AMLE Special Section Call for Papers: Learning to Hope In and Through Management Learning & Education
AMLE Editors
- Katrin Muehlfeld, Trier University (Germany)
- Laura Colombo, University of Exeter (United Kingdom)
- Stuart Middleton, University of Queensland (Australia)
- Todd Bridgman, Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand)
- Dirk Lindebaum, University of Bath (United Kingdom)
Call for Papers
Hope is situated between what is and what might be. As such, hope is typically experienced under conditions of uncertainty, and there is no paucity of uncertainty in these times of geo-political upheaval and existential threats posed by climate change. Why and how should/can we hope in these troubling times? This is the guiding question for us in this special section. Hope is defined as “the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways” (Snyder, 2002, p. 249). This definition is useful in four ways: it (i) identifies individual agency as the nucleus of hope; (ii) highlights the intimate connections between agency and pathway thinking (i.e., understanding causal relations to overcome obstacles); (iii) emphasizes the action-orientation that hope may imply; and (iv) it highlights the key role of an individual’s cognitive appraisal of the world—past, present, and future. As such, hope has bearings on the pragmatic, critical, and spiritual pedagogical foundations of our field and the knowledge that has emerged from it (bell hooks, 2003; Dewey, 1922; Freire, 1992; Harvey, 1988).
While hope’s crucial relevance to education has been recently highlighted by international research initiatives such as No Limits to Hope, launched in 2025 by the Club of Rome, the World Environmental Education Congress and the Fifth Element (WEEC, 2025), hope remains considerably under-explored in (i) management learning, (ii) management education, and (iii) the business of business schools. It is only recently that scholars have begun to discuss hope’s potentially pivotal role for and within management (see Hudson, Wright, Toubiana, Jarvis, Granqvist, 2025) and, more specifically, management learning and education (Lindebaum, 2025; Skilling et al., 2023). This special section in AMLE seeks to harness this nascent momentum to explore why and how hope (as noun) and/or hoping (as verb) can enrich our substantive understanding for tackling grand challenges and bringing about holistic and desirable futures (Comi, Mosca, & Whyte, 2025; Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2024; Muzio & Wickert, 2025; Lindebaum, 2025; Wenzel, Cabantous, & Koch, 2025; Wickert, 2025; Wright, 2025). All three thematic priorities in AMLE can and should have a role to play (Lindebaum, 2025). As to management learning, learning to hope is essential to who we are as human beings (as agency and pathway thinkers). Concerning management education, we can leverage appropriate pedagogical approaches to make learning to hope possible. Finally, institutional structures within business schools (and wider universities) may require careful examination and adjustment if our students are to hope for solutions to grand challenges and holistic and desirable futures.
In this special section, we are specifically interested in exploring the ways in which we may hope in and through management learning and education. Underlining the theory-driven ethos of AMLE (Caza, Harley, Coraiola, Lindebaum, & Moser, 2024), the special section seeks new theorizing about the role of hope for and within MLE across levels of analysis and in relation to desirable future end states. Building on this, we are interested in practical insights that may inform management educators and decision-makers in business schools in their initiatives geared at supporting learning to hope in and through management learning and education, with the ultimate aim of facilitating effective tackling of grand challenges and bringing about desirable futures (e.g., Starkey & Tempest, 2025). Therefore, submissions could, for example, address thematic questions around the following illustrative (but not exclusive) areas of concern:
1. Hope as multifaceted, multilevel phenomenon across time
The literature on hope features a variety of issues that touch upon the multifaceted nature of hope as a multilevel phenomenon, ranging from the microlevel of the individual, to the most aggregate macro-level of society as a whole, with a whole range of intermediate levels including dyads, teams, groups, and organizations.
At the individual level, questions arise, such as, for example:
- What is the role of ‘talking about hope’ (Lindebaum, Geddes, & Jordan, 2018) in shaping cognitive (re)appraisals around hope? Are there different types of hope that may give rise to different types of behavior—for example, hope that implies relying on one’s own agency in contrast to hope that encourages waiting for some external force to bring about ‘a miracle’ (e.g., Bernardo, 2010)? If so, what does it take to transform ‘passive’ hope into hope that embraces one’s own agency?
- What is the role of (other) emotions (such as, for example, anger or fear) for stimulating of hindering hope?
- Are there any possible negative or dysfunctional consequences for individuals when they learn to hope? If so, how can they be counteracted?
At the level of collectives (e.g., dyads, teams, groups, organizations, societies), issues that could be addressed include, for example:
- How can collective hope be conceptualized? By what mechanisms(s) does hope cross from the individual (i.e., micro) to the collective (i.e., macro) level?
- What is the role of emotions in fostering or hindering movement across levels (Ashkanasy, 2003), potentially facilitating the emergence of ‘escalators of hoping’ (Lindebaum, 2025)?
- How is hope distinctly conceptualized across cultural contexts (e.g., Averill & Sundararajan, 2005) and what are the consequences and the potential for cross-fertilization to the benefit of MLE? For example, do Indigenous ways of being and acting offer distinct insights into how to learn to hope when faced with powerful exogenous influences?
Such macro-level perspectives further point to the need to look back in order to look forward and to explore the embeddedness of conceptualizations of hope within specific historical contexts. Thus, in terms of a historical perspective,
- How can historical approaches inform our conceptualization of hope? What can we learn from the past, as well as from histories of the past, to provide insight on learning to hope?
- To what extent and in what ways could reflections at the nexus between historical and cultural perspectives on hope deepen and broaden our understanding of learning to hope?
2. Management Learning, Education and the business of business schools
Concerning Management Learning, possible questions that emerge are:
- How do extant learning theories conceive of learning to hope? Many seminal established theories such as experiential learning (e.g., Kolb & Kolb, 2005) comprise a strong retrospective element. Could they be meaningfully extended to emphasize prospective elements of learning (Lindebaum, 2024)? Could, for example, recent conceptualizations of learners’ transitions through liminal space, triggered by encounters with threshold concepts (Irving, Wright, & Hibbert, 2019) hold valuable insights for how to broaden the scope of existing learning theories with the aim of fostering understanding of antecedents and boundary conditions of learning to hope?
- How do cognitive assessments and anticipated emotions interact in individuals’ evaluation of future possible outcomes (Baumeister, Maranges, & Sjåstad, 2018; Baumeister, Vohs, Nathan DeWall, & Zhang, 2007)? To what extent and under what conditions do anticipated emotions have the potential to steer individuals towards striving for desirable futures? How can these interactions be harnessed in the management classroom to foster learning to hope in and through MLE?
- What motivates students to engage in training and education, especially when ‘all hope seems lost’; that is, when the state of the world around them makes their futures seem highly uncertain and their present riddled with eco-anxiety?
- What motivates students to invest (sometimes significant amounts of time and financial means) in their education when it seems highly uncertain whether they will be able to reap the benefits of this investment (whatever they consider these benefits to be)?
For management education, prospective authors may wonder, for example:
- Why and how do we teach about hope in uncertain times? What can we learn from the past in terms of teaching during times of global upheaval (e.g., Lewis, 2013)? Which pedagogical strategies and interventions may enable students to develop pathway and agency thinking towards holistic and desirable futures?
- Do initiatives to support learning to hope in and for MLE need to distinguish between programs aimed at freshman students, who have not yet been socialized within a business (school) environment (e.g., Ong, Cunningham, & Parmar, 2024) and programs aimed at professionals?
- Are there any potential unintended and adverse consequences that might arise from fostering learning to hope in and for MLE, for example, by unintentionally encouraging disengagement from the present, through focusing on the future?
- If hope is distinctly conceptualized across cultural contexts (e.g., Averill & Sundararajan, 2005), how could this variety of conceptualizations be used to achieve cross-fertilization to the benefit of management education? For example, how could insights from Indigenous ways of hoping be translated into pedagogies and business school contexts across the globe?
- How can we buttress and protect the function of hope as management educators, given that ‘function’ (Keltner & Haidt, 1999) concerns the regular consequences of a phenomenon in a (socio-ecological) system (Colombo, Moser, Muehlfeld, & Joy, 2024)?
- How might spiritual understandings of hope across different cultural and religious contexts, with their relation to personal character (Comer & Schwarz, 2020) and human connectedness through love (Berry, 2010) help in our efforts to pedagogically engage with framing understandings of hope in our classrooms?
- What might philosophies of American pragmatism, as found in Peirce (1878) and Dewey (1922), and with its underlying dynamics in nineteenth-century pioneering spirit have to offer for theories of hope in management education? What might the incremental nature of knowledge in this philosophy have to add to our understanding of processes by which hope may emerge and progress?
- With the roots of critical theory in ancient Gnosticism (Carlin, 2021), is it possible for critical pedagogy to be hopeful? How has hope been represented by leading critical scholars in the education field (e.g., Freire, 1992; bell hooks, 2003), and how might critical theory branch out to other philosophies for advancing a hopeful research agenda?
In the context of business of business schools, the following questions could be entertained:
- How do business schools develop institutional structures that hinder and/or facilitate teachers’ and students’ embracing of pathway and agency thinking towards holistic and desirable futures?
- For scholars who have long critiqued the neoliberal business school, how might changing macro trends presage elements of hope? Might emergent postliberal philosophies (e.g., Middleton, 2024) affect an emphasis on learning to hope in and through management learning and education? For example, if, following the extant business of business schools literature, American hegemony over higher education may constrain global efforts to tackle grand challenges, then what does a postliberal shift towards “America First” mean for this hegemony? Might it mean the end of American domination of international business schools? If so, what could perhaps replace it?
Submission Types
We welcome Research and Review, Essay, and Book and Resource Review submissions for this special section. 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 any of the editors involved in the special section with their questions:
We encourage authors interested in submitting a book or resource review to contact Laura Colombo 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 section. Please note that consultation with the editors is neither a prerequisite nor an expectation for submission to the special issue.
Special Section Timeline and Process
Submissions will be accepted via AMLE’s Manuscript Central portal between the 1st of February, 2026, and the 27th of February, 2026. Prior to submission, we will hold an optional virtual paper development workshop (PDW), tentatively scheduled for the 1st of Dec 2025, for interested authors to receive feedback on their ideas. Those interested in participating in the virtual workshop should e-mail either (a) a full draft paper or (b) a 4,000–5,000 word proposal (including an indication of the structure of the proposed paper, its aims, key arguments, theoretical contribution to and practical implications for AMLE) to amle@org.org by the 30th of October 2025. While we encourage interested contributors to participate in this PDW, participation is not a prerequisite for, or a guarantee of, eventual acceptance for the special section. Please note that authors whose papers receive an invitation to revise their work for possible inclusion in the special section need to be able to be responsive to strict turnaround times for their revision given that the special section is scheduled for the last issue handled by the current editorial team at AMLE.
References
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