Markus BeckmannFriedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg | FAU · School of Business, Economics and Society
Markus Beckmann
Dr. rer. pol.
About
100
Publications
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Introduction
Markus Beckmann holds the Chair for Corporate Sustainability Management at Friedrich-Alexander-University's School of Business, Economics and Society (Germany). Between 2009 and 2012, he was assistant professor for social entrepreneurship at Leuphana University Lueneburg (Germany). His research interests include functional perspectives in corporate sustainability management, CSR, social entrepreneurship, and business ethics.
Additional affiliations
November 2012 - present
November 2009 - October 2012
Publications
Publications (100)
While academia attributes superior value potential to sustainable smart PSS (SSPSS), in practice, they are not widely implemented. To address this gap, we analyze how the notion of SSPSS value is constructed through sensemaking. Adopting a case study approach, we explore differences in organizational sensemaking. Moreover, we analyze how the three...
With crises like climate change and degradation of the earth’s natural habitats, human
consumption needs to become more sustainable to decrease humanity’s environmental footprint. Fostering sustainable consumer behavior by enabling consumers to make an informed choice for sustainable products is vital in changing human consumption for the better. T...
A transition toward a more sustainable economy requires substantial innovations. To this end, sustainability innovators need not only ideas but also financial resources. Yet, especially nascent sustainability innovators suffer from trust issues and other barriers to funding through traditional financing. In this regard, crowdfunding (CF) offers a p...
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role for growth and sustainable development, particularly for rural areas in which MNCs are absent. Despite this link, there is little systematic research that investigates how SMEs address the particularities, opportunities, and challenges of rural areas based on their strengths and weakn...
The paper investigates how the alignment of two corporate functions, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and trade compliance (TC) can help companies to take corporate value chain responsibility (VCR). In particular, the authors investigate how evolutionary system theory can explain the co-evolution of two distinct VCR functions (SSCM and TC...
To address global sustainability challenges, adequate governance solutions are needed. Yet, sustainability governance is typically fragmented. This fragmentation poses a key challenge for practitioners and researchers and receives growing scholarly attention in different academic disciplines. So far, however, these research streams are missing a co...
Social entrepreneurs are change makers that aim to solve society’s unsolved problems. Not surprisingly, social entrepreneurship has thus created high expectations. To better understand the potential as well as the limitations of social entrepreneurship, however, a more nuanced approach is needed in two ways.
First, social entrepreneurship is a mul...
In open innovation initiatives for sustainability-oriented innovations, it is indispensable to have a wide array of engaging stakeholders. Yet, as not all relevant actors are able or willing to participate, important opinions can go unnoticed. Due to such stakeholder selection effects, aspects of high relevance may remain uncaptured. To address thi...
Das Jahr 2009 stellte für die Elektromobilität (E-Mobilität) in Deutschland eine
Zäsur dar. Zu dieser Zeit begann die Bundesregierung, mit einer breit angelegten
Initiative
die Kräfte von Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft zu bündeln, um
bis 2020 eine Million Elektrofahrzeuge (E-Fahrzeuge) auf die Straße zu bringen
(Bundesregierung, 2009). Ergänzt wurde d...
Crowdfunding has been discussed as a tool for acquiring resources, a way of communicating information to potential investors, and a means of testing the market potential of entrepreneurial projects. Yet, little is known about how successful crowdfunding influences consumers' perceptions about a product or its features. We assume that mentioning a s...
Small business social responsibility (SBSR) and social entrepreneurship are two concepts that address societal value creation by small and medium sized organizations. This chapter takes the inherent hybridity of both forms as a starting point to ask where differences lie and which roles these concepts play for society across the globe. We argue tha...
Wie die Energiewende im Energiesektor hat auch die Elektromobilität das Potential den Verkehrssektor, insbesondere im Hinblick auf Reduktion von lokalen CO2- und Lärmemissionen, zu revolutionieren. Die Realisierung der beiden deutschen Großprojekte ist eng miteinander verzahnt. Der Ausbau der Elektromobilität in Deutschland birgt im Hinblick auf zu...
This article discusses sustainable entrepreneurship in light of planetary boundaries and related aims to contribute to managing for and in a safe operating space for humanity. The rapidly developing research area of environmental, social and sustainable entrepreneurship has flourished for the last two decades and improved our understanding of the p...
Sustainable entrepreneurship is seen as a promising approach aiming to solve complex social, environmental, and economic problems with innovative solutions. Whilst the concept of collaboration provides an important conceptual overlap between the entrepreneurship and sustainability literatures, it has so far received little attention in sustainable...
In den letzten Jahren haben deutsche Unternehmen zahlreiche bedeutende Entwicklungen in den Bereichen Energietechnik, erneuerbare Energien, Sanitärtechnik und Wasseraufbereitung, Medizintechnik, etc. hervorgebracht, die zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung beitragen können. Gemessen an Patentanmeldungen kommt deutschen Unternehmen weltweit eine Vorreiterro...
Long before the current refugee crisis, third sector organizations (TSOs) have played a pivotal role in dealing with the multifaceted challenge of migration. Researchers have analyzed this role in many ways. What is missing, however, is a comprehensive overview of how the third sector contributes to dealing with migration. To close this gap, we con...
This paper seeks to analyze empirical differences and patterns in applied sustainable sourcing and supply management (SustSSM) strategies. The question is whether companies employ individual SustSSM practices in reoccurring configurations. The study aims to identify such typical corporate SustSSM approaches and how they vary across contingency fact...
This article shows how taking a constitutional economics perspective can clarify the idea of responsibility. Applying constitutional economics, the authors distinguish between within-game (or sub-constitutional) responsibility when playing a game and context-of-game (or constitutional) responsibility for developing the conditions under which a game...
This chapter examines the sustainability concept from an order ethics perspective. Order ethics focuses on those “rules of the game” that channel how individuals interact and that govern whether the involved individuals (can) realize ethically desirable or undesirable group outcomes. This chapter argues that the very notion of sustainability can be...
As forms of private self-regulation, multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have emerged as an important empirical phenomenon in global governance processes. At the same time, MSIs are also theoretically intriguing because of their inherent double nature. On the one hand, MSIs spell out CSR standards that define norms for corporate behavior. On the o...
„Social Entrepreneurship“ erlebt seit Jahren einen Aufmerksamkeitsboom. Organisationen wie Ashoka fördern öffentlichkeitswirksam herausragende Social Entrepreneure. Auf Konferenzen wie dem VisionSummit treffen sich jährlich Tausende, um sich (u.a) über soziales Unternehmertum auszutauschen. Neu-eingerichtete Professuren, neue Lehrangebote und neu-g...
Companies are increasingly expected to integrate sustainability considerations into their supply chains. As a consequence, Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) now covers a broad spectrum of practices that companies can use to define their individual SSCM profile. Little is known, however, as to how such typical SSCM profiles look like in emp...
Ethische Unternehmensführung scheint im Trend zu liegen. So erfreut sich das Ideal des ‚Ehrbaren Kaufmanns‘ einer modernen Renaissance und rückt Begriffe wie Verantwortung und Werte in die Managementdiskussion (Lin-Hi 2010). Offenbar nicht als Einzelphänomen. Corporate (Social) Responsibility oder die Idee der Unternehmensverantwortung sind längst...
The notion of “democracy” has become a much-debated concept in scholarship on business ethics, management, and organization studies. The strategy of this paper is to distinguish between a principle of organization that fosters partici- pation (type I democracy) and a principle of legitimation that draws on consent (type II democracy). Based on this...
As forms of private self-regulation, multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have emerged as an important empirical phenomenon in global governance processes. At the same time, MSIs are also theoretically intriguing because of their inherent double nature. On the one hand, MSIs spell out CSR standards that define norms for corporate behavior. On the o...
This article develops a Hayekian perspective on social franchising that distinguishes between the end-connected logic of the small group and the rule-connected logic of the big group. Our key claim is that mission-driven social entrepreneurs often draw on the small-group logic when starting their social ventures and then face difficulties when the...
Today humankind faces persistent ecological and social challenges that no single organization or individual can solve. Social entrepreneurship provides an innovative management perspective for addressing these problems by seeing them as an entrepreneurial opportunity. In order to emphasize the underlying mechanisms of how social entrepreneurs “do b...
Social business and social entrepreneurship offer an exciting field for empirical and conceptual management research. Yet, while there are many attempts to define either social entrepreneurship or social business, the boundaries and overlaps of both phenomena often remain vague or contested—thus rendering empirical or conceptual learning more diffi...
Nachhaltige Entwicklung ist ohne eine nachhaltige Entwicklung von Unternehmen nicht möglich. Unternehmen leisten durch ihre Wertschöpfungstätigkeit wichtige Beiträge zur Befriedigung menschlicher Bedürfnisse. Gleichzeitig verbinden sich mit praktisch jeder Wertschöpfungstätigkeit auch Schadschöpfungseffekte zu Lasten der Nachhaltigkeit. Die Aufgabe...
This paper addresses a fundamental problem in corporate sustainability: How can corporations transform trade-offs through win–win-oriented governance strategies aimed at creating value? Drawing on new strands of research in business ethics, we employ an ‘ordonomic’ perspective and proceed in four steps. First, we sketch how sustainability semantics...
This article introduces a research framework for systematically assessing and comparing the ways social entrepreneurs generate social change. Based on a review of the academic debate, we discuss the requirements for such a framework. We then develop a conceptual framework that focuses on the entrepreneur-environment interaction in two dimensions. T...
Should corporations be run according to democratic principles? To answer this question, we distinguish between two mental models: the type I mental model that defines democracy in terms of certain organizational procedures and the type II mental model that defines democracy in terms of the consent of the governed. We claim that type I democratic pr...
(1) Bill Clinton wird zugeschrieben, eine zentrale Herausforderung im Bereich sozialer Innovationen wie folgt pointiert zu haben: „Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up.“ Bill Clinton formuliert damit eine von zwei Positionen, die sich auch in der deut...
Wie überall auf der Welt befindet sich auch die deutsche Gesellschaft in einem grundlegenden Wandel. Demographische Veränderungen, wirtschaftliche Turbulenzen, eine sich ständig verändernde globale und europäische Politik sowie, ganz speziell, die noch immer andauernde Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands haben deutliche Spuren in der deutschen Gesellsch...
Auf der Grundlage ihrer Forschungsergebnisse haben die Teilkonsortien jeweils eigene Handlungsempfehlungen für Politik, Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Sozialunternehmern erarbeitet.
Sustainability challenges are complex. So are the challenges that business firms encounter in their corresponding quest for corporate sustainability. Given this complexity, there is a need for new approaches to corporate sustainability management research. We discuss transdisciplinarity as such a novel approach in three steps. After showing that sp...
with a multitude of more or, often, less specified sustainability issues in the organization and beyond, along the entire value chain and across various dimensions (economic, social, ecological). In the face of this complexity, it is widely acknowledged that no single actor can 'win the race against unsustainability'– cooperation is necessary to ta...
This article contributes to the debate about the political role of the business firm. The article clarifies what is meant by the “political” role of the firm and how this political role relates to its economic role. To this end, the authors present an ordonomic concept of corporate citizenship and illustrate the concept by way of comparison with th...
Abstract This article documents the results of a research workshop bringing together six perspectives on social entrepreneurship. The idea was to challenge existing concepts of the economy, the firm, and entrepreneurship in order to shed new light on social entrepreneurship and on our existing theoretical frameworks. The first two contributions use...
Learning goals
Upon completing this chapter, you should be able to accomplish the following:
Distinguish between an organizational and a societal perspective on social entrepreneurship and social business.
Discuss social entrepreneurship as an alternative instrument for solving social problems and addressing social needs.
Explain the difference bet...
This chapter discusses how the theoretical perspective of ordonomics provides a framework for better understanding and advancing
the practice of social entrepreneurship. From an ordonomic perspective, the concept of social entrepreneurship offers a semantic
innovation (at the ideas level) whose potential for social innovation can be fully reaped on...
The purpose of this chapter is to develop an ordonomic conceptualization of corporate citizenship and new governance that
(a) provides a framework for positively explaining the political participation of companies in new governance processes and
(b) does not weaken but instead strengthens the functional role of corporations as economic actors in th...
A growing number of businesses is dealing with corporate sustainability issues. As corporate sustainability covers a wide range of complex topics such as emission reductions, biodiversity management, sustainability-oriented product and service innovation, sustainable supply chain management, or corporate influences on communities and regional devel...
Social entrepreneurship und social business sind zunehmend in aller Munde. Angesichts vielfältiger sozialer und ökologischer Probleme, der Schwierigkeiten tradierter
Problemlösungsmechanismen des Staates und nicht zuletzt der einschneidenden Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise der vergangenen Jahre
verbinden sich zum Teil hohe Erwartungen mit dem Thema „S...
Ethik ist nur dann eine sinnvolle Ergänzung zur Betriebswirtschaftslehre, wenn sie durch eine Vermittlung strategischer Kompetenzen aktiv dazu beiträgt, Manager zu besseren Führungskräften auszubilden. Hierzu skizziert dieser Beitrag ein ordonomisches Theorieangebot: eine Wirtschaftsethik für wettbewerblich verfasste Marktwirtschaften, eine Unterne...
This article develops an ordonomic concept of how corporations can create sustainable value through new governance. The paper weaves together new strands of research in business ethics with the current debate on sustainability. The argument is made in three steps. The first step sketches how the sustainability semantics has evolved from a sociopoli...
This article develops an “ordonomic” approach to business ethics in the age of globalization. Through the use of a three-tiered
conceptual framework that distinguishes between the basic game of antagonistic social cooperation, the meta game of rule-setting,
and the meta-meta game of rule-finding discourse, we address three questions, the answers to...
((1)) Die entstehende Weltgesellschaft ist mit globalen, aber auch lokalen Problemen konfrontiert. Hinsichtlich der Lösung
dieser zunehmend komplexer werdenden Probleme richten sich viele Hoffnungen nicht nur auf Staaten, sondern immer öfter auch
auf die Privatwirtschaft. Diskutiert wird dies als „Corporate Social Responsibility“ – als gesellschaft...
This article introduces an “ordonomic” approach to corporate citizenship. We believe that ordonomics offers a conceptual framework for analyzing both the social structure and the semantics of moral commitments. We claim that such an analysis can provide theoretical guidance for the changing role of business in society, especially in regard to the e...
Dieser Beitrag stellt mit Hilfe der Ordonomik einen systematischen Zusammenhang zwischen zwei unterschiedlichen Literaturen her, deren Fragestellungen zunächst inkommensurabel erscheinen: zwischen der akteurszentrierten Social Entrepreneurship- Literatur und der auf Institutionen ausgerichteten Ordnungspolitik. Das Argument des Beitrags lautet, das...
This article discusses how the theoretical perspective of ordonomics provides a framework for better understanding and advancing the practice of social entrepreneurship. From an ordonomic perspective, the concept of social entrepreneurship offers a semantic innovation (at the ideas level) whose potential for social innovation can be fully reaped on...
The purpose of this article is to develop an ordonomic conceptualization of corporate citizenship and new governance that (a) provides a framework for positively explaining the political participation of companies in new governance processes and (b) does not weaken but instead strengthens the functional role of corporations as economic actors in th...
International stehen Forderungen im Raum, wirtschafts- und unternehmensethische Inhalte in die Managerausbildung zu integrieren. Der Beitrag entwickelt aus ordonomischer Sicht zwei Argumente, warum es im Interesse der Betriebswirtschaftslehre liegt, diese Forderungen konstruktiv aufzugreifen. Erstens sehen sich die Unternehmen neuartigen Herausford...
Der Global Compact (GC) der Vereinten Nationen versteht sich nicht als Regulierungsinitiative, sondern als freiwilliges Lern- und Dialogforum fuer Corporate Citizenship. Dieser Beitrag entwickelt Vorschlaege, wie der GC diesem Anspruch (noch besser) gerecht werden kann. Hier geht es um ‚Strukturen’ in zweifacher Hinsicht: (a) Zum einen koennen Corp...
Soziale Unternehmer können als Change Agents zur Lösung gegenwärtiger Herausforderungen beitragen und Ordnungspoli- tik kann durch geeignete Regeln für die Wirtschaft zum Erreichen gesellschaftlicher Ziele beitragen. Im Rahmen einer Kombination beider Ansätze erscheinen Social Entrepreneurship und Ord- nungspolitik als komplementäre Elemente einer...
Although the sustainability debate has already brought about considerable conceptual progress, a pivotal dimension to sustainable development has so far been widely neglected. This article argues that, in addition to the ecological, economic and social dimension, sustainable development
critically hinges on the moral dimension of institutional legi...
Seit etlichen Jahren entfalten Unternehmen (darunter viele äußerst erfolgreiche Unternehmen!) in zunehmendem Maß bürgerschaftliches
Engagement - und verhalten sich damit völlig entgegen den Lehrbüchern der traditionellen Wirtschafts-wissenschaft. Corporate
Citizenship erwies sich in der herkömmlichen ökonomischen Theoriebildung als blinder Fleck: W...
Corporate codes of conduct are often used to address problems they cannot solve. Theory can explain that voluntary commitments are advantageous if they help to overcome social dilemmas. The economic logic of codes of conduct is therefore based on an argument of self-commitment: prudent self-commitment can enhance freedom. This logic works in two wa...
Empirically, responsibility is a concept increasingly made use of in order to address societal issues. The debate on corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship is a case in point. At the same time, it is a concept mainstream economics has, so far, hardly touched on. The paper shows that the application of economic reasoning to the re...
Based on economic ethics, this paper reflects on and aims to improve the semantics of responsibility. The traditional concept of responsibility is threatened with erosion when responsibility is attributed to an actor who is unable to exercise individual control over the outcome of his actions. In the modern world-society this is increasingly the ca...
It is the nature of powerful ideas that they can summarize a ground-breaking concept in a plain and simple message. In this sense, the concept of sustainability is a very powerful idea. However, although the sustainability debate has already brought about considerable conceptual progress, a pivotal dimension to sustainable development has so far be...
Projects
Projects (2)
Out now! This publication provides a compendium of the status quo of responsible management and makes connections, in order to further consolidate and enrich the responsible management field. There are multiple final draft chapter available in the project log. The final version is available in The Research Handbook of Responsible Management edited by Oliver Laasch, Roy Suddaby, Edward R. Freeman, and Dima Jamali, published in 2020, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788971966