CALL FOR APPLICATIONS (Sign up here)
FIRMS AND MORAL REPAIR: SHAPING A RESEARCH AGENDA
18-19 November 2024, IESE Business School, Barcelona.
Firms are increasingly confronted with demands to acknowledge responsibility for past wrongs and commit resources to mend the negative consequences of their actions. From Mark Zuckerberg's apology to the US Senate to initiatives by Sibanye-Stillwater and Samarco following major disasters, corporate reparative actions are becoming more common, signaling what some have called an "age of apology."
Moral repair, as defined by moral philosophers, involves practices that help victims of corporate wrongdoings move toward restored moral relationships. Management, business ethics, and business and human rights scholars have begun to explore moral repair from various angles, including trust and legitimacy restoration with stakeholders, adopting restorative justice lenses, and addressing legacies of irresponsibility. Recent studies have also further clarified its procedural and substantive components.
Despite progress, the scholarly discussion on moral repair remains fragmented. To address this, this exploratory workshop aims to generate ideas, foster collaboration, and map potential avenues for expanding the concept of moral repair in management scholarship. The workshop aims to engage participants in exploring questions such as: Can moral repair become a distinct field of inquiry, and if so, how? Could there be a "theory of moral repair" for firms? What fundamental theories/perspectives can inform moral repair? How can studies of moral repair connect with a larger (management) audience?
Scholars from diverse backgrounds are invited to contribute original ideas, including normative, empirical, and theoretical insights at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis of moral repair. Some of the most pressing topics to be discussed in the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:
· Remedies for business-related human rights wrongs.
· Corporate moral reparations versus legally mandated reparations: tensions, overlaps, and opportunities.
· Corporate moral agency.
· Leadership and moral repair.
· Moral repair in the workplace.
· Different wrongs, different remedies? Corporate remedy in the wake of gender, environmental, discrimination, and fraud abuses.
· The opportunities and limitations of corporate engagement in symbolic forms of repair – e.g.: apologies, commemorations, memorials.
· Tensions between procedural and substantive dimensions of moral repair.
· Stakeholder relationship reparation following a transgression.
· Corporate remedy in transitional justice contexts
· Acknowledgement of responsibility, corporate reparations, and the legal consequences for the firm.
· Spiritual traditions for corporate moral remedy theorization.
Scholars interested in participating in the workshop are invited to submit an extended abstract (min. 1,000, max. 2,500 words) by September 30th, 2024. The outcome of the call for abstracts will be communicated by early October 2024.
Sign up here: https://apply.iese.edu/firms_and_moral_repair/
For more information, please contact the organizers
· Dr. Jordi Vives-Gabriel, Senior research fellow, IESE Business School. (jvivesg@iese.edu)
· Dr. Wim Van Lent, Associate Professor, IESEG.
------------------------------
Susana Esper
IESEG School of Management
Lille
------------------------------