Dennis Schoeneborn, Copenhagen Business School

Héloïse Berkowitz, CNRS, Aix Marseille University

Leonhard Dobusch, University of Innsbruck

Frank de Bakker, IÉSEG School of Management

Consuelo Vásquez, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Over the past decades, the relations between business and society have fundamentally changed. We are entering an age of digital futures with artificial intelligence taking over more and more human tasks at rapid speed, as well as broken futures with accelerating dynamics of climate change, in which the survival of humankind will depend on our ability to organize in collective ways and imagine alternatives to tackle such complex social problems, amidst growing inequalities and ecological destruction on a planetary scale.

Appel publié par Business & Society. Lire l'appel complet sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• How is collective actorhood performed and organized?
• Is a legal status/legal person needed to accomplish collective actorhood?
• Why and how do actors strategically downplay or amplify collective actorhood? How do these strategic efforts affect responsibility attributions?
• What are the implications and limitations of collective actorhood for reenvisioning the business-society relationship and offer alternative solutions in crises of civilization?
• Where and how does actorhood emerge? How do institutional contexts affect actorhood?
• How does actorhood evolve over time or space, and how do organizations transition between different degrees of organizationality?
• Can social collectives be perpetuated and maintained even with a low degree of organizationality – or do they feel pressures either to be dissolved or evolve toward higher degrees of organizationality eventually?
• How to explain asymmetric dynamics between the organized (e.g., established formal organizations; high degree of organizationality) and the (rather) unorganized as their counterparts (e.g., social media firestorm; low degree of organizationality)?
• What can we learn from alternative forms of organizing, including those in marginalized settings?
• How is collective actorhood conceptualized in the various geographies, including the Global South? How does this translate, circulate, and adapt across geographies?
• What are the contributions of other collective notions stemming from indigenous cosmovisions and decolonial approaches?
• How does actorhood affect the interactions between organizations from different domains (for profit and non-profit, scientific organizations, public actors, etc.)?
• When does collective actorhood create relations of domination and exploitation?
• At what point does collective actorhood become constitutive of societal problems and crises (incl. fascism, techno-feudalism, etc.) – rather than a solution for addressing them?
• How does actorhood (or the lack of) affect the relationship between privileged and marginal communities?
• Can living (forests, rivers, soils) and non-living (algorithms, technologies) entities be attributed actorhood and be held accountable? How does it differ from 'human' organizing?
• How can alternative ontologies help inform this analysis?
• How can a gradual understanding of organization help us to understand variations in the degree of organizational actorhood and responsibility attributions in the relations between businesses and society?
• What are the parameters of organizationality required for a responsible collective actorhood?
• How can alternative ontologies, cosmovisions, and organizing experiences inform this critical reflection?
• How to better account for situations in which marginalized actors are forced into fluid and precarious ways of organizing and/or have no choice to lessen the degree of organizationality to cope or survive?

Timeline

• October 3, 2025: Deadline to register for Meet-the-Editors session
• October 7, 2025: Virtual Meet-the-Editors session at 2.00-3.00pm CET
• January 31, 2026: Deadline to submit proposal or extended abstract for presubmission workshop
• February 25, 2026: Virtual presubmission workshop
• August 1, 2026: Submission window opens
• September 30, 2026: Submission deadline for manuscripts

Associate editors

• Devi Vijay, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta

Matevž Rašković, Auckland University of Technology

Noemi Sinkovics, Newcastle University

Michelle Voyer, University of Wollongong

Nives Dolšak, University of Washington

Gurmeet Singh, University of the South Pacific

Our oceans make up 70% of our planet, provide transportation for 80% of global goods in volume and ensure the livelihood of over 3 billion people, including many of the global poor. Oceans represent the largest environment-humanity nexus on Earth in environmental, economic, geopolitical and global security, and socio-cultural terms. Yet, as planetary spaces, our oceans are often thought of as separate from humans in a human-nature duality, which limits research on the place-space embeddedness of business in particular environmental materialities like our oceans.

Appel publié par Business & Society. Lire l'appel complet sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Business models, value creation, and distribution: How do different ocean-based business models create value, who captures the value and who bears costs across communities, ecosystems, and value/supply chains? What trade-offs and paradoxes emerge between economic growth and social/environmental objectives, and how are they justified, negotiated, or contested by various stakeholders and at different levels? How do firms build, maintain, or lose social licence to operate in ocean- and coast-related activities, and what triggers shifts in legitimacy?
• Governance, accountability, and power across levels: How do governance arrangements (e.g., local, national, regional, transnational) shape who gets access, who is included/excluded, and how rules are enforced in ocean and coastal settings? When and why do 'good governance' arrangements still produce undesired social outcomes (e.g., exclusion, livelihood disruption), and what mechanisms explain this? How do firms, states, NGOs, and community actors coordinate or compete to frame problems, set standards, and allocate responsibilities and resources?
• Justice, equity, and lived impacts: How are distributive, procedural, recognitional, and restorative justice concerns expressed in ocean and coastal contexts, and how do they translate into organisational and policy decisions? What forms of inequity arise in practice (e.g., displacement, access restrictions, benefit-sharing), and what interventions have been effective (or ineffective) in redressing them? How do gender, indigeneity, and marginalisation shape participation in governance and benefit-sharing, and what organisational and policy practices enable or constrain inclusion?
• Ownership, stewardship, and legitimacy: Under what conditions are oceans treated as shared spaces versus commodified resources, and how do firms and states influence these framings? What governance designs or institutional arrangements support credible stewardship (beyond compliance), and how are these maintained or evolve over time? How do alternative understandings of stewardship and collective rights (including Indigenous governance) reshape corporate strategy, accountability, and legitimacy?
• Risk, contestation, and the 'dark side': How do illegal, informal, or harmful practices (e.g., illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, labour abuses, illicit trade) become embedded in ocean-related industries, and what enables accountability or impunity? How do firms manage reputational, legal, and operational risks linked to ocean-related activities, and when do risk-management approaches conflict with justice and sustainability aims?

Timeline

• May 1, 2026: Online idea generation workshop
• August 1, 2026: Online research capacity building workshop for PhD students, early-career scholars and emerging market scholars
• March 15, 2027: Submission window opens for full papers
• May 15, 2027: Submission window closes for full papers
• June 1, 2027: Hybrid PDW for R&R papers at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji
• November 1, 2027: Online 'Delphi method' workshop for writing a scene-setting future research agenda as part of the Introduction to the Special Issue