AMLE Call for Special Issue Papers: Management Learning and Education as Drivers of Fundamental Alternative Forms of Organizing
2025-11-01 00:00 - 2026-01-04 00:00 (America/New_York) | Kopaonik
Guest Editors

Simon Pek, University of Victoria (Canada)

Frédéric Dufays, HEC Liège-ULiège & KU Leuven (Belgium)

Martyna Śliwa, University of Durham (United Kingdom)

Ajnesh Prasad, Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico)

Amon Barros, FGV EAESP (Brazil)

AMLE Editors

Laura Colombo, University of Exeter (United Kingdom)

Katrin Muehlfeld, Trier University (Germany)

Call for Papers

In promoting managerialism and shareholder value maximization, business schools have long been implicated in perpetuating what has come to be popularized as grand challenges in the literature. These include, among other phenomena, climate change, biodiversity loss, economic and gender inequality (e.g., Kumar et al., 2024; Locke & Spender, 2011; Parker, 2018). AMLE, in particular, has been at the vanguard of identifying and interrogating the nexus between business schools, management education, and management learning, on the one hand, and the perpetuation of grand challenges, on the other hand. For example, in describing the economic arrangements that structure society, Fotaki and Prasad (2015: 558) observed almost a decade ago: “[M]any blind spots and unanswered questions about the complicity of business schools in propagating inequalities under neoliberal regimes still exist.” More recently, turning to the matter of climate change, Colombo and colleagues (2024) lamented in an editorial about the historical role of management learning and education (MLE) in contributing to the deteriorating state of the world’s natural environment. This led them to ask: “How can our discipline help envision and shape a thriving future, in a way that contributes knowledge, skills, and wisdom toward tackling the contemporary ecological and climate crises?” (207). Observations such as these are being raised with greater frequency and urgency by MLE scholars seeking to tackle pernicious societal grand challenges (Figueiró, Neutzling, & Lessa, 2022; Mailhot & Lachapelle, 2024).

To tackle grand challenges, attention has been given to alternative organizations and the positive societal impact they generate (e.g., Cavotta & Mena, 2023), as well as to their prefigurative function of and for an alternative future—a future that is better aligned with social and environmental considerations (Bhatt, Qureshi, Shukla, & Hota, 2024; Schiller-Merkens, 2024). Researchers commonly use the term alternative organizations to describe those that meaningfully depart from some of the defining characteristics of traditional corporations. Such alternative forms include, among others, cooperatives, stakeholder firms, social enterprises, and employee-owned firms (e.g., Chen & Chen, 2021; Kociatkiewicz, Kostera, & Parker, 2021; Luyckx, Schneider, & Kourula, 2022; Mair & Rathert, 2021; Pek, 2023).

When alternative forms of organizing have been studied in the discipline of management, they have been largely reduced to incremental alternatives, pointing to “anything different to the traditional for-profit model” (Barin Cruz, Aquino Alves, & Delbridge, 2017: 324). Social enterprises are perhaps the quintessential incremental alternative. They have received a tremendous amount of scholarly attention to date in both management (Battilana & Lee, 2014) and MLE research (Pache & Chowdhury, 2012; Tracey & Phillips, 2007).

In this special issue, we are specifically interested in fundamental (Barin Cruz et al., 2017) alternative forms of organizing, which “challenge some of the classic principles of the capitalist system” (Barin Cruz et al., 2017: 323). Specifically, we consider fundamental alternative organizations as embracing joint or collective ownership instead of private ownership (Chen & Chen, 2021; Luyckx et al., 2022). This includes a broad diversity of organizations, including cooperatives (Zamagni & Zamagni, 2010), communes (Frye, 2022), broad-based employee ownership in the form of employee ownership trusts (Michael, 2017) and employee stock ownership plans (Blasi, Scharf, & Kruse, 2023), Indigenous economic development corporations (Savic & Hoicka, 2023), bicameral firms (Ferreras, 2017), commons-based peer production (Benkler & Nissenbaum, 2006), and community self-organizations, such as collective Black enterprises in the Colombian Pacific (Tubb, 2018). These organizations often, but not always, complement this distinctive approach to ownership with more democratic governance and management (Chen & Chen, 2021; Pek, 2021).

Fundamental alternatives have received only marginal attention from MLE scholars (though there are some exceptions, e.g., Audebrand, Camus, & Michaud, 2017) and they continue to remain largely absent from mainstream management textbooks (Rankin & Piwko, 2022). This curious lack of MLE engagement with fundamental alternative forms of organizing means that students graduating from business schools hoping to tackle grand challenges are not equipped with the tools and concepts necessary to be able to do so. For MLE scholarship to achieve its ostensible aim of producing socially conscientious leaders for a sustainable future, business school curricula must be broadened so as to include these fundamental alternative organizations.

To be sure, this is no small feat. Those who have tried to incorporate such organizations into their curricula have identified a range of challenges. For example, Audebrand and colleagues (2017) observed resistance from students (e.g., limited interest) as well as instructors (e.g., limited resources). Fournier (2006: 297) found that, while students actively engaged with concepts pertaining to alternative organizing, “they all demonstrated a lack of faith in their very possibility.” Yet, there is some evidence of how MLE can subvert even the most culturally embedded of social systems. Zulfiqar and Prasad (2021), for example, have illuminated how engaged pedagogy intended to raise consciousness on social inequalities among privileged business school students can unsettle and transcend taken-for-granted assumptions about the world.

With an eye on tackling societal grand challenges, MLE scholarship can and should play a major role in distilling the challenges to teaching and learning pertaining to fundamental alternative organizing and identifying solutions that can overcome them. These span the three domains of MLE research – i.e., the business of business schools, management learning, and management education (Lindebaum, 2024) – and their intersectional phenomena, including business schools’ and universities’ governance arrangements (Billsberry, Ambrosini, & Thomas, 2023; Wright, Greenwood, & Boden, 2011), inter-departmental relationships (Parker, 2021), student consumerism (Naidoo, Shankar, & Veer, 2011), and pedagogical interventions (Parker, Racz, & Palmer, 2018; Reedy & Learmonth, 2009). This special issue aims to generate new theory about fundamental alternative organizations and MLE and, in so doing, respond to calls for more critical thinking about the objectives of management education, greater collaboration with other scholarly disciplines, and a broadening of our pedagogical approaches (Colombo et al., 2024).

Illustrative Themes and Research Questions

Fundamental Alternative Organizations and the Business of Business Schools

How can challenges to incorporating fundamental alternatives be overcome by instructors, business school leaders, and accreditation agencies? For example, would different approaches to business school governance—perhaps those modeled on fundamental alternatives themselves like Mondragon University (Wright et al., 2011)—be helpful in this regard?

How can fundamental alternatives be woven into professional and executive education programs targeted at professionals in both traditional businesses and fundamental alternatives? What are the opportunities to rethink existing business models in this regard, such as developing targeted programs to support Cooperative Principle #5 on Education, Training, and Information from the statement of cooperative identity? (International Co-operative Alliance, n.d.)

How does integrating fundamental alternatives into MLE affect business schools’ relationships with stakeholders such as corporate philanthropic partners?

How do fundamental alternatives configure in MLE in unique and contrasting ways across cultures? For instance, do the form and/or effects of fundamental alternatives materialize differently in Global South versus Global North business school contexts?

How, and to what effects, could dominant publishers like Harvard Business Publishing better incorporate fundamental alternatives into their products? (Bridgman et al., 2016)

Fundamental Alternative Organizations and Management Learning

What new skills and competencies can students acquire through different pedagogical strategies focused on fundamental alternatives? For example, do these pedagogical strategies contribute to the development of civic capacities? (Colombo, 2023) Paradoxically, what skills and competencies might students inadvertently not acquire when moving MLE beyond its dominant focus on traditional business models to also include fundamental alternatives?

What potential unintended consequences like the amplification of formal, social, and psychological disempowerment (Diefenbach, 2020) might arise from teaching about fundamental alternatives?

How are instructors personally and professionally transformed through engaging with fundamental alternatives in their pedagogy? Do they, for instance, become more engaged in the governance of their business schools? Do they become more involved in activities that support the creation of fundamental alternatives? (Esper, Cabantous, Barin-Cruz, & Gond, 2017)

How can teaching fundamental alternatives inspire student entrepreneurs to develop new business models and practices (Pepin, Tremblay, Audebrand, & Chassé, 2024)?

How can teaching fundamental alternatives help students prefigure their paths toward a new economy (Schiller-Merkens, 2024)? To what extent does it impact their identity (formation) as students, as citizens, and/or as entrepreneurs? (Solbreux, Hermans, Pondeville, & Dufays, 2024)

Do the internal dynamics of fundamental alternatives offer new perspectives on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and, if so, how might they intervene in polemical debates over “woke” DEI policies taking place among business school academics? (Prasad & Śliwa, 2024

Fundamental Alternative Organizations and Management Education

Fundamental alternative organizations have been largely ignored in contemporary MLE scholarship as evidenced in their omission in economics and management texts (e.g., Kalmi, 2007; Rankin & Piwko, 2022; Schugurensky & McCollum, 2010). Instead, the traditional investor-owned, capitalist enterprise maintains a hegemonic presence in MLE despite growing concerns for more sustainability in business school education (Figueiró et al., 2022; Mailhot & Lachapelle, 2024). MLE researchers can help unpack the factors that may have contributed to this state of affairs.

Re-tracing the history of business schools (McLaren et al., 2021; Spicer, Jaser, & Wiertz, 2021; Wanderley, Alcadipani, & Barros, 2021), what key events may have contributed to the current marginal place of fundamental alternatives?

What is the role of isomorphic pressures generated by key actors like accreditation bodies in silencing or making fundamental alternatives visible in management education? (Romero, 2008)

What is the role of broader social discourses like student consumerism (Naidoo et al., 2011) and managerialism (Clegg, 2014) in undermining fundamental alternatives in MLE?

Why has MLE scholarship readily embraced incremental alternatives like social enterprises, while not affording similar legitimacy to fundamental alternatives like worker cooperatives and broad-based employee ownership?

While some authors have incorporated fundamental alternatives into their teaching (Audebrand et al., 2017; Fournier, 2006), there is much to learn about how fundamental alternatives could be integrated into different pedagogies. Additionally, we need a deeper understanding of the challenges instructors might face and how those challenges could be overcome. MLE scholarship has much to contribute to both of these closely related topics.

How can existing MLE pedagogies like experiential learning and service learning be translated to teach fundamental alternative organizations effectively? For example, should students’ and instructors’ interactions with organizations in service learning projects (Mazutis, 2024) differ in the case of fundamental alternatives versus incremental alternatives or traditional businesses?

How should educational efforts focused on fundamental alternatives be integrated and sequenced with those on traditional business topics (Pache & Chowdhury, 2012)?

How can educational practices currently used to teach fundamental alternative organizations in other disciplines (e.g., Manley, 2021; Meek & Woodworth, 1990) be leveraged and translated into business schools?

What challenges might instructors and students face when engaging with fundamental alternatives in different contexts (Audebrand et al., 2017; Fournier, 2006)? For example, how might student consumerism, which varies across countries (Fairchild & Crage, 2014), affect instructors’ implementation of pedagogical strategies targeted towards fundamental alternatives?

How can educational repositories like the Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership become legitimated as important empirical resources in delivering management education?

Submission Types

We welcome Research and Review, Essay, and Book and Resource Review submissions for this special issue. The agnostic ethos of AMLE in terms of underlying paradigms, theories, and methods is reiterated (for as long as a submission falls within the remit of AMLE). All of the journal’s standard formatting and peer review guidelines will apply.

Inquiries

Those interested in contributing to this special issue are welcome to contact Simon Pek (spek@uvic.ca) and Ajnesh Prasad (prasad@tec.mx) with their questions. We encourage authors interested in submitting a book or resource review to contact us prior to preparing a manuscript. Authors interested in submitting a book or resource review should identify the work to be reviewed and a brief explanation of how it fits the remit of the special issue.

Please note that consultation with the guest editors is neither a prerequisite nor an expectation for submission to the special issue.

Special Issue Timeline and Process

Submissions will be accepted via AMLE’s Manuscript Central portal between November 1, 2025 and December 15, 2025.

Prior to submission, we will hold an optional virtual professional development workshop on June 25, 2025, for interested authors to receive feedback on their ideas. Those interested in participating in the workshop should e-mail a 3,000-word proposal (including references) to Simon Pek (spek@uvic.ca) and Ajnesh Prasad (prasad@tec.mx) by May 15, 2025. We also plan to offer workshops to discuss this special issue at the 85th Academy of Management Conference in Copenhagen and the 41st EGOS Colloquium in Athens. We will share more details about these and other opportunities when available via the AMLE website and various listservs. While we encourage interested contributors to participate in these opportunities, they are not a prerequisite for, or a guarantee of, eventual acceptance in the special issue.

Following our first-round decisions, we will hold a second optional professional development workshop for authors who receive a revise and resubmit decision following the first round of peer review. It is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2025, and full details will be shared when available.

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