David Cooperrider - Böcker

Organizational Dimensions of Global Change is the first book in a new series designed to facilitate, across discipline and national boundaries, an emergent dialogue around the issue of global change and cooperative potential. Written by an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, the book explores how organizational scholarship and thinking can inform an understanding of global change issues and examines the potential of cooperation as a practice, an organizing accomplishment, and as a value for understanding issues of global change. It opens up conversations and research paths and addresses basic questions such as: What do we mean by global change research? What can organizational scholarship contribute to understanding the human dimensions of global change? If we were to offer a priority agenda for research and inquiry, what questions would we be asking and what kinds of research would have a high probability of making a large contribution to knowledge as well as a timely relevance for action? Topics discussed include global women leaders, corporations as agents of global change, international networking, the development of global environmental regimes, and collaborative knowledge creation. Organizational Dimensions of Global Change is an essential resource for students and scholars in the fields of organization and management science, policy studies, international relations and development studies, earth systems science, as well as the disciplines of sociology, economics, anthropology, political science, and psychology.

This issue features some of the smartest thinking in the world as it relates to the innovation-creating potential of a stakeholder view of the firm. It’s a changing world out there, and we hope this issue provides a sense that it’s time to seize this moment. Corporate citizenship is entering a new phase. We are seeing a coming together of a shareholder view of the firm and a stakeholder view of the firm. We are seeing a shift from stakeholder engagement as defensive and risk-reducing, to creative and innovation-producing — what we call 'generativity'.

Let’s face it: corporate citizenship is not normally the `go to’ discipline for those leaders aiming to inspire, delight, re-frame the game and generate business-uplifting innovation. But all of that may be changing, say the authors of this special issue of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship , as business is embracing design thinking as the next frontier in competitive advantage and as corporate citizenship is rapidly emerging as a catalyst for unexpected, disruptive business innovation.

The link between management education and the development of business leaders with socially responsible mind-sets and values is reaching a important turning point. We are seeing an increased attention to research and education innovation to prepare tomorrow’s leaders with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to act and lead responsibly. These contributions provide models, design ideas and actual experiences that strongly support the idea that management education can rise to the challenge and promise laid out by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in acknowledging the potential of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education and similar innovative stimuli: that `the Principles for Responsible Management Education have the capacity to take the case for universal values and business into classrooms on every continent’.