Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Business Environment

 

Special Edition on: "Corporate Volunteering: Conceptual Embedment, Empirical Research, and Future Perspectives"

Guest Editors:
Christian Lorenz, Gian-Claudio Gentile and Prof. Dr. Theo Wehner, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

The objective of this special issue is to provide a scientific platform where researchers from multiple disciplines concerned with the issue of Corporate Volunteering (CV) may meet and exchange theoretical viewpoints as well as elaborated empirical conclusions for the current and future development of CV.

The changing role of the corporation as a ‘good citizen’ and its interaction with the wider society is a broadly discussed issue in the current discourse of ‘business and society’. Furthermore, the strategic use of philanthropic engagement is increasingly recognised as a means of expressing the uniqueness of a firm’s responsible behaviour towards its stakeholders (e.g. community, NPO, employees).

Thus CV, as a part of corporate philanthropy, offers great potential for strategic management, such as community development, enhancement of employee motivation and commitment, as well as reputational gains with regard to future employees and clients. However, open questions remain regarding its proliferation and implementation in practice (e.g. its cultural antecedents, its strategic vs. philanthropic implementation, cooperation processes between the corporation and the community).

In accordance with the observation that CV appears to be a promising strategic management tool, academic interest in the concept is gaining momentum: of the roughly 10,000 publications (date of origin between 1990 and 2008) found using the search engine Google Scholar, almost three quarters (72%) stem from the time span between 2001 and 2008.

However, CV literature suffers from two major deficits which impede the development of a comprehensive picture of the subject:

1. Most contributions assume the international growth of CV practices to be motivated by the expected benefits for diverse stakeholder groups such as society, employees, and employers. Yet, sound empirical evaluations of these benefits are scarce - if not inexistent.
2. Researchers publishing on CV stem from numerous disciplines and are rarely interconnected with each other, whereas multidisciplinarity is desirable and in the CV context essential to cover the broadness of the subject; the lack of a cross-linked community hinders progress in adequately tackling the depth of the topic, making continuing scientific discourse and sustained progress in our knowledge ever more difficult.

Subject Coverage
This special issue offers the opportunity to merge complementary approaches to CV and may present a first step on the way to establish an interlinked, multidisciplinary scientific community dealing with CV. To that end, theoretical works and literature reviews are invited which help to conceptually connect CV with related topics, such as corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, or corporate community involvement as well as with sociological and psychological volunteering research. With regard to empirical research, we encourage researchers to contribute their sophisticated and quality standard setting qualitative and quantitative studies.
We explicitly ask interested authors to take the international perspective concerning CV – sociological as well as psychological intercultural theories provide us with means to adequately deal with important cultural differences in CV that have been described in the past. Well-grounded recommendations for implementation in every day business practice are welcomed.
Examples of topics appropriate for submission to the CV issue include, but are not limited to:

• Status quo in the Corporate Volunteering practice
• International comparisons in nature and extent of CV approaches
• The strategic and organizational implementation and/or development of CV (e.g. decision processes, internal and external communication, and organisational integration)
• High standard empirical evaluation studies challenging the often-hypothesised benefits of CV for a) employees, b) employers, c) non-profit-organizations, and / or d) society. Empirically derived future prospects on the nature and extent of CV practices
• Differences and commonalities between CV and private volunteering as well as informal volunteer behaviour at the workplace, such as organisational citizenship behaviour
• Differences and commonalities between CV and other forms of philanthropic engagement (sponsorship, corporate giving, and/or fundraising)
• Leadership and CV
• Critical reflections of CV out of theoretical perspectives (e.g. a stakeholder perspective)
• CV as a process of deliberation between the corporation and their partner organizations, mostly NPO (e.g. coordinating and goal setting processes)

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page

Important Dates

Abstract submission deadline: 1 February, 2009

Manuscript submission deadline: 1 July, 2009

Final paper submission deadline: 1 November, 2009