By Tobias Gößling
This year’s annual EBEN conference took place on the Dante Building of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Tilburg Sustainability Center, an inter-faculty research group and the department of Organization Studies at Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences had invited to discuss research and practice in Business Ethics and Social Responsibility.
The main topic of this conference was doux commerce, an idea that might be particularly visible in a traditional industrial city like Tilburg was: Capitalism and competition will not only eventually lead to the benefit of the whole society but will also contribute to the development of kind manners and benevolent behavior. Will they? 90 researchers and ethics practitioners attended the conference to discuss 75 academic papers, almost half of them centered around this specific topic.The venue of the conference in the old industrial city of Tilburg takes part in the changes that industries and societies are undergoing nowadays. Whereas for decennia, the Tilburg industry workers had a rough life but participated in the same community as their employers, nowadays the city of Tilburg is characterized by a diversity of parallel living spheres.
The conference was sponsored by Tilburg Sustianability Center (TSC), Organization Studies of TSB, and Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.