Call for papers for a Special Issue to mark the 30th birthday of AIMS

Call for papers for a Special Issue to mark the 30th birthday of AIMS
"Grand challenges and the future of management studies"

Guest editors : Héloïse Berkowitz (CNRS, Aix Marseille Université, heloise.berkowitz@univ-amu.fr), Rachel Bocquet (Université Savoie Mont Blanc, Rachel.Bocquet@univ-smb.fr), Hélène Delacour (Université de Lorraine, helene.delacour@univ-lorraine.fr), Benoît Demil (Université de Lille, benoit.demil@univ-lille.fr)

In 2022, the International Association of Strategic Management (AIMS, https://www.strategie-aims.com/) will celebrate its 30th anniversary. Taking stock of 30 years of research, this special issue invites innovative studies which question strategy and organization theories as we know them and which might help to accelerate the grand challenges 'turn' in management studies. Management studies have been increasingly acknowledging the urgency of researching and tackling grand challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, aging societies, big data and digitalization, gender inequalities, labor slavery, resource depletion, poverty and disaster risks (Ferraro et al., 2015; George et al., 2016; Gümüsay et al., 2022; Shrivastava et al., 2019) (see also: United Nations 17 Goals, https://sdgs.un.org/goals).
As these challenges require collective action, management studies are well placed to offer original perspectives and tools to understand their nature, their dynamics, and the organizational changes required or that can be considered with a view to solving them. By moving beyond simply acknowledging that organizations are affected by and have to deal with broader social issues (Vaara & Durand, 2012), this trend highlights the growing recognition that businesses are responsible for the current crises (Ergene et al., 2020; Whiteman et al., 2013; Wright & Nyberg, 2017) and that we can no longer consider organizations and economies as being disconnected from socio-ecological ecosystems (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021). Grand challenges are complex interconnected issues which have far-reaching effects, affect a broad range of stakeholders at various scales, and are inherently deeply uncertain and unpredictable (Ferraro et al., 2015; George et al., 2016). As such, grand challenges ca ll into question how we conceive strategies and organizations and invite scholars to rethink businesses' roles in and relations with society (Levillain et al., 2014). They invite us to develop alternative forms of organizing (Barin Cruz et al., 2017; Ouahab & Maclouf, 2019; Petrella et al., 2021) or new models that repurpose businesses so that they truly attend to social needs and goals (Crane & Matten, 2021). We are interested in all forms of organizing collective action: firms and non-governmental organizations, communities, public actors, social movements, inter-organizational relationships, etc.
This call for papers is open to interdisciplinary approaches which draw on human and natural sciences, engineering, design, and urbanism to examine how strategy and organization studies can help to make sense of and address grand challenges. We will also welcome epistemological, theoretical, methodological and empirical works, as these grand challenges will require new observational tools and new ways of analyzing data.

The full CfP can be found here: https://management-aims.com/index.php/mgmt/sibd

Submission: The deadline for submission is midnight on July 10th, 2022.

If you have an idea for a possible paper that may fit this call and would like to discuss it initially, do not hesitate in contacting one of the guest editors.

Please submit your manuscript through the journal's online submission system (https://management-aims.com/index.php/mgmt/about/submissions). You will need to create a user account if you do not already have one, and you must select the appropriate Special Issue at the 'Manuscript Type' stage. The Special Issue Editors will handle all manuscripts in accordance with the journal's policies and procedures; they expect authors to follow the journal's submission guidelines (https://management-aims.com/index.php/mgmt/preparation).