Romana Rauter, University of Graz

Abel Diaz Gonzalez, Maastricht University

Florian Lüdeke-Freund, ESCP Business School

Maya Hoveskog, Halmstad University

Nikolay A. Dentchev, University of National and World Economy

John Elkington, Volans

Contemporary business–society relationships face unprecedented strain due to corporate political influence, externalization of ecological and social costs, rapid technological change, and interconnected ecological and geopolitical crises. Current management approaches prove inadequate for advancing sustainable and equitable outcomes, requiring new analytical frameworks that examine how value is created, captured, and distributed among diverse stakeholders, and how power, risk, and responsibility are allocated across organizational and institutional boundaries.

The business models for sustainability perspective offers a promising lens for understanding these systemic dynamics by directing attention to the organizational arrangements and mechanisms through which sustainable value is created and distributed, power is exercised, and responsibilities are allocated. This special issue seeks theoretical and empirical contributions that explore how BMfS negotiate and reshape business–society relationships, including their potential to create more equitable outcomes and their capacity to reproduce inequalities or shift risks to vulnerable populations.

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

Potential topics

• What insights do business models for sustainability (BMfS) offer into the dynamics of business–society relationships in the contemporary context?
• In what ways do existing BMfS facilitate the (re)negotiation of value creation and capture mechanisms and processes, as well as the distribution of power, risk, and responsibility?
• Under what conditions do BMfS reproduce inequality, shift risks to vulnerable actors, create new dependencies, or reinforce private control over societal problems?
• Which critical perspectives can help in studying the 'dark sides' of BMfS and corresponding business–society relationships?
• How do BMfS operate differently across sectors, regions, and institutional environments, particularly in non-Western contexts?
• Which theories, including inter- and multidisciplinary approaches, are and can be used to study BMfS as facilitators of business–society relationships?
• What methodological approaches and innovations can aid in the study of the value creation and capture logics that enable, constrain, or actively reshape the terms on which business–society relationships depend?

Timeline

• November 15, 2026: Abstract submission deadline for Virtual Paper Development Workshop
• December 1, 2026: Virtual Paper Development Workshop
• January 1, 2027: Virtual Paper Development Workshop
• May 1, 2027: Full paper submission window opens
• June 30, 2027: Full paper submission deadline
• September 1, 2027: Editorial decisions for first review phase
• January 31, 2028: Second submission deadline
• April 1, 2028: Editorial decisions for second review phase
• August 31, 2028: Third submission deadline
• October 1, 2028: Editorial decisions for third review phase
• December 30, 2028: Final submission deadline

Associate editors

• Lea Stadtler, Grenoble Ecole de Management

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