Faith and Management:
Complementarities, Contradictions, Concerns

At least in Western industrialized countries, management studies have been firmly established in universities and business schools for at least a hundred years (Booth & Rowlinson, 2006). Among others, they deal with a profession forming “the assumptions that shape any organization’s behavior, dictate its decisions about what to do and what not to do, and define what the organization considers meaningful results” (Drucker, 2003: 3f.). Recently, scholars have started to address the spiritual dimensions of management by looking at issues such as workplace spirituality (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003), the impact of spirituality on the effectiveness of organizations (Karakas, 2010), servant leadership (Dierendonck & Patterson, 2010), or the effect of various religious traditions on organizations and their members (Neal, 2013).

Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, management education has made some room for spiritual paradigms (Delbecq, 2000; Fry, 2009). In parallel, scholarly associations such as the International Association for Management, Spirituality and Religion and a similar interest group at the Academy of Management emerged. In German-speaking countries, this still is a nascent field of study. With some notable exceptions (Edlund, 2013; Zindel, 2012) there are few publications on the subject and few institutionalized discourses going beyond related issues such as corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and ethics.

The 1st Vienna Symposium on Faith and Management intends to connect scholars from Austria, Germany and Switzerland (the DACH-region) who explore the interface between faith, spirituality & religion on the one hand and management & leadership on the other. We invite conceptual and empirical submissions as well as position-papers and expressions of interest, are open for a broad spectrum of theoretical and methodological backgrounds, and specifically encourage scholars from all religious traditions to apply. The symposium will emphasize various forms of interaction among participants. Beyond paper presentation sessions, formats such as panel and plenary discussions, theme-sessions and caucuses will also be part of the program.

• Venue: WU Vienna, Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna,
• Symposium start: Monday 26 June 1230 hours; end: Tuesday 27 June 1730 hours
• Symposium language: German
• Paper abstracts or expressions of interest (500 words; German or English): until February 15, 2018; office-ivm@wu.ac.at
• Notification of acceptance: March 2, 2018
• Contribution towards expenses: 80 Euros, includes lunch, dinner and coffee breaks
• Contacts: Ali Aslan Gümüsay (guemuesay@uni-hamburg.de); Wolfgang Mayrhofer (wolfgang.mayrhofer@wu.ac.at); Martin A. Steinbereithner (msteinbereithner@servantsoftheword.org)