In line with the theme of the
EABIS 6th Annual Colloquium "The Emerging Global Governance Paradigm:
The Role of Business and Its Implications for Companies, Stakeholders
and Society" - the focus of this year's PhD forum was on global governance.
With nearly 60 participants, this year's EABIS PhD Conference has gathered the largest number of participants until now.
Welcome & 'Present and Future of CSR' Session
Prof. Antonio Argandoña, IESE Business School and Prof. Gilbert Lensen, President of EABIS opened the conference outlining the content and objectives of the day.
Professors André Habisch (Director of the Centre for Corporate Citizenship, Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadts, Piotr Ploszajski (Vice Rector, Warsaw School of Economics) and Nigel Roome
(Daniel Janssen Chair in CSR, Solvay Business School, and Chair of the
Academic Board, EABIS) shared thoughtful and provocative insights as
keynote speakers.
Professor Habisch revisited the ethical values debate, while Professor Poszajski (download presentation)
challenged the audience with the practical reasons that prompt
companies to adopt CSR practices, questioning the extent to which those
practices are shaped by large corporations when SMEs account for a much
bigger share of the corporate pie.
Professor Roome in turn reinforced the importance of the trilogy
focus & rigor & relevance as everlasting research tip. He made
a strong point around engaging stakeholders in research projects as a
means to build up relevance.
Innovative Features
As part of the submission process to this year's PhD Conference participants had the opportunity to identify their key challenges and barriers to progress. Those inputs were used by the organizers to shape the content of the day highlighting the value-add issues. Relevance of current research and publication strategy emerged as the areas demanding priority advice. Click here to download the statistics.
An outstanding innovation -both in terms of content and format- of this year's PhD conference was a dedicated session which addressed the challenge of getting published.
A roundtable discussion moderated by Professor Domènec Melé (IESE and Section Editor of the Journal of Business Ethics) featured Professors Andrew Kakabadse (Cranfield University and co-Editor of the Journal of Management Development), Malcolm McIntosch (Coventry University and General Editor of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship) and Maurizio Zollo (Bocconi, INSEAD and member of the Editorial Board of Organization Science).
The roundtable was followed by the so-called ‘Editors Lunch',
that provided further opportunities for participants to engage in
informal exchanges with senior editors around publishing strategies.
Another highly praised feature introduced this year has been the Career Guidance session,
as an interactive space where both academic and corporate career paths
in the CSR domain were discussed. As CSR gets further embedded across
academic disciplines and functional areas, new career opportunities
continue to unfold for PhD candidates.
As a final valuable addition to this year's event, selected
submissions to the conference are being considered for publication in a
special edition of the Journal of General Management.
Click here to download the Conference Programme
PhD Presentations
The core of the day consisted of presentations by PhD candidates,
each giving an outline of their research project followed by a feedback
session
In order to focus the feedback from senior professors as well as to
facilitate interaction and peer-learning among participants,
presentations were clustered in four groups according to their
overarching research theme:
- CSR and the 3rd Sector
- Stakeholder theory
- Concepts of CSR
- CSR and Economics
Click here for the PhD Conference Proceedings
The event was sponsored by the "la Caixa" Chair of Corporate
Social Responsibility and Corporate Governance and the Center for
Business in Society at IESE Business School.
