines. The concept of CWC and the emergent research stream it has sparked provide a fruitful substrate for more multidisciplinary dialogue. CWC raises many questions that invite bridging insights between disciplines, borrowing theoretical concepts from across disciplinary boundaries to enrich investigation, and will benefit from multidisciplinary collaboration. We therefore welcome both (1) work that explicitly integrates or bridges multiple disciplinary perspectives, and (2) work grounded in a single discipline that nonetheless seeks to connect with, contribute to, or benefit from exchanges with other disciplinary traditions. The following are examples of topics for submission that this sub-theme might explore:

CWC initiators and governance:

• Which of the three key actors—community, entrepreneur, regimes of support—are best positioned to start or orchestrate different types of CWC initiatives? Under which conditions?

• How is leadership within a CWC initiative organized and redistributed over time, and what interdisciplinary insights (e.g., shared leadership, community governance, political capacity) explain transitions between community, entrepreneur, and support-regime actors?

• How do communities raise support for their cause and attract the attention of and buy-in from entrepreneurs and/or regimes of support? What theories from (the sociology of) social movements, (economic) geography, political science and economy, and organization studies help explain this process?

• How can for-profit firms be meaningfully involved in CWC beyond instrumental business-case logics, and how do different moral, cultural, and economic frames influence their engagement and its effects?

• What factors influence supporters’ decisions to participate in, invest, ignore, or leave the CWC process? What (communal) systems or institutional knowledge is needed or assumed?

• How can the inclusivity of CWC and fair distribution of wealth be governed, recognizing power differences between the key actor categories and the heterogeneity of communities? What theories can help us explain relevant negotiations and processes?
   

CWC approaches:

• How do CWC stakeholders allocate resources toward long-term commitments?

• How do CWC stakeholder collaborations build on but also extend scholarship on CSPs (cross-sector partnerships), and what complementary best practices from, for example, public administration, collective action theory, and innovation studies can be integrated into CWC approaches?

• What types of intermediary work and intermediary organizations enable CWC?

• What binds CWC actors together and how do those bonds affect CWC processes?

• What is the role of institutional infrastructure in enabling and supporting CWC processes?

• How do community or entrepreneurial ecosystems foster or deter the development of CWC?

• What is the relationship between CWC and the State? How does this vary across local settings and to what effect?
   

CWC indicators and assessment:

• What are the different manifestations of civic wealth as an outcome, and how can insights from sociology, geography, economics, political science, and public health help delineate its dimensions?

• How does civic wealth manifest in place-based versus other types of communities?

• What are the most effective ways to evaluate and measure manifestations of civic wealth, and how does effective assessment of CWC differ between community types?

• What indicators do the different key actors—community, entrepreneur, regimes of support—use to assess CWC, track and direct their contributions to joint CWC efforts, and how do divergent disciplinary perspectives shape metrics and expectations, and vice versa?

• How does measuring civic wealth enrich our understanding of impact measurement?

• How can indicators of CWC be used to learn from past experimentation to improve CWC outcomes?
   

We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that adopt diverse disciplinary lenses, including studies that draw on organizational theory, organizational behavior, strategy, entrepreneurship, sociology, public administration, nonprofit management, urban planning, economics, political science, and more. We are interested in research that uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches, and encourage the submission of papers that use new (participatory) methods and novel data from diverse contexts.
 

• Aureli, S., Del Baldo, M., Demartini, P., & Piber, M. (Eds.). (2023). Cultural heritage as a trigger for civic wealth creation and sustainable urban development. Roma Tre press. https://hdl.handle.net/11585/972791
• Bauwens, T., Huybrechts, B., & Dufays, F. (2020). Understanding the diverse scaling strategies of social enterprises as hybrid organizations: The case of renewable energy cooperatives. Organization & Environment, 33(2), 195–219.
• Bryson, J., Sancino, A., Benington, J., & Sørensen, E. (2017). Towards a multi-actor theory of public value co-creation. Public Management Review, 19(5), 640–654.
• Chalmers, D. (2021). Social entrepreneurship’s solutionism problem. Journal of Management Studies, 58(5), 1363–1370.
• Chen, K. K., & Chen, V. T. (Eds.). (2021). Organizational imaginaries: Tempering capitalism and tending to communities through cooperatives and collectivist democracy (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 72). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X202172
• Daskalaki, M., Hjorth, D., & Mair, J. (2015). Are entrepreneurship, communities, and social transformation related? Journal of Management Inquiry, 24(4), 419–423.
• Dentoni, D., Pascucci, S., Poldner, K., & Gartner, W. B. (2018). Learning “who we are” by doing: Processes of co-constructing prosocial identities in community-based enterprises. Journal of Business Venturing, 33(5), 603–622.
• Dowin Kennedy, E. (2021). Creating community: the process of entrepreneurial community building for civic wealth creation. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 33(9–10), 816–836. https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2021.1964612
• Dubb, S. (2016). Community wealth building forms: What they are and how to use them at the local level. Academy of Management Perspectives, 30(2), 141–152. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2015.0074
• Farny, S., Kibler, E., & Down, S. (2019). Collective emotions in institutional creation work. Academy of Management Journal, 62, 765–799.
• Franklin, R., & Slawinski, N. (2026). Activating civic wealth creation in devitalized communities: The role of sense of place. Journal of Business Venturing, 41(4), 106603.
• Haugh, H. (2022). Changing places: The generative effects of community embeddedness in place. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 34(7–8), 542–566.
• Hertel, C., Bacq, S., & Belz, F. M. (2019). It takes a village to sustain a village: A social identity perspective on successful community-based enterprise creation. Academy of Management Discoveries, 5(4), 438–464.
• Hertel, C., Binder, J., & Fauchart, E. (2021). Getting more from many—A framework of community resourcefulness in new venture creation. Journal of Business Venturing, 36(3), Article 106094.
• Hertel, C., Vedula, S., Bacq, S., & Rocchino, R. (2026). From collective dilemmas to collective solutions: An integrative framework and research agenda for collective action and sustainability research. Academy of Management Annals. Advance online publication.
• Johnstone, H., & Lionais, D. (2004). Depleted communities and community business entrepreneurship: Revaluing space through place. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 16(3), 217–233.
• Kleinhans, R. (2017). False promises of co-production in neighbourhood regeneration: The case of Dutch community enterprises. Public Management Review, 19(10), 1500–1518.
• Kneiding, C., & Tracey, P. (2009). Towards a performance measurement framework for community development finance institutions in the UK. Journal of Business Ethics, 86(3), 327–345.
• Logue, D., & Grimes, M. (2022). Platforms for the people: Enabling civic crowdfunding through the cultivation of institutional infrastructure. Strategic Management Journal, 43(3), 663–693.
• Lumpkin, G. T., & Bacq, S. (2019). Civic wealth creation: A new view of stakeholder engagement and societal impact. Academy of Management Perspectives, 33, 383–404.
• Lumpkin, G. T., Meléndez, E., & Bacq, S. (2023). Civic wealth creation: Bypassing monopolies through collective action. Academy of Management Perspectives. Advance online publication.
• Mitzinneck, B. C., & Besharov, M. L. (2019). Managing value tensions in collective social entrepreneurship: The role of temporal, structural, and collaborative compromise. Journal of Business Ethics, 159(2), 381–400.
• Mitzinneck, B. C., Coenen, J., Noseleit, F., & Rupietta, C. (2024). Impact creation approaches of community-based enterprises: A configurational analysis of enabling conditions. Journal of Business Venturing, 39(6), Article 106420.
• Montgomery, A. W., Dacin, P. A., & Dacin, M. T. (2012). Collective social entrepreneurship: Collaboratively shaping social good. Journal of Business Ethics, 111(3), 375–388.
• Ometto, M. P., Gegenhuber, T., Winter, J., & Greenwood, R. (2019). From balancing missions to mission drift: The role of the institutional context, spaces, and compartmentalization in the scaling of social enterprises. Business & Society, 58(5), 1003–1046.
• Peredo, A. M., & Chrisman, J. J. (2006). Toward a theory of community-based enterprise. Academy of Management Review, 31(2), 309–328.
• Powell, E. E., Hamann, R., Bitzer, V., & Baker, T. (2018). Bringing the elephant into the room? Enacting conflict in collective prosocial organizing. Journal of Business Venturing, 33(5), 623–642.
• Schneiberg, M., King, M., & Smith, T. (2008). Social movements and organizational form: Cooperative alternatives to corporations in the American insurance, dairy, and grain industries. American Sociological Review, 73(4), 635–667.
• Wang, R., & Spicer, J. (2024). “All roads lead to Rome?” Performance evaluation across different types of community land trusts based on a large-scale survey. Journal of Urban Affairs, 1–22.