BUSINESS & SOCIETY Special Issue Call for papers August 2010
The Social Performance and Responsibilities of Entrepreneurship
Guest Editors:
Mark Casson; University of Reading, UK
Stephen Pavelin; University of Reading, UK
Entrepreneurial behaviour enacts change. An
entrepreneur may start-up a company that, when
entering a market, broadens consumer choice and
intensifies competition for market share among
providers. Furthermore, entrepreneurship can
drive the introduction of new products, improved
versions of old products, efficiency gains in
production processes, innovative business models
and paradigm-shifts in corporate culture. It is
straightforward that such fruits of
entrepreneurial spirit can result in social
benefit new products that please consumers, a
disruption of an established competitive balance
among incumbents that drives down prices,
technological change that extends production
possibilities, and so on. However, this
circumstance does not imply that entrepreneurship
is necessarily bound to make some positive contribution to social welfare.
In highlighting productive and unproductive (even
destructive) roles of entrepreneurship, Baumol
(1990) notes that if entrepreneurs are defined,
simply, to be persons who are ingenious and
creative in finding ways that add to their own
wealth, power, and prestige, then it is to be
expected that not all of them will be overly
concerned with whether an activity that achieves
these goals adds much or little to the social
product (pp. 897-898). Entrepreneurial behaviour
guided by self-interest may channel into
whichever activities maximise private gain, even
if they include socially harmful rent-seeking,
dirty tricks against rival companies, deceptive
marketing, tax evasion and (perhaps more subtly)
even the promotion of intensified rivalry in
economic relationships to the possible detriment of social cohesion.
This reality presents a question: What are, and
what factors determine, the effects of
entrepreneurship on corporate social performance
(CSP)? The extant literatures on social and
environmental entrepreneurship have highlighted
and evaluated an emergent tendency for
entrepreneurship guided by a stated intention to
build-in a regard for social and/or environmental
issues as a core component of adopted business
models. Has this tendency made entrepreneurship,
and corporate conduct in general, more socially
beneficial? More generally, is entrepreneurial
behaviour socially productive, and how might
institutional reform promote a channelling of
entrepreneurial spirit away from less-than-productive endeavours?
This planned special issue will discuss the
impacts of entrepreneurial behaviour on social
welfare and also assess the responsibilities of
entrepreneurs in relation to social and
environmental issues. Some research questions
that might be addressed in this special issue
include, but are not limited to, the following:
· What are the social responsibilities of an entrepreneur?
· How does entrepreneurial behaviour
affect the welfare of society in general and
perhaps certain stakeholder constituencies in particular?
· What factors determine the impacts of
entrepreneurship on social and environmental issues?
· How do institutional factors influence
the manner in which entrepreneurial efforts are
distributed across productive, non-productive and destructive behaviours?
· Can public policy reform promote a
greater prevalence of socially beneficial entrepreneurship?
· To what extent have documented trends of
social and environmental entrepreneurship brought
an improvement in corporate social performance at
the firm-, industry-, regional- or global-level?
· Has the manner in which corporate social
responsibility is understood and practiced
undergone significant change that reflects the
entrepreneurial introduction of innovative business models?
· Does the prevalence and strength of
entrepreneurial spirit affect the development and
maintenance of social cohesion?
This special issue is open to papers from various
academic disciplines that are conceptual,
theoretical or empirical in nature and present
new insights on the social responsibilities of
entrepreneurship and the effects of
entrepreneurial behaviour on CSP. Possible topics are the following:
· The social responsibilities of entrepreneurs;
· The social performance of entrepreneurial behaviour;
· Unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship;
· Social and environmental entrepreneurship.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Due Date: February 28, 2011
Contributors are requested to submit full papers
electronically to the corresponding guest editor,
Dr. Stephen Pavelin (
s.pavelin@reading.ac.uk) no
later than February 28, 2011. (Special issue
submissions should NOT be loaded to the
manuscript central online system for regular
submissions.) Submissions to the special issue
should follow the Business & Society manuscript
submission guidelines outlined on the journals
website at
http://bas.sagepub.com (then click on
Submit a Manuscript). Papers should include a
100-150 word abstract followed by three to five
keywords. The paper itself should contain no
indications of authorship (including
self-citations or references). A title page
containing full author contact information should
be sent as a separate document. The citations and
references should be APA compliant (see BAS guidelines).
A Business & Society Special Issue Workshop
(titled: The Social Performance and
Responsibilities of Entrepreneurship) will be
held at the International Association for
Business and Society Annual Meeting 2011, to be
held in Bath, UK on June 23-26. Authors will be
informed whether their paper has been accepted
for presentation at the Workshop by March 31,
2011. While accepted authors will be encouraged
to attend the Workshop, further consideration of
a submitted paper is not contingent upon such
attendance. Following the Workshop, all papers
under consideration will go through the journals
double-blind review process. Please feel free to
address any questions you have regarding the
special issue to the guest editors:
Prof. Mark Casson
School of Economics, University of Reading, United Kingdom
E-mail:
m.c.casson@reading.ac.uk
Dr. Stephen Pavelin
School of Economics, University of Reading, United Kingdom
E-mail:
s.pavelin@reading.ac.uk
DISTRIBUTED BY DUANE WINDSOR, BAS EDITOR,
odw@rice.edu
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