Reminder: Call for papers EURAM 2021 Conference in Montréal – “Management History, Theory, and Philosophy”

Call for papers to the SIG 14 track T14-02 “Management History, Theory, and Philosophy” at the EURAM 2021 Conference in Montréal

Track description: The Management History, Theory, and Philosophy track addresses historical and philosophical foundations and challenges of management and organisation theory and practice. Knowledge of these foundations and challenges is vital for developing creative management solutions to persistent organisational problems, overcoming intellectual lockdowns, and shaping the futures of our disciplines.

Open to all paradigms, this track invites decidedly philosophical, historical, theoretical and conceptual contributions from scholars with backgrounds in management and organisation studies, sociology, economics, anthropology, history, philosophy, information science, communication studies, and further appropriate disciplines addressing issues and challenges in following non-exclusive fields:

  1. Business history
  2. History of economic thought
  3. Management philosophy
  4. Management theory
  5. Organization theory
  6. Multidisciplinary management and organization studies
  7. Futures of management and organization

Submissions to past EURAM tracks co-organised by the proponents have been published or are forthcoming in regular or special issues of journals such as Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Organisational Change Management, and Futures. Our partner journals this year are the Scandinavian Journal of Management [SSCI 1.891, Scopus, FNEGE**, CABS**, VHB***], the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences [SSCI .756, Scopus, CNRS**, CABS**], and Futures [SSCI 2.769, Scopus, FNEGE**, CABS**].

Convenors: Steffen Roth, La Rochelle Business School, France, and University of Turku, Finland; Wolfgang Amann, HEC Paris; Vladislav Valentinov, University of Halle; Augusto Sales (augusto.sales@fgv.br), FGV EBAPE.

Keywords: Management history, management theory, management philosophy, history of economic thought.

Submission deadline: 12 January 2021. Please see the EURAM 2021 website for details.

From the Atlantic: The Timeless Lessons of Easter Are More Timely Than Ever

Inspiring piece by @philipyanceyon on religion during the Covid-19 pandemic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/holy-week-lessons-pandemic-times/609826/

< On Wednesday and Thursday nights, when Jews gathered in some virtual way for the seder feast, they asked, “How is this night different from all other nights?” Christians would do well to reflect similarly. The Jewish celebration of Passover and the Christian celebration of Holy Week overlap this year. Both recall dark nights from long ago when desperate people of faith gathered to face a scary future. Both, however, are now overshadowed by a global threat from a virus that respects neither religion nor geography. What lessons might we take away today, under this very different threat?

Passover commemorates a time when not one but 10 plagues were unleashed, on a nation that had enslaved the Israelites. According to the Book of Exodus, God said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt … So I have come down to rescue them.” Thus began a power contest between Moses’s God and the Egyptians’ many gods. The plagues culminated in a final affliction that would take the lives of every firstborn son in Egypt.

On that night of blood and death, the Israelites huddled in their homes, listening to the loud sounds of grief but protected by the marks on their doorposts that caused the plague to “pass over” their own homes. After more divine intervention, the Israelites escaped at last and began their march to the promised land. That image, of slaves walking free, has inspired liberation movements throughout history, most notably the American civil-rights movement. />

< Writers of the Gospels portray Jesus as recapitulating the experience of his forebears, including a flight to Egypt and a 40-day temptation in the wilderness. Some compatriots welcomed him as a leader like Moses, one who could deliver them from another oppressive regime, the Roman empire. Instead, of course, he met an early death.

All four Gospels set Jesus’s crucifixion during Passover in Jerusalem—yet another historical echo—and all four record a final meal with the disciples. In John’s detailed account, Jesus spells out his own fate that awaits him, though his followers seem uncomprehending. He is turning the mission over to them. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another,” he says. To underscore the point, he takes on the role of a servant and, despite their protests, washes their feet.

Then comes Easter Sunday, the day that changes everything—eventually. With surprising transparency, the Gospels record that initially the disciples refused to believe the rumors of resurrection. Unlike scheming conspirators, or gullible simpletons, they reacted as any rational person would: with incredulity. Dead bodies in a sealed tomb don’t suddenly reappear, alive, a few days later. One by one, Jesus convinced the disciples otherwise.

As if in a daze, some of them headed home, to resume their old profession of fishing. And when they saw Jesus one last time, they asked if he was now planning to restore the kingdom to Israel. They were still unable to grasp what he had told them, that his death would inaugurate a new kind of kingdom, not tribal or ethnic, but one without borders, a spiritual kingdom that would spread to the outermost parts of the Earth.

Seven weeks passed between Easter and Pentecost, when the disciples finally understood their mission. Suddenly, “with a sound like the blowing of a violent wind,” the spirit of God descended, transforming the cowering disciples into bold and courageous messengers. The kingdom had come, though not just to Israelites: to Parthians, Medes, Romans, Cretans, Arabs, and many others, as the Book of Acts details.

“The kingdom of God is within you,” Jesus had told them, a concept they comprehended at last. />

< Jews and Christians share the belief that humans are God’s image-bearers, with the mission of mirroring God’s own qualities of mercy, compassion, and steadfast love. At Passover, Jews relive a time when they were slaves, a reminder to care for the needy and disenfranchised. They are encouraged to invite the less fortunate and those who live alone to the seder feast, a tradition made impossible this year by coronavirus restrictions.

For Christians, Holy Week focuses on a God-man who makes a willing sacrifice and then charges others with emulating his example of selfless love. Against all odds, in the three centuries after Jesus’s death, Christianity grew from a tiny subset of Judaism to become the official religion of the Roman empire. The sociologist Rodney Stark argues that Christians’ response to suffering helped fuel the expansion of the faith. When diseases such as smallpox and the bubonic plague hit Roman villages and the locals fled, Christians stayed behind to nurse not only their own families but also those of their pagan neighbors. When Romans abandoned their unwanted babies by the roadside, Christians adopted them.

After Christians became a majority in Rome and all of Europe, however, a kind of amnesia set in about Jesus’s message of nonviolence. Under Christendom, some of Jesus’s followers became persecutors rather than the persecuted, and waged wars of religion in the name of the “Prince of Peace.” Tragically, their spiritual ancestors, the Jews, made an easy target.

The lessons of Passover and Holy Week apply to believers and unbelievers alike, as a tiny virus has humbled us all. When we gather digitally in search of human contact, we do so with a new understanding of how vulnerably connected we are; the novel coronavirus that has spread around the world provides the proof. We will defeat the malady only by putting aside our divisions and working together as a global community, united against a common threat. Real victories are won not with the sword, but through service and care for one another.

The governor of Colorado, where I live, gives regular updates on the COVID-19 outbreak, in press conferences marked by honesty and good sense. Jared Polis is the first Jew to hold the title, and I was recently surprised to hear him quote a passage from the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13. “And now these three remain,” said the governor, “faith, hope and love.” He described the faith we have in the scientists working on vaccines and cures, and in the health-care workers tending the sick. Next he reported on some reasons for hope, as social distancing finally shows results in our state.

“But the greatest of these is love,” he concluded. A challenge like COVID-19 can be met only if we all join together in a display of willing sacrifice and selfless love. Something worth pondering in a year when Passover and Holy Week overlap. />

Keep calm and carry on… publishing

In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, my ‘doktorvater’ Steffen Roth managed to find the eye of the hurricane to write two interesting pieces on the current crisis:

Weak evidence for strong pandemic interventions. A 2019 WHO warning for the current COVID-19 crisis

Abstract
Social distancing. Travel bans. Confinement. The purpose of this research note is to document that more than 50% of the world population are affected by WHO (World Health Organization) recommendations for the 2020 coronavirus crisis for whose effectiveness the WHO admits that the evidence quality is low or very low. This self-contradiction is confirmed by a WHO document published in October 2019 as well as supporting documentation from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The research note concludes that an obvious resolution of this self-contradiction would be to limit restrictions to those for whose effectiveness the WHO’s document reported that there was at least moderate evidence. Available for download at SSRN.

COVID-19. Scenarios of a Superfluous Crisis

Abstract
Case fatality rates (CFR) have been critical in the emergence and management of the current COVID-19 crisis. This article presents a comparative map of CFR for the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and influenza (H1N1 and H2N2). The mapped data shows that current CFR of SARS-CoV-2 are considerably lower than, or similar to those, of hospitalized patients in the UK, Spain, Germany, or international samples. We therefore infer a possible risk that the virulence of the coronavirus is considerably overestimated due to sampling biases, and that increased testing might reduce the general CFR of SARS-CoV-2 to rates similar to, or lower than, those of the common seasonal influenza. We conclude that governments, health corporations, and health researchers must prepare for scenarios in which the affected populations cease to believe in the statistical foundations of the current COVID-19 crisis and interventions. Available for download at SSRN.


Image borrowed from Techcrunch.

CFP | (Management) Consulting: Theory and Practice | EURAM 2020 @ Dublin

Call for papers to the SIG 12 Track: “(Management) Consulting: Theory and Practice” @ the EURAM conference 2020 in Dublin

Theme: The Business of Now: the future starts here
Venue: Trinity Business School, Dublin, Ireland.
Date: 10-12 June 2020

Track description: 

Keywords: Consulting * Professional Services * Advisory * Accounting Firms * Big Four * MBB * Big three

From 2011 to 2020, the global expenditure on Management Consulting is expected to rise from USD107 to 158 billion. With consulting corporations such as KPMG, BCG and McKinsey, global actors have gained public attention, as they advise corporations, governments and institutions. Management consultants range from sole practitioners and those working in small boutique firms to members of global consultancies that literally span the world. But what exactly is (Management) Consulting?

The “(Management) Consulting: Theory and Practice” track is a response to the rapidly growing interest in research and theory building around the act of consulting and the world of professional services firms. We also seek to incentive the development of consultants from the perspectives of research, practice and teaching and ultimately bridging scholarship and practice.

Topics of interest include, amongst others:

  • What is the future of consulting?
  • Are there signs of important transformations in the business of consulting?
  • What is the effect and future position of machine learning and advanced algorithms in the consulting market?
  • Will the consulting be disrupted? How would it evolve? What are the potential new business models?
  • Is consulting more than giving advice?
  • What are the work relations in professional services firms?
  • Are gender issues impacting the big consulting firms such as the so-called Big-4 (Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC)?
  • How diversity and inclusion are taken by consulting firms?
  • How converging are the business of design and management consulting?
  • What are the dynamics of Client-Consultant relationship?
  • What are the characteristics of professional services organizations?
  • How can consulting interventions impact organizations?
  • Knowledge commoditization: the models, templates, and tools of the consulting trade have historically been kept “secret” by consultants and locked away as intellectual capital. Does the shared economy represent a threat for consultants?

Selected papers will be invited for submission to partnering journals.

Track Convenors:

  • Augusto Sales, Rennes School of Business, France, and KPMG Global Strategy Group Alumni Partner, Brazil (contact me @ acs282@georgetown.edu)
  • Lars Clausen, University College Lillebælt, Denmark, and University of Flensburg, Germany
  • Steffen Roth, La Rochelle Business School, France, and Kazimieras Simonavicius University, Lithuania
  • Ricardo Azambuja, Rennes School of Business, France, and Fundação Dom Cabral, Brazil

Deadlines:

  • Deadline for Paper Submission: 14 January 2020 (2pm Belgium time)
  • Notification of Acceptance: 19 March 2020
  • Early Bird Registration Deadline: 10 April 2020
  • Authors and Symposia Panellists Registration Deadline: 17 April 2020

Full paper submissions are invited via the official EURAM 2020 conference website (please see the menu Submission & Guidelines).

This CFP is also available for download here.


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