The aim of the workshop is to provide an opportunity for scholars as well as practitioners to present and develop their research ideas. While there are no restrictions in regards to paper topics other than their relevance to business ethics and corporate responsibility, we particularly welcome contributions to the following sub-themes:

• Business and human rights: the institutionalization of business and human rights as a research field is evolving rapidly. Currently, the field is driven predominantly by legalistic angles on the subject while other, non-legal disciplines remain underrepresented. We particularly welcome contributions that explore the subject from management, business ethics, international business, political science and other non-legal perspectives. We also welcome empirical analyses as well as contributions specifically on teaching business and human rights.  

• Political role and responsibility of corporations: recent years have heralded a growing interest of scholars in business ethics and corporate responsibility in the political role and activities of companies and the responsibilities that inevitably come with them. Possible perspectives include, but are not limited to: business-government negotiations, lobbying, the interaction between corporations and non-governmental and civil society organizations, corporate influence and impact on public policy.

• Historic corporate social responsibility: In recent years, historians, journalists and civil society activists have started to dig into the dark side of the past of some corporations: accomplices of the Nazi regime, or Apartheid South Africa, profiteers from slavery and producer of large scale ecological disasters. The functionalist interest of corporations is obvious in this case and the hermeneutical struggle over the interpretation of past incidents visible in public debates. How has the narration around corporate social responsible and irresponsible behavior evolved in the course of history? How do corporations use their past and storytelling in CSR and business strategy? Why are some serious cases of corporate irresponsibility collectively forgotten? How does the process of remembering and forgetting corporate (ir)responsibility work? More specifically, what do different people/ organizations do in order to forget or remember, or make other stakeholders remember or forget?

• ​Future directions in business ethics: four decades of business ethics research and discussion have turned the field from a predominantly philosophical into a multi-disciplinary affair. New influences by, among others, (neo-)institutionalism, organizational theory, or neuro- and behavioral sciences, are reshaping the discussion in profound new ways. We welcome contributions that reflect on such new influences and their impact on the nature, identity, and trajectory of business ethics as a field.

• Post-structural and post-foundational currents in business ethics: Post-structural and post-foundational theories, which are often, if falsely, accused of moral relativism (‘anything goes’), ask what business ethics becomes if one abandons the notion of a final (transcendental) ground upon which businesses’ moral course of action can be based. We welcome contributions which use post-structural and post-foundational approaches, such as those informed by the work of Oliver Marchart, Ernesto Laclau, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, to pose new and intricate questions about the (im)possibility of business ethics under conditions of contingency and contestation.