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Call for Submissions

Business Ethics Quarterly

Special Issue on:

Exploring Important Thinkers to Generate

New Theory in Business Ethics

Guest Editors:

Andrew C. Wicks, University of Virginia

Patricia H. Werhane, DePaul University and the University of Virginia

Lindsay Thompson, Johns Hopkins University

Norman Bowie, University of Minnesota

This is an abbreviated call for submissions.
The full call is here: https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2018.45

Overview:

Business ethics is a hybrid discipline built on the conceptual resources of several fields, including moral and political philosophy, economics, sociology, and social psychology. While business ethics is a domain unto itself, scholars continue to draw on a variety of theories and ideas from disciplinary fields to generate original work. Scholars have already utilized resources from a variety of sources to great effect. In moral and political philosophy, Kant, Mill, Aristotle, Smith, Marx, Habermas, Sen, Nozick, Walzer, and Rawls are all scholars who have figured prominently in dialogues within business ethics. To remain vibrant, and to innovate, business ethicists should continually be searching for new ideas that hold promise to enrich the dialogue. In this special issue, we invite colleagues to submit papers that a) bring in work from important thinkers in a variety of disciplines who have been overlooked or underutilized within the business ethics literature so far, b) provide important resources from these thinkers to generate new theories and insights on a given topic in business ethics, and c) show how this work can be used, more broadly, to inform the larger dialogue in contemporary business ethics.

While the term "underutilized thinkers" is both broad and vague, the editorial team seeks papers that demonstrate how a well-known thinker in a field (a person who has heretofore been overlooked in the business ethics and corporate responsibility literature) can contribute significantly to business ethics. We will focus on the extent to which a given theorist's ideas are relevant in existing literature, particularly within BEQ, and/or how these ideas should be included in the corpus of business ethics.

We are also willing to work with authors early in the process to help sort out whether their proposed theorist would be a good candidate for this call.

Papers that make the focus on novel ideas generated from an underutilized theorist the centerpiece of their work are more likely to be successful. While we do not exclude empirical work as such, any use of empirical methods (qualitative or quantitative) would need to be in the service of a larger focus on generating new conceptual and normative theory.

Objectives:

1.  Identify thinkers from a variety of fields whose ideas have largely been excluded from existing dialogues in business ethics.

2.  Generate new theories, as well as new resources, that extend beyond a given submission to provide a richer array of ideas and thinkers for scholars in business ethics.

3. Create strong conceptual and normative papers that speak to important topics in business ethics and extend our current understanding of the field, including the phenomena to which it speaks.

Some Possibilities:

·      Psychologists and social psychologists such as Freud, Jung, Milgram, Pinker, and Haidt.

·      Sociologists such as Durkheim, Weber, Goffman, Foucault, Bruno LaTour, and Granovetter. 

·      Feminist scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir, Carol Gilligan, Virginia Held, and Catherine MacKinnon.

·      Economists such as Quesnay, Ricardo, Malthus, Pareto, Keynes, Samuelson, Hayek, Jensen, Oliver Williams, and Robert Frank.

·      Philosophers and political theorists, such as medievalists David Hume, Pascal, Rousseau, Mill, Montesquieu, Burke, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein; neo-Marxists, such as Adorno, Lucács, Marcuse; pragmatists, such as James, Dewey, and Rorty.

Manuscript submissions will be accepted from September 1, 2019 through November 1, 2019, using BEQ's online submission system:  https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/beq.

To inquire about the relevance of a possible submission or raise other questions please contact the guest editor team through coeditor Andy Wicks at WicksA@darden.virginia.edu.

BEQ, published by Cambridge University Press, is the official journal of the Society for Business Ethics. For more information contact BEQ editor in chief Bruce Barry at EditorBEQ@vanderbilt.edu.

Follow BEQ on Twitter @BEQJournal.