Symposium 01. European retailers strategies on sustainable development
Organisers:
Lavorata Laure (University East of Paris – Institute of Research in Management) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Vernier Marie-France (Esdes Lyon) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Session chair:
Colla Enrico (Novancia Business School Paris) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Panelists:
Colla Enrico (Novancia School Paris)
Domanski Tomacz (International and Political Studies Faculty, University of Lodz)
Lavorata Laure (University East of Paris – Institute of Research in Management)
Ruiz Molina Maria Eugenia (Department of Marketing and Market Research, University of Valencia)
Sparks Leigh (University of Stirling)
Zentes Joachim (Institut für Handel & Internationales Marketing Universität des Saarlandes)
Description:
Defined by the Brundtland (1987) report as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, sustainable development has increasingly figured in company policies and is today regarded as an important business goal by many stakeholders (Sheth et al., 2011). This topic concerns also retailers: as active intermediaries between producers and manufacturers, and customers, they can be in a singularly powerful position to drive sustainability (Jones & al., 2007).
Retailers have been implementing various practices that take account of sustainable development, : elimination of plastic bags at checkouts, reduction of CO2 emissions, internal codes of good conduct (e.g.in relation to child labour), improvement of employment practices (male/female wage parity, hiring of handicapped workers, etc.), and so forth. In the UK, Tesco uses wood products from certified sources and Sainsbury’s tries to combating obesity. In France, Monoprix encourages people to change their consumption patterns by purchasing products for their quality-of-life characteristics, including sustainable development in their design. Until now, researchers analysed only sustainable development from the firms’ point of view but there are still relatively few academic studies that focus on sustainable development in the field of retailing. As said Susan Hackerman: "Retailing with a difference. Retailing with a conscience. Retailing is not about maximizing profits” (quoted by Morrison and Humlen, 2013).
Confronting the views of researchers from different countries (Poland, UK, Spain, Germany and France), this symposium aims to analyse and compare sustainable development strategies in European field of retailing, focusing particularly on store brand strategies During this times of crisis and uncertainty, retailers can choose to focus more on economic topics than sustainable problems. Thus, the panellists will compare different European retailer's strategies in order to analyse the place of sustainable development and its role in economic performance.
Keywords:
Sustainability; Retailers; Strategies; Europe; Store brands.
Symposium 02. Behavioural Strategy
Organiser:
Torsten Wulf (Phillips-University Marburg) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Session chair:
Philip Meissner (Philipps-University Marburg) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Panelists:
Tomi Laamanen (University of St. Gallen)
Gerard Hodgkinson (University of Warwick)
George Wright (University of Strathclyde)
Henry Brighton (Max Planck Institute)
Daniella Laureiro-Martínez (ETH Zurich)
Description:
Behavioural Strategy has developed into an important new sub domain of strategic management research. By combining psychological research with the strategy domain, Behavioural Strategy aims at grounding strategic management on more realistic assumptions regarding human judgment and interaction. This includes topics like cognitive biases and their impact on the strategic decision-making process, the role of heuristics as well as how emotions and team interactions affect decision quality and the overall strategy of the organization.
This symposium will discuss the status quo of this emerging field as well as important avenues for future research based on keynote presentations and a panel discussion featuring some of the most distinguished researchers in the field.
Keywords:
Behavioural Strategy; Decision Making Process; Cognition; Heuristic; Neuro.
Symposium 03. Philosophy of management perspectives on uncertainty as a great opportunity for corporate "performance"
Session chair and organiser:
Jacob Dahl Rendtorff (Roskilde University) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Panelists:
Rendtorff Jacob Dahl (Roskilde University) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Jardat Remi (ISTEC - École supérieure de commerce et de marketing) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Pesqueux Yvon (CNAM) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Guillet de Monthoux Pierre (Copenhagen Business School) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Pezet Eric (Université de Paris-x) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Larsen Øjvind (Copenhagen Business School) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Grisseri Paul (Middelsex University) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
De RoZario Pascale (CNAM) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Description:
This workshop will deal with the tension between uncertainty and opportunity from the point of view of philosophy of management. Uncertainty can be very dangerous in unstable technological systems and lead to crisis and destruction. Therefore, dealing with uncertainty may be the key to opportunity moving beyond destruction and collapse. Focusing on the tension between uncertain and opportunity in the perspective of philosophy of management, we will discuss the possible contribution to better performance of philosophy of management with a focus on the following:
- Attention to the unforeseen. At the organizational level, this means that we have to be able to go beyond pre-given cognitive and moral interpretations of situations so that it is possible to make decisions in relation to the unforeseen.
- Establish critical organizational identity. We can say that we need institutions with ethical integrity and stability.
- Towards a decentralized view on corporate social responsibility. Instead of seeing the corporation or organization as being in the centre of the concern as affecting or being affected by stakeholders, we should see the organization as one among many stakeholders in complex systems.
- Extending the scope of CSR including environmental responsibility. We need indeed to be aware of the critical function of sustainability for the aim and goal of organizations. Awareness of responsibility of the organization to its natural environment is essential for avoiding damage on to the environment.
- Risk management becomes the central figure for sustainability. The organization should try to define and account for potential risks in relation to its activities. Risk management becomes the central figure for sustainability.
- Tackling uncertainties of organizational action. We need to go beyond calculation and look at our responsibilities from a complexity perspective, and we need to go beyond the pre-established logic of quantitative and qualitative methods for analysis and try other methods for understanding and decision-making.
- Go beyond binary logic to look into deep causality structures of events. Nevertheless, there are areas also the critical problems of the violent self-conservation and reproduction of the dialectical system that need to be taken into account when dealing with complexity.
- In complex systems, we should be aware of interconnectedness and low-probability but high-impact extremes events.
- Precaution and improved risk-mitigation. – Management should be critical to the information of predictions and be aware that risk is unavoidable in complex systems.
Keywords:
Uncertainty; Hermeneutics; Philosophy of Management; Complexity.
Symposium 04. Aesthetics, process and objects
Organisers:
Béjean, Mathias (IRG – Université Paris Est) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Bazin, Yoann (ISTEC) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Riot, Elen (Université de Champagne Ardennes) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Session chair:
Béjean, Mathias (IRG – Université Paris Est) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Panelists:
Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre (Copenhagen Business School)
Hjorth, Daniel (Copenhagen Business School)
De Vaujany, François-Xavier (DRM – Université Dauphine Paris)
Description:
Why does aesthetics raise so much attention in contemporary management and organisation studies? Of course, the fact that symbolic and aesthetic values have come to be fundamentals of our “experience economy” (Pine and Gilmore 1998, Postrel 2003) seems to be an acceptable answer. Still, such an answer should not overlook how aesthetics, as a conceptual domain, can also contribute to a more fundamental understanding of nowadays organizations (Ramirez, 1996; Riot & Bazin, 2013; Strati, 1992; Taylor & Hansen, 2005).
Originally concerned by reintroducing subjective and sensory experience in organizational life, researches in organizational aesthetics have then opened new ways in which to conceptualize the dynamic relation between form and matter in organizations (Guillet de Monthoux 2004), the role of aesthetic knowledge and objects in organizational practices (Barry & Meisiek, 2010; Strati and Gherardi 2012), or, more recently, the processes of “formativeness”, a concept which “comes from aesthetic philosophy and [which] denotes the process by which phenomena (for instance an object or a work of art) acquire form within working practices” (Gherardi & Perrotta, 2013, p.1.).
Nevertheless, while such focus on form, matter, processes and practices, echoes other research works on processes, objects and artefacts (P. R. Carlile et al., 2010; Paul R. Carlile, Nicolini, Langley, & Tsoukas, 2013; Ewenstein & Whyte, 2009). It seems that the relationships between these various traditions need to be investigated further. For instance, as recently noted by Riot and Bazin (2013), “as today, there has been little exploration of the various relationships between work, art and socio-materiality depending on the frame of experience within a given society, organization, group or sub-group” (p. 202). “
To gain insight into this viewpoint, this symposium wants to bring scholars together in order to engage in questions related to aesthetic, forms, processes, objects, and artefacts. Could these notions be articulated despite different traditions? Is this an impossible task? Are new notions necessary?
Keywords:
Aesthetics; Forms; Processes; Objects; Artefacts.
Symposium 05. Scholarship with Impact
Organisers:
Ciaran Heavey (University College Dublin) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Brian Fox (University of Connecticut) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Session chair:
Zeki Simsek (University of Connecticut)This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Panelists:
TBD
Description:
The concept of scholarly impact is becoming an omnipresent fixture of academic life. While management scholarship has long been guided by the axiom of ‘publish or perish,' authors, reviewers, and especially editors, alongside administrators, promotion and tenure committees, and funding agencies are increasingly becoming fixated with scholarly impact.
While there are several approaches to assessing scholarly impact – such as journal lists (ABS, FT45) and peer evaluation/review, social-economic analyses - the impact factor has emerged as a standard impact measure of choice for many individuals, schools, and journals across the globe. While originally intended to assess the scholarly standing of journals (and initially articles), the impact factor is nowadays everywhere as the need to demonstrate impact has become an obsession of global magnitude.
On the one hand, individual researchers are pressed to publish in high impact journals while publishers support and advertise journals with high impact factors, as well as editors attributing impact factors to editorial policies and actions. On the other hand, schools create systems and incentives for targeting high impact factor journals for attaining “bragging rights” (Singh et al. 2007), in order to improve national rankings such as these of Financial Times and Business Week.
Academic departments are focusing not only on the number of articles published by faculty, yet it matters where those articles are published (Seglen, 1997, McWilliams et al., 2005). Administrators, faculty colleagues, and committee members equally rely on impact factors for decisions about tenure and promotion (McWilliams et al., 2005). Impact factors are used for rewarding researchers with funding and appointments to chaired positions (Seglen, 1997; Monastersky, 2005). Moreover, funding agencies use impact factors to assess research topics and disciplines, including for annual merit increases of researchers.
Our symposium aims at developing a more integrative and comprehensive conversation about the nature, content, and context of scholarly impact at multiple levels of analysis including authors, journal, and individual researchers.
Keywords:
Scholarly impact; Author impact; Article impact; Journal impact; Impact evaluation; Impact metrics.
Symposium 06. Business Diplomacy
Organisers:
Huub J.M. Ruël (Windesheim University of Applied Sciences - The Netherlands) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Mikeal Soendergaard (Aarhus University) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Raquel Meneses (University of Porto) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Session chair:
Huub J.M. Ruël (Windesheim University of Applied Sciences - The Netherlands) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Panelists:
Gilberto Sarfati [Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV). The Business Administration School of São Paulo (Brazil) (EAESP)]
Hans Kristian Hedetoft [FGV-EAESP São Paulo & HEC Paris (Brazil & France)]
Mikael Sondergaard [Aarhus University (Denmark)]
Vikrant Shirodkar [School of Business, Management and Economics; University of Sussex (UK)]
Eshani Beddewela [University of Huddersfield (UK)]
Rui Monteiro [University of Porto (Portugal)]
Raquel Meneses [University of Porto (Portugal)]
Huub Ruël [Windesheim University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands)]
Description:
Doing business internationally means facing a complex international business environment; global companies, large, medium, or small, need to manage and ‘survive’ in a rapidly changing political and economic business environment that requires them to interact with multiple stakeholders such as host governments and NGOs. To operate successfully among all these complexities, international business will need to develop business diplomacy competences and knowhow more than before.
Yet not many international companies recognize the importance of business diplomacy. Instead of training their managers in business diplomacy, most multinational corporations (MNCs) hire political diplomats and rely on their experience in managing complex relationships with host governments. MNCs need to anticipate stakeholder conflicts, communicate with non-business pressure and interest associations, influence host-government decision-making, and maintain constructive relations with external constituencies. Therefore, they cannot rely on advisors only, but should develop their own business diplomacy competences.
It is argued that by engaging in business diplomacy, corporations can increase their power and legitimacy. Firms that are involved in business diplomacy have chosen to satisfy a social public demand rather than only a market demand. Scholars emphasize that it is important for modern corporations to respond to the expectations of various stakeholders in order to obtain a “license to operate,” and therefore the importance of enacting business diplomacy in today’s business environment is stressed. In the international management literature, the term business diplomacy is not widely recognized and has received (too) little scholarly attention.
This symposium aims at shaping the debate on business diplomacy in multinational corporations (MNCs). It will deal with questions such as: what exactly is business diplomacy? How is business diplomacy in MNCs related to (political) corporate diplomacy? To what extent do MNCs engage in business diplomacy and how? Moreover, what are directions for research on business diplomacy?
Keywords:
Business diplomacy; Corporate diplomacy; MNC; Stakeholder management; MNC-host government relations; Corporate political activity.