"Alternative Business Models for Sustainable Development": Colloquium Euram, 6-8th June 2012, Rotterdam. Call for paper until 17 January 2012

Faced with socioeconomic and environmental risks and crises, as well as with the persistence of poverty and gross inequalities, research needs to focus on alternative business models.

In this track of the 12th Euram conference "Social Innovation for Competitiveness, Organisational Performance and Human Excellence", we will try to identify the specificities of innovative or, conversely, traditional alternative models that claim to contribute to sustainable development; the conditions under which they can solve some of the aforementioned problems; the main obstacles, and the paradoxes they are confronting; the scope and limits they may reach; and the way they enrich and complement corporations’ classical Business Models or, on the contrary, intend to substitute other logics to the dominant ones.

We will investigate the actors, networks and institutions that promote alternative models, the aims they pursue, the financing, governance, strategy and organization of their operations, the evaluation of their results, and the (sometimes conflicting) frameworks and indicators adopted to conduct such evaluations: profitability, business case, socioeconomic development, emancipation, human rights, democracy, capacity building and community development.

While not being exclusive, six main devices will be privileged in this track: Base of the Pyramid; Social Entrepreneurship; Microfinance and Social Venture Capital; Social Economy and Nonprofits Organizations; Fair Trade; Public-Private Partnership. Research could, amongst other issues, explore the kind of specific: funding but also cooperation, management and outcome measurement, implied by such ventures. We wish to bring together scholars from various fields of the social sciences (management, law, sociology, economics, political science, social psychology, history, human geography…), who share a common interest in Alternative Business Models issues

We value:

• Theoretical, methodological and/or empirical works,
• Managerial or more social/political orientations,
• Micro, meso (for instance, sector/global value chain or region) or macro lenses,
• Diachronic (historical) and/or synchronic studies,
• Classical, constructionist/institutionalist or critical analyses.

We intend to publish the best papers, as well as some of the results of our debates, in International Management Review.

Colloquium, 6th-8th June 2012 in Rotterdam

Submission of papers : 17 January 2012 – 14h00 (2pm) Brussels Time

Notification to Conference Authors : As of 27 March 2012

Early bird registration – 20 April 2012

Track - Alternative Business Models for Sustainable Development