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Hi All,

Below is the call for papers for the upcoming Responsible Leadership conference  in Pretoria, South Africa, next November.  Please consider submitting an abstract.  Best to all,

Sandra Waddock

With this announcement the Albert Luthuli Centre for Responsible Leadership and the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative along with international conference partners – Griffith University Business School, Business School Lausanne and Babson College - would like to invite papers related to responsible leadership from a trans-disciplinary perspective involving social and natural science. 

As the interconnectedness and complexity of the world continues to grow, there is increasing awareness of the limitations of knowledge gathered within strict disciplinary boundaries, just at the point where humanity is pushing beyond many planetary boundaries and limitations.  The result is an enhanced need for responsible leaders whose knowledge and wisdom transcends disciplinary, sector, and most current boundaries.   Management, leadership, and business knowledge by itself cannot ensure a sustainable and equitable future.  Scientific knowledge alone is not enough.  Governance and political science knowledge alone is not enough.  What is needed is an integration of knowledge about and insight into responsible leadership across disciplinary boundaries ranging from management and economics studies, the physical and biological sciences, law, government, and the humanities and social science.  Only by integrating across current disciplinary boundaries can we find hope for generating what has been termed Earth System Governance, a way for humanity to manage the complexities of the world to create a just, equitable, and sustainable world for all.  We are searching for a New Political Economy, as the High Level Report to the UN Secretary-General prior to Rio+20 called it. For this conference, we invite papers relating to responsible leadership from and across any of these perspectives, particularly from the physical and biological sciences. 

The manifold ecological, biodiversity, equity, and sustainability problems of the world necessitate new and integrated scientific understanding in a whole range of biological and physical science disciplines.  But scientific knowledge alone will be insufficient to effect necessary changes in the systems and cultures of humankind's economic and political systems. 

For transformative change toward a sustainable and equitable world, which McIntosh has termed 'the necessary transition', responsible leadership must be developed both within disciplines, and across scientific and other types of disciplines altogether, including management, economic, humanities, natural, legal and political, and social sciences.  Responsible leadership is needed in all areas of science to bridge scientific understanding into business and governance systems that span the earth.  Similarly, responsible leadership is needed in business and global governance and political systems that take into consideration the new interdisciplinary imperatives being uncovered by basic and applied sciences.  Single discipline-based knowledge and leadership alone will be insufficient for humanity to 'the necessary transition' to a sustainable and equitable world.

The purpose of the Third International Conference on Responsible Leadership will be to create a forum where scholars of management and responsible leadership in business and government can come together with leading biological and physical scientists to generate shared perspectives and understanding across disciplinary boundaries.  Many scientists are themselves attempting to bridge scientific disciplines to create a dialogue about the crucial multi-disciplinary insights needed to tackle increasingly complex issues, such as genomics, disease, sustainability, energy, and food security, to mention just a few areas.  Each of these arenas is fraught with leadership responsibilities that are not bounded by the particular scientific disciplines but need to create bridges between what are now rather rigid boundaries with little conversation going on among them.  This conference aims to bring together academics interested in dialogue about the ethical, responsibility, leadership, and human implications of research within these complex and interconnected domains.

'The Necessary Transition' reflected transitions that are not only necessary but already in motion (McIntosh, 2013) but with a caveat: "what can we learn – or can we learn – from previous transitions in human history?". In particular what can be learnt from outside our disciplines?  Cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees has talked about his concern with "low-probability, high-consequence events - real-world analogues of unforeseen crashes in the financial system . . . Global society depends precariously on elaborate networks - electricity grids, air-traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, and so forth. Unless these are highly resilient, their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic (albeit rare) breakdowns, cascading through the system.  (And) We are kidding ourselves if we think that those with technical expertise will all be balanced and rational."

We need our leaders to be consultative, knowledgeable and wise. How can this be achieved given the current nature of siloed expertise?

For this conference, we invite papers relating to responsible leadership from and across any of these perspectives, particularly from the physical and biological sciences

CONFERENCE THEMES: 

Under the umbrella of the broad theme, we invite papers, panel conversations, symposia, case studies, and workshops, in the following sub-theme areas:

·         Responsible leadership issues in bridging scientific, management, and political systems to create a just and sustainable world;

·         Leadership and disciplinary issues in integrating across and within scientific disciplines:  leadership and responsibility implications, ethical issues, and sustainability issues for the future in, e.g., energy, biodiversity, food security, agriculture, genomics, disease;

·         How business and other types of enterprises are bridging across scientific, management, and social science disciplines to create a sustainable future; and

·         Social-eco system management and governance, Earth System governance, global action networks (GANs), valuing ecosystem services.

SCHEDULE FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Abstracts of papers (max. 500 words) can be submitted to the conference office (CRL2014@up.ac.za). They should be submitted electronically (by e-mail), in RTF/MSWord format as file attachments (not as part of the message).

31 January 2014: Deadline for abstracts of 500 words, to be submitted to CRL2014@up.ac.za

15 March 2014: Notification of acceptance of abstracts

All abstracts will go through a blind-review process. The conference manager will remove all author identifying information and process review of abstracts.

15 June 2014: Deadline for full paper submission, to be submitted to CRL2014@up.ac.za

All full paper submissions will go through a double-blind peer review process. Therefore, all author-identifying information should be removed from the paper except for a cover page. We advise all non-native english speakers to have their papers checked by a native speaker before submission. Papers should be no longer than 35 pages (double-spaced) including tables, graphs, references and endnotes. The formatting of the paper has to follow the guidelines of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship.

Please check our website (http://www.up.ac.za/crl) for up-to-date information on deadlines and procedures.

Any further queries about the academic conference can be addressed to:     E-mail:      CRL2014@up.ac.za

                             Tel:       +27 12 420 4271

Sandra Waddock

Galligan Chair of Strategy

Carroll School Scholar of Corporate Responsibility

Professor of Management

Boston College

Carroll School of Management

Chestnut Hill, MA 02467  USA

617-552-0477

waddock@bc.edu  

https://www2.bc.edu/~waddock/

Check out my latest book:  Building the Responsible Enterprise by Sandra Waddock and Andreas Rasche (Stanford, 2012) at:  http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=21915 (useful for an overview of corporate responsibility and companies...or as a textbook for your business in society course!)

Check out my CDs at www.cdbaby/cd/sandrawaddock