Read This Article, but Don’t Print It

Eric Lamm, Jennifer Tosti-Kharas, and Eric G. Williams, all of San Francisco State University, published “Read This Article, but Don’t Print It: Organizational Citizenship Behavior Toward the Environment” on January 28, 2013 in Group & Organization Management. The abstract:

This article contributes to the growing research interest on sustainability-directed citizenship behaviors by helping to develop the construct of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) toward the environment, defined as voluntary behavior not specified in official job descriptions that, through the combined efforts of individual employees, help to make the organization and/or society more sustainable. Hypotheses predict the extent to which employees’ beliefs about their organization and about sustainability in general will be associated with OCBs toward the environment. The hypotheses are tested via a field survey of 733 employees working in a variety of occupations. Regression results indicated that OCBs toward the environment were related to, yet distinct from, OCBs in general, perceived organizational support (POS), affective commitment (AC), and beliefs that sustainability is important both in general and for one’s current organization. The article concludes with theoretical implications for research on sustainability and extra-role behaviors as well as the practical implications for managers wishing to foster sustainability in their organization.

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Call for Papers: Sustainability and Simulation/Gaming

Call for Papers
Sustainability and simulation/gaming
Special issue of
Simulation & Gaming:
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theory, Practice and Research

http://sg.sagepub.com/
 
http://www.unice.fr/sg/

Guest Editors:

Levent Yilmaz, Auburn University, USA
Tuncer Ören, University of Ottawa, Canada

As the challenges involving the achievement of a sustainable society become truly global involving interdependencies among social, political, and technical dimensions that collectively influence risk, simulation gaming with complex system models is becoming a highly effective strategy to study them. In today’s challenging policy environment, government officials and other decision-makers are confronting difficult sustainability problems whose common feature is their complexity.

Even under optimistic conditions, unexpected disasters and crises will increase severity of conditions for immediate disaster relief and the need to assist large number of refugees. Also, human actions contribute to environmental disasters such as oil spills. These emerging challenges suggest development of adaptive and resilient plans that can be revised under conditions of deep uncertainty. Development of simulation-based predictive displays for a control system or predictive displays based on multisimulation to evaluate several futures and decisions based on the outcomes of several futures will be critical enablers to deal with uncertainty that is pervasive in complex interconnected systems that need to be properly managed. Better data can also drive simulation games, which can help predicting important trends, assessing how well proposed policies and strategies would meet desired system-level objectives, and determining the optimal levels of resource use. Examples include growth, development, and evolution of urban areas, management of critical infrastructures during crisis and disaster, and management of natural environments such as forests or rivers as well as policies for governance such as fiscal and economic policies to assure sustainability and definitely to avoid disasters. However, effectiveness and relevance of simulation games to decision-making require careful consideration of the integration of the simulation gaming solutions with deliberation and political process. Hence, the issues pertaining to transparency, legitimacy, and participation are critical pillars of an integrated strategy.

With this special issue, we aim to provide the opportunity for authors to contribute original and unpublished articles that present the use of Simulation & Gaming for exploring social, economic, and environmental sustainability of human and natural systems. Simulation gaming can serve as a proactive anticipatory system to examine possibly unintended consequences of course of actions, as
their impacts are amplified and are often unforeseeable due to complex interactions and emergence that permeate through the components of a complex interconnected system of systems. Multidisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome to address the problem of complex system sustainability.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Integrated economic, social, and environmental simulation games for sustainability
• Models of human factors and social dynamics in relation to human and organizational enterprises
• Simulation games for decision support under uncertainty and long-term policy analysis
• Metrics for proactive anticipation of unsustainable conditions and their solution
• Tools and techniques for assessing adaptability, resilience, and emergent behavior in complex adaptive human and social systems
• Simulation gaming for disaster management and recovery
• Advanced methods and tools for testing of the resilience of proposed financial regulations
• New ways of thinking for policy makers for predictability, control, and explanation of complex adaptive phenomena
• New resource management paradigms investigated by M&S
• Data needs and validation of sustainability models and simulation games
• Synergy of software agents and simulation games, including agent-monitored simulation games

Instructions for Submission: Before submitting a manuscript, please consult the Guide for S&G Authors, available at
http://www.unice.fr/sg/
. The first step involves sending an abstract and keywords to the guest editors. After the approval of your abstract by the guest editors, you can submit your full manuscript.

Levent Yilmaz yilmaz |@| auburn.edu
Tuncer Ören oren |@| eecs.uOttawa.ca
S&G at Sage
http://sg.sagepub.com/

S&G Author Guide
http://www.unice.fr/sg/

Editor: David Crookall simulation.gaming |@| gmail.com
yilmaz |@| auburn.edu
oren |@| eecs.uOttawa.ca

Schedule

• Receipt of proposals: by end of January 2013.
• Response to proposals: in a month.
• Submission of manuscripts: by May 15, 2013
• First review: to be submitted by July 15, 2013.
• Revision (maybe 2nd review), editing, proofing,
• in a month
• On line publication: as articles are accepted.
• Publication of special issue: 2013

Your Food, Your Planet: Time to Take Action

CIAT International Center for Tropical Agriculture (cc)

If you haven’t yet seen the “Story of Agriculture and Climate Change: The Road We’ve Traveled” Oxfam infographic, take a look here, courtesy of the Weekend Musings sustainability blog (click on the graphic to zoom in). It gives a clear overview of a topic that is highly complex, yet impacts our very lives: our planet’s booming population depends on agriculture for survival, and with the threat of climate change looming, we need to adapt. For related research, take a look at the following articles:

“GM Crops and Smallholders: Biosafety and Local Practice“
By Klara Jacobson, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Anne Ingeborg Myhr, GenØk-Center for Biosafety
Published November 19, 2012 in The Journal of Environment & Development (JED)

“Responding to Climate Change: Barriers to Reflexive Modernization in U.S. Agriculture“
By Diana Stuart of Kellogg Biological Station, Rebecca L. Schewe of Mississippi State University, and Matthew McDermott of Michigan State University
Published in the September 2012 issue of Organization & Environment (O&E)

iltopomuschiato (cc)

Editor’s note: Calling all photographers: Would you like to help put a new face on Organization and Environment? The journal is currently holding a cover photo contest. Click here to submit your photo by December 30!

Shelby Hunt on Sustainable Marketing

rawlsnews.ba.ttu.edu

Marketing legend Shelby D. Hunt, the Jerry S. Rawls and P.W. Horn Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University, published “Toward the Institutionalization of Macromarketing: Sustainable Enterprise, Sustainable Marketing, Sustainable Development, and the Sustainable Society” on August 9, 2012 in the Journal of Macromarketing. A past editor of the Journal of Marketing (1985-1987), he is the author of numerous books, including Marketing Theory: Foundations, Controversy, Strategy, Resource-Advantage Theory (M.E. Sharpe, 2010) and A General Theory of Competition: Resources, Competences, Productivity, Economic Growth (SAGE Publications, 2000). One of the 250 most frequently cited researchers in economics and business (Thompson-ISI), he has written numerous articles on competitive theory, strategy, macromarketing, ethics, relationship marketing, channels of distribution, philosophy of science, and marketing theory. The abstract:

Major events in the institutionalization of macromarketing include (1) the series of macromarketing conferences that began at the University of Colorado in 1976, (2) the founding of the Journal of Macromarketing in 1981, and (3) the establishment of the Macromarketing Society in 2004. This article focuses on the continuing institutionalization of macromarketing by providing a commentary on Mark Peterson’s new textbook, Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach. The commentary is structured around seven questions: (1)What is Peterson’s ‘‘sustainable enterprise’’? (2)What is a macromarketing approach? (3)What is the ‘‘stability illusion’’ and how does Peterson dispel it with resource-advantage (R-A) theory? (4) How does R-A theory relate to sustainable marketing? (5) Does the text contribute to institutionalization or reinstitutionalization? (6)Was the financial crisis a ‘‘failure of laissez-faire’’? (7) Where is the discussion of the ‘‘welfare-state, Ponzi illusion,’’ and the sustainable society?

Click here to continue reading Dr. Hunt’s article in the Journal of Macromarketing and here to learn more about the journal.

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Organization & Environment Turns a New Leaf

epSos.de (CC BY 2.0)

Organization & Environment invites you to submit articles, essays, reviews and more for a “re-booted” issue on Sustainability and Organizations: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going.

Sustainability opportunities and challenges appear to be increasing in frequency and intensity in this second decade of the 21st Century. Advancing the capability of individual, organizational, and societal efforts to achieve and maintain long-term quality of life values (our short-hand definition of sustainability), such as addressing global climate disruption, ever-increasing population and economic activity, massive extinctions of biodiversity-critical species and toxification of nearly two-thirds of the planet’s ecosystems, and the crushing scourges of poverty, enslavement, and exploitation, all present sustainability scholars (and practitioners) with positive chances for a better world and negative threats of “sustain-ocide”.

As Organization & Environment reorganizes itself to help sustainability researchers better address these environmental and socio-economic opportunities and challenges, the incoming O&E co-editors thought that a thorough assessment of our past and present collective sustainability milieu and suggestions on how we can best address these in our scholarship (and, perhaps, even in our practice) would be an appropriate theme for our first “re-oriented” issue.

To this end, we are encouraging all sustainability management, policy, and related social science researchers to develop and submit articles, essays, reviews, and other intellectual efforts to focus on where we have been (our individual/organizational/societal past and present research efforts to improve on that condition) and we are going and suggested ways forward in the future, both conceptually and practically. Our main intent is to explore the connections between the management of organizations and any of the dimensions of sustainability.

Some of the questions we are asking contributors to consider, whether through our double-blind peer review process or our co-editor invitations include (but are not limited to):

• How have researchers in sustainability helped advance sustainability at one or more levels of human organization?
• What have been the observed or hypothesized impacts of environmental and/or socio-economic sustainability research on those studied phenomena (that is, does it look like our research has made a difference so far)?
• Which sustainability issues have not been adequately addressed by sustainability researchers in the past, why do these gaps exist, and how can these issues be addressed in future sustainability research?
• Which sustainability issue or issues (environmental and/or socio-economic) will become significantly more salient in the decade(s) immediately ahead, and how should sustainability researchers approach these for maximum impact?
• Since most of us have either family members or friends who are in one or more “future generations”, how can and should these personal connections to the future influence our research to help contribute to their welfare long after we move to the next stages of our careers and lives?
• How can we collaborate with colleagues in related sustainability fields to join us in researching salient sustainability issues, providing broader (and perhaps deeper and more effective) perspectives on how sustainability opportunities and challenges can be be approached jointly? Particularly, how can multiple social sciences collaborate /have collaborated with the analysis of sustainability management in organizations?
• How might technology, whether classified as hardware, software, or “warmware”, be used by either us or by others in society (such as practitioners and our other stakeholders) to leverage sustainability opportunities and tackle sustainability challenges with positive sustainability results?
• Whatever your current level and status in sustainability academia, what kind of sustainability legacy would you like to eventually develop that you think would be seen as having a positive sustainability impact?
• How can social and environmental sustainability management phenomena be integrated for “total” or “holistic” sustainability approaches, whether through integrated sustainability indicators, approaches, policies, values, strategies, programs, or results?
• Speaking of integration of sustainability phenomena, how can academic and practitioner sustainability management efforts and achievements be better connected to one another in the future, perhaps learning from the “non-successes” of these efforts in the past?
• What are the antecedents and outcomes of organizational and inter-organizational sustainability capability generation at regional, national, and global levels?
• What academic theories have contributed to practical sustainability results, are new sustainability theories needed if these results have not been sufficient, and how might academics best communicate these theories and their actual or potential impacts to their multiple sustainability-oriented stakeholders for maximum impact toward sustainability solutions?

These and many other related past, present, and future sustainability phenomena are appropriate and welcomed for this “re-booted” O&E journal issue. We encourage sustainability scholars from multiple disciplines to contact either of the co-editors about their “sustainability-in-transition” ideas and to think, feel, and write “outside the box”. In addition, please also feel free to consult with the co-editors to discuss how their potential submissions can help redirect and take the journal to the next level of quality and impact.

For paper submission, authors will be required to set up an online account on the SAGETrack system hosted by ScholarOne. All manuscripts should be submitted via
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/oe
.

Your suggestions for future issues are also welcomed, so please contact either Mark Starik (mark.starik@gmail.com) or Alberto Aragon-Correa (jaragon@ugr.es) to develop new, interesting, and impactful ideas for this and future O&E issues. A new O&E Editorial Board will be forming with the goal of increasing the quality and readership of the journal by becoming both more rigorous and relevant in addressing the sustainability issues of our time.

Let’s make future generations of sustainability scholars proud of our achievements and our efforts to provide the foundations for truly sustainable human organizations, including the individuals within them and the societies of which they are key elements!

To learn more about Organization & Environment, please click here.

Real Facts, Real Issues: Role-Play in the Management Classroom

dddaag (CC BY 2.0)

It’s not every management course that has students requesting an exam, explaining that they want to come to class prepared to reap the benefits of the learning experience. Yet that’s exactly what happened in the innovative Climate Change Policy course developed by Melissa Paschall and Rolf Wüstenhagen of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Dr. Carolyn Egri of Simon Fraser University interviewed the authors about their article, “More Than a Game: Learning About Climate Change Through Role-Play,” published in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of Management Education (JME). Click here to download the podcast, and here to subscribe on iTunes. Also check out this video highlight of the project, a finalist in the global PRME LEADERS+20 Competition.

Melissa Paschall is a doctoral student in Management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, where she helped develop the CEMS Climate Change Role Play.  From November 2010 through March 2012 she was a visiting student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.  Melissa has consulted companies and non-profits on sustainability issues both independently and as a Senior Consultant at Sustainable Business Strategies.  Her current research focuses on ethical trading relationships and sustainable livelihoods for small farmers.

Dr. Rolf Wüstenhagen is a Director of the Institute for Economy and the Environment (IWÖ-HSG) and holds the Good Energies Chair for Management of Renewable Energies at the University of St. Gallen. He graduated in Management Science and Engineering (TU Berlin) and holds a PhD in Business. In 2005, 2008 and 2011, respectively, he held visiting faculty positions at University of British Columbia (Vancouver), Copenhagen Business School, and National University Singapore. His research focuses on decision making under uncertainty by energy investors, consumers and entrepreneurs. From 2008-2011 he served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the Special Report on renewable energy and climate change mitigation. Since 2011, he is a member of the advisory board for the Swiss government’s energy strategy 2050.

Dr. Carolyn Egri, professor of management and organization studies at Simon Fraser University, is a pioneer in research related to corporate environmental and social responsibility – she has been publishing on this topic for more than 15 years, long before it became trendy. “It’s meaningful work,” she says. “Since it’s a relatively new field, it’s very exciting – there’s the opportunity to develop new standards and ideas.” A TD Canada Trust Distinguished Teaching award recipient, Carolyn has been examining corporate environmental social responsibility practices as well as cross-cultural differences in managerial values and influence tactics around the world. Carolyn is a former chair of the Academy of Management’s Organizations and the Natural Environment interest group and has been chair of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Research Development Initiatives adjudication committee.

Follow this link to hear more interviews from the Journal of Management Education podcast series. Further information about the journal can be found here.

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Tomorrow’s Business Leaders vs. the Climate Challenge

We are pleased to present a Journal of Management Education (JME) study that is making waves around the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME), a UN-coordinated initiative that aims to increase corporate responsibility and sustainability in business education.

Melissa Paschall and Rolf Wüstenhagen, both of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, published “More Than a Game: Learning About Climate Change Through Role-Play” on July 8, 2011 in JME. The article explores “CEMS Climate Change Strategy Role Play,” an exclusive course for management students that was a top 10 finalist in the PRME LEADERS+20 Competition presented by the UN and Aarhus University, Denmark. Find out more about the project and hear commentary from the authors in this video highlight.

Dr. Paschall and Dr. Wüstenhagen wrote:

Climate change has the potential to affect businesses in many ways: by changing the regulatory environment, reducing or shifting natural resources, catalyzing severe weather events, influencing customer preferences, and even displacing customers and employees. Businesses, in turn, can affect climate change by either continuing to emit unsustainable levels of greenhouse gases or finding ways to deliver customer value in an environmentally sustainable manner—and by lobbying for regulations that support their preferred strategies.

Because today’s management students are tomorrow’s business leaders, we recognize the importance of preparing them to lead well in a carbon-constrained world. To this end, during the spring of 2008 we began designing a new course for masters’ students in business, with the goal of creating deep learning around the topic of climate change—and fostering the ability to act on that knowledge in a decision-making context. Our objective was to educate students about the scientific and political dimensions of the subject and to help them see connections to management practice.

Read the full article here. To learn more about the Journal of Management Education, please follow this link.

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Tackling a Wicked Management Problem

Akuppa (CC BY 2.0)

A new study in SAGE Open makes no bones about climate change as a wicked management problem. Urging a dynamic approach, the study zeroes in on Ghana as an opportunity for adapting water management to climate change.

John FitzGibbon and Kenneth O. Mensah, both of the University of Guelph, published “Climate Change as a Wicked Problem: An Evaluation of the Institutional Context for Rural Water Management in Ghana” on May 25, 2012 in SAGE Open. To read more recent articles, click here.

The abstract:

Understanding complexity suggests that some problems are more complex than others and defy conventional solutions. These wicked problems will not be solved by the same tools and processes that are complicit in creating them. Neither will they be resolved by approaches short on explicating the complex interconnections of the multiple causes, consequences, and cross-scale actors of the problem. Climate change is one such wicked problem confronting water management in Ghana with a dilemma. The physical consequences of climate change on Ghana’s water resources are progressively worsening. At the same time, existing institutional arrangements demonstrate weak capacities to tackle climate change–related complexities in water management. Therefore, it warrants a dynamic approach imbued with complex and adaptive systems thinking, which also capitalizes on instrumental gains from prior existing institutions. Adaptive Co-Management offers such an opportunity for Ghana to adapt its water management system to climate change.

To learn more about SAGE Open, please follow this link.

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Rio +20: JED Special Issue

The Journal of Environment & Development (JED), which was recently selected for coverage in the Social Science Citation Index, has released the June 2012 Special Issue: Policy Instruments for Sustainable Development at Rio +20. Click here to view the Table of Contents.

Joseph E. Aldy and Robert N. Stavins, both of Harvard University, published the lead article, “The Promise and Problems of Pricing Carbon: Theory and Experience.”

The abstract:

Because of the global commons nature of climate change, international cooperation among nations will likely be necessary for meaningful action at the global level. At the same time, it will inevitably be up to the actions of sovereign nations to put in place policies that bring about meaningful reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases. Due to the ubiquity and diversity of emissions of greenhouse gases in most economies, as well as the variation in abatement costs among individual sources, conventional environmental policy approaches, such as uniform technology and performance standards, are unlikely to be sufficient to the task. Therefore, attention has increasingly turned to market-based instruments in the form of carbon-pricing mechanisms. We examine the opportunities and challenges associated with the major options for carbon pricing—carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, emission reduction credits, clean energy standards, and fossil fuel subsidy reductions—and provide a review of the experiences, drawn primarily from developed countries, in implementing these instruments. Our summary of relevant theory and survey of experience from industrialized nations may be helpful to those who wish to examine the potential applicability of carbon pricing in the context of developing countries.

To learn more about The Journal of Environment & Development (JED), please follow this link.

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Call For Papers: Eco-Innovation in Hospitality and Tourism

epSos.de (CC BY 2.0)

Do you have a sound, useful, and practical message about innovative and sustainable practices of interest to managers in the hospitality industry? Submit your research to the upcoming special issue of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly: Sustainable and Eco-Innovative Practices in Hospitality and Tourism.

Special Issue:

Hospitality companies are cognizant of the importance of innovation and a proactive environmental approach to successful operation. Consequently, hospitality and tourism organizations are striving to be eco-friendly while maintaining their competitive edge financially. In support of this effort, we are seeking research that helps hospitality organizations create sustainable solutions that make best use of core resources and improve organizational efficiencies while reducing our collective carbon foot print. Research that helps hospitality and tourism organizations become operationally productive, socially responsible and proactively ‘eco-innovative’ citizens of the society is highly encouraged.

Submit Papers in these Areas:

Areas of inquiry may include but are not limited to:

• New models, frameworks, and explanations for the hospitality and tourism fields with a
• focus on sustainability
• Economics of sustainable decisions – qualitative and quantitative approaches
• Best eco-innovative practices in travel, tourism & hospitality organizations
• Defining sustainability – a critical review of current literature and suggestions for future
• ISO 400, Nordic Swan Green Palms – comparative analysis of Green tools and measures
• Scale development for measuring Green firms of tomorrow
• Case studies of champions of sustainability, social responsibility, eco-innovation and
• Green practices from hospitality and tourism
• ‘Going Green’ from an interdisciplinary perspective

Deadlines:

Abstracts Submissions – October 15th , 2012
Abstract Decisions – Nov. 15th, 2012
FULL Paper Submission – January 15th 2013
Full Paper Decisions – March 15th 2013
Submission of Revisions – April 15th 2013
Revision Decisions – May 15th, 2013

How To Submit:

Prospective authors are strongly encouraged to contact the special issue editors regarding potential topics of interest or any questions / suggestions regarding the special issue. Click here for contact information. All manuscripts should be submitted online via
mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cq only.

Please click here for more information and complete submission guidelines.