Building on Its Past: The Future of Business and Society Scholarship

Abstract

This Special Issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Business & Society with nine rigorous literature reviews that address important societal problems and provide opportunities for theory development in the business and society field; in this introduction we present an overview of the Special Issue. With the theme “Building on Its Past,” the nine articles address a host of contemporary issues, including climate change, wicked problems, business and human rights, human health, certifications standards, the governance of artificial intelligence, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder theory, and corporate political activity. Together, these reviews offer a wealth of suggested themes, theories and approaches that can drive our research forward for the next decades in business and society research and practice. Using the lens of a miner-prospector continuum to categorize the diversity of articles within this special issue, a common theme emerges across the portfolio of reviews: they all call for a more systemic and integrative perspective toward studying the complex interactions that link business and society actors and issues. Building on these findings, we encourage future scholars to fill long-standing researched gaps through a more open systems approach, which supports both contextually sensitive and multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address grand societal challenges. We conclude with specific suggestions as to how business and society scholars might use an open systems approach, including embracing methodologies to address complex causal pathways, theorizing with a view towards spanning external and internal elements of an organization, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems.

More Than an Umbrella Construct: We Can (and Should) Do Better With CSR by Theorizing Through Context

“…In conclusion, as we noted in our introduction to the 60th-anniversary special issue (Brown et al, 2022), business and society issues are gaining an increasing attention from the mainstream management scholars as well as the stakeholders of business research. The effects of the pandemic and climate change have now touched all of us in one way or another and have added more salience to our scholarship.…”

The Design of Future Business Education: Post-pandemic Challenges and Opportunities

“…It is critical in business learning to employ an open systems approach, which includes employing methodologies to address complex causes, employing theories and perspectives that include external and internal organizational elements, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems. As according Brown et al [6], future business education should include a more systemic and integrative perspective to study the complex interactions that link business actors, issues, and society, as well as a more open approach that supports contextual aspects as well as multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address society's great challenges.…”

The future of grand challenges research: Retiring a hopeful concept and endorsing research principles

“…Such a mandate calls for empirical and theoretical attention to how organizations influence and shape the trajectories of social systems and expands traditional ways of studying how organizations address or are affected by GC (Mair & Seelos, 2021). Illustrations for a traditional perspective are Brown et al (2022), who identified organizational survival as the key dependent variable in GC research, or Voegtlin et al (2022), who identified responsible innovation as an approach by which businesses help solve GC. A third mandate perspective expands a focus on solving GC towards imagining and assessing possibilities and roles for organizations to generate fewer 'grand' problems in the first place (Ackoff, 1981).…”

“…Illustrations for a traditional perspective are Brown et al. (2022), who identified organizational survival as the key dependent variable in GC research, or Voegtlin et al. (2022), who identified responsible innovation as an approach by which businesses help solve GC.…”