Social Regulation and Sustainability: The Next Act

31 Dec 2023

Journal of Organizational Change Management
Guest editor(s) : Mahamadou Biga Diambeidou, Maria Giuseppina Bruna, Valérie Swaen, Ahmed Imran Hunjura

Introduction

Adopting a transdisciplinary, multi-level and critical perspective, this special issue (SI) calls for innovative, robust and impact-oriented papers, addressing the new challenges and promises of regulation, resilience and sustainability within institutions, organizations and market agencies responding to the double pronged pressures of public regulations and cultural ideologies of sustainability. Endorsing theoretically embedded as well as empirically grounded approaches, the SI aims at contributing to the emerging debate on regulation issues in times of crisis (Akyildirim et al., 2020; Levy, 2020; Geloso et al., 2021). Accordingly, the SI aspires to enlighten and assess the polyhedric (and, perhaps, intertwined) impacts of public policies, institutional and/or markets dynamics, corporate strategies and/or stakeholders’ pressures on social regulation within institutions, companies and/or other agencies active both in the markets and in the public sphere. A particular focus will be on the effects of pluralistic regulations (sensitive to the call of stakeholders; Bruna, 2020; Rouine, Ammari & Bruna, 2022) and on the consequences of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

Methodologically speaking, the special issue encourages critical, inter-disciplinary and/or multi-level research reports, articulating institutional, juridical, sociological and management issues. Comparative approaches are welcome (i.e., longitudinal or inter-temporal investigations, sectoral perspectives, international comparaisons etc.). We are also welcoming the research reports on coming to grips with the pandemic threat. Confronting the hardiest pandemic of recent decades, which has bereaved more than 6.4 million people around the world and has engendered lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing initiatives as well as stop-downs of production and consumption activities and international recession, our post-modernity is experiencing a critical period, an anthropological crisis and a civilizational challenge.

Despite extraordinary surges of solidarity (Pascoe & Stripling, 2020), coming from Local/National/Regional/International Institutions and their emergency, security and recovery plans to companies endorsing (and actually) practising CSR principles, from Schools and Universities to associations and NGOs were frequently reduced or abandoned, which hinders the effective practice of responsibility.

These phenomena reflect a lack of social regulation. Plunged into uncertainty, companies are, in fact, experiencing a triple phenomenon of vertiginous growth of stakeholders (which inaugurates pleistocratic drifts (Reynaud, 1997), normative inflation and instability (of orientations, values, structures, processes and practices…) which weakens strategic alignment and undermines the cohesion of teams. Like society, organizations are also the scene of profound socio-economic upheavals, managerial metamorphoses (sometimes fortunate as digitalization, appropriation of new technologies, new work-life balances by teleworking, and organizational citizenship development) that, nevertheless, fail to hide the positional and strategic hesitations that have been inaugurated or, often, revealed and accelerated by the pandemic.

To face these challenges, we plead in favor of an ethics of regulation (Bruna, 2020) able to ward off the fates of an anomic drift with devastating social harmony and organizational efficiency (proliferation and delegitimization of norms; contradiction and ineffectiveness of rules).

List of topic areas

• Conceptual papers on social regulation, sustainability and resilience in times of crises
• Narrative Reviews/Meta-analysis/Systematic review of the literature on social regulations (adopting multi-level perspectives – institutional, legal, market-based and/or Corporate regulations)
• Narrative Reviews/Meta-analysis/Systematic review of the literature on social regulations in times of crises
• Narrative Reviews/Meta-analysis/Systematic review of the literature on interlacing of social regulations and CSR challenges
• Empirical papers investigating the relationships among social regulation and sustainability
• Empirical papers on social regulations in times of crises, grounded in innovative and robust multi-level, comparative and/or interdisciplinary approaches
• Empirical papers on sustainability, responsibility and CSR challenges, policies and practices in times of crises.
• Empirical studies which provide new evidence on « pluralistic regulation » in times of crises
• Any other themes or research works which can directly advance the SI topic.

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the SI title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to « Please select the issue you are submitting to ».

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key deadlines

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31st December, 2023