Call for Abstracts

The International Studying Leadership Conference (ISLC) is one of the most prestigious conferences on leadership and leadership studies. The ISLC is held annually in December. It attracts leadership researchers working in academia, consultancies and industries from all over the world. The first conference was held at Oxford University in 2002, and since then the meeting has been hosted by the Universities of Lancaster (in 2003 and 2005), Exeter (2004), Cranfield (2006), Warwick (2007), Auckland (2008), Birmingham (2009), Lund (2010), Bristol (2011) and Perth (2012). Conference participants often comment on the critical, rigorous, constructive and supportive atmosphere that characterizes discussions and debates at the ISLC. The ISLC 2013 will be organised in the beautiful city of Rome by a consortium of Italian and international institutions led by the Foundation Demote under the coordination of Dr. Antonio Marturano. The Conference dates are December the 14th to the 16th.

The conference main theme will be Sustainable Leadership for Socially Responsible Organizations.

The recent crises have revealed a series of fractures within both political and business organizations. Corporate governance models are no longer fit for purpose given the complexity of modern society and business. The focus on the narrow interests of shareholders  are overly simplistic, failing to recognise the systemic functions of business in global and local society. Clearly, current leaders should better integrate and balance between their own needs, society's, the organisation's and the planet's to achieve better long term outcomes. We encourage scholarly contributions that look into the practice of leadership in order to question current theoretical understandings of leadership. We also encourage a critical perspective by re-focusing normative theories of leadership, offering an opportunity to question monolithic and managerial constructions of leadership, towards more holistic and sustainable approaches. However, the relatedness between leadership and sustainability is a controversial matter. It is clearly related to the problem of responsibility; according to Heifetz and Linsky, a leader "needs to identify and accept responsibility for your contributions to the current situation, even as you try to move your people to a different, better place." Responsibility in complex systems calls for ethical and arguably more spiritual behaviours that have been explored since ancient times; one of Judaism's most distinctive and challenging ideas is the ethics of responsibility, the idea that God invites us to become, in the rabbinic phrase, His "partners in the work of creation." In this traditions responsibility is linked to love and freedom:  the God who created the world in love calls on us to create in love. The God who gave us the gift of freedom asks us to use it to honour and enhance the freedom of others. Life is God's call to responsibility. In much a similar way we can say leadership is not to exploit the world but – as Pope Francis said – to enshrine it.

The subthemes are (but not limited to):

-          Leadership and crisis

-          Leadership in complex environments

-          Leadership and responsibility

-          Leadership and spirituality

-          Cross-cultural leadership

-          Leadership in New and mainstream Paradigm of Medicine

-          Leadership ethics

-          Sustainability and political/public leadership

-          Leadership in the digital era

Selected conference papers will be asked to submit their full work for peer review in Leadership (IF: 1.159). As editors of the Leadership journal, David Collinson and Keith Grint are particularly keen to strengthen the links between the conference and published articles in Leadership (SAGE).

Other conference contributions will be selected for peer review in:

Venue: http://www.demote.eu/wordpress/?page_id=58