This year’s EBEN Research Conference will be held in Palermo (Italy), September 8-9, 2016. Theme of the conference: ‘Ethical Behavior and Ethical Disclosure‘.
Deadline: March 30, 2016
Despite the strengthened debate and the general interest in ethical behavior and ethical disclosure, the link between this two aspects is still an under-investigated topic.
Despite some critical analysis, in the last years the ethical foundations of social/sustainability disclosure (but also generically of corporate disclosure) and the consistency between disclosure and business practices has not always been analyzed in depth.
Even in light of the recent scandals that highlighted the gap between the entrepreneurial/managerial action and the content of the disclosure documents, the conference proposes to think about the risk that these documents are simply tools of impression management or managerial capture. This topic is strongly relevant considering that in the last years news tools (e.g., integrated reporting) have been developed and their goals and main consequences are not fully clear. In a physiological view, the ethical culture and behavior of an organization should entail the adoption of tools able to show the actual corporate behavior but also to spread the values of that organization. Actually the corporate disclosure, indeed, seems often characterized by an opportunistic approach. Therefore, the general topic of the conference can be studied in terms of research of the philosophical foundations of corporate accountability and moral responsibility according to which the firms should ground their communication towards stakeholders. Many other crucial questions could be debated in the conference, for example: if voluntary and not standardized social disclosure could be more able to strengthen the compliance with moral norms, or if it encourages not coherent corporate behaviors; if the choice of different users of the corporate disclosure reports (all stakeholders or only investors) can affect the transparency, the consistency, reliability and the effectiveness of the communication.
The EBEN Research Conference 2016 will focus on this particular field that is the understanding of the complex relations between the ethical behavior and the way in which the business decides to disclosure this behavior. We also invite to propose papers that are able to depict not only the link between the two aspect but also the meaning and mechanism that characterize ethical behavior and ethical disclosure. We propose the following research themes and major research tracks at the conference:
- Social and Integrated Disclosure: ethical foundations and implications
- Corruption: implications in terms of ethical behavior and ethical disclosure
- Social Entrepreneurship and ethical behavior
- Ethical Behavior and disclosure in public management
- Religion and corporate social behavior
- Philosophical premises for an ethical behavior in markets and organizations
- Environmental/sustainable management and business ethics
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