An editorial agenda for the next two years

Citation

Jones, G. (2011), "An editorial agenda for the next two years", Journal of Global Responsibility, Vol. 2 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jgr.2011.46602aaa.002

An editorial agenda for the next two years

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Global Responsibility, Volume 2, Issue 1

The agenda of the Journal of Global Responsibility over the next two years will be to develop a concentrated examination of three critical topics, while still providing a platform for the full array of interests subsumed by the general topic area of global responsibility. To do this, we will be running a mix of general and special editions. The special editions will examine, respectively, business education, the nature of responsibility and finally leadership through the lens of global responsibility.

The world is now approximately two-thirds of the way though the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainability. A key outcome of the energy developed by this decade of concentrated attention is the UN Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME). PRME has only been operating since July 2007, but already has over 300 signatories; these are business schools that have committed to report regularly on the six principles – or to put it another way – to report on their efforts to engender a more global sense of responsibility. While it is perhaps too early to reflect in a summative way on the effect of these grand strategies, it is timely to provide a platform where actors can show how they are meeting the challenges.

The next issue of the JGR due out in October 2011 will focus on business education and global responsibility. Look forward to articles that showcase promising practice. There will also be articles that begin an examination of responsibility and the underpinning graduate capabilities such as critical self-reflection. Reflexivity is easy to write into a curriculum in an aspiration sense. However, actually achieving it as a graduate outcome requires a sophisticated approach. In particular, we need to apply critical theory to much of the dogma that passes for leadership thought. We want to be able to transcend the Western approach from which much of our current concepts of leadership have arisen.

We also want to skill students in critical thought, so that the journey towards responsibility is emancipating and empowering rather than just another added burden. To that end, it is also time to examine what we mean by responsibility. Volume Three Issue One (due out in early 2012) will be a special issue devoted to an examination of the nature of responsibility. The dilemma for most of us is one of managing the gap between the personal sense of responsibility and the corporate sense of responsibility. Implicit is the idea of the company as person, which is not a notion that is accepted by all. Whether or not it is valid to conceptualize a company as a person, the idea that a company has a culture, or perhaps many cultures, is well accepted. It is also well accepted that the real company culture – as opposed to the slogans that inevitably appear in the public relations literature – can be expressed as values. There is therefore, the potential for people to find roles where the collective sense of responsibility and the individual sense of responsibility are as close to a match as possible.

Responsibility is often equated with accountability, and to be sure, responsibility includes a willingness to give an account for one’s actions. But accountability in this sense is a simple, codified and fairly dull process. Responsibility is transcendent and to a large extent it is personal as well as corporate. Responsibility includes the areas that are difficult to codify and therefore impose. It includes the area of moral judgment and embraces altruism. Responsibility therefore has a spiritual and emotional dimension and as well as a managerial dimension. This special issue on the nature of responsibility provides scholars with an opportunity to explore this very large concept with its many rooms. The call for papers is currently out.

The current issue (Volume Two, Issue One) is a general issue in as much as it publishes the best submissions from the broad survey of interests within the area of global responsibility.

Two articles assist in the redevelopment of our concept of responsibility. Rüdiger Hahn provides a theoretical discussion, which serves to integrate the concepts of corporate responsibility and sustainable development. This is an application of traditional philosophical thought to the task of building a more powerful conceptual framework that provides both legitimacy and guidance to global responsibility. Chih Hung Chen uses a more empirical approach to provide a snapshot of how corporate social responsibility is conceptualized and practiced in Taiwan. Still in Asia, Oeyono, Samy and Bampton provide another empirical snapshot of CSR as practiced by the top companies in Indonesia and in particular examine the relationship between the extent of the commitment to CSR and real financial returns.

There is a broad set of questions that need to be answered about relations between the developed and developing world. These questions must be answered if we are to reach anything like a global concensus on the way forward. Compensation to the developing world has been on the global agenda at least since the time of the Bruntland Commission and is a feature of the current round of climate control negotiations. Compensation is usually seen through a political lens, as a way of giving the developing world a stake in carbon reduction. In this issue Tilokie Depoo and Davaid J. Rosner, construct the ethical argument for compensatory sustainability regimes that assist developing countries, especially in the context of global policy on climate change. Rolando M. Tomasini’s article looks at relations with the developing world in the context of learnings that sophisticated multinational companies can achieve when brought into joint ventures with, or service arrangements to, NGOs. Kerry Lynne Pedigo and Verena Mary Marshall look at the dilemmas that Australian managers confront when their manufacturing operations are located in the developing world. In particular, she provides a window into how these managers confront and personally deal with realities of child labour, hazardous working conditions, discrimination and exploitation.

This issue includes a presentation and evaluation of a structured educational experience that seeks to unite the more scientific elements of ecological education with the more spiritual development of education. Although the authors Eugene Allevato and Joan Marques, do not explicitly use the terminology of whole personal learning, the article will be of particular interest to those who seek to create a more integrated learning process.

Grant Jones