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Social Business Conference 2015

‘Social Business – Business as if People Mattered’

2nd Biannual International Conference, June 11th and 12th, 2015, Anadolu University, Turkey, in association with Social Business. Paper Submission Deadline extended to 1 March 2015.

Building on the success of the first Social Business conference held at Anadolu in May 2013, the organisers invite submissions to a second meeting to be held in June 2015 in conjunction with the 20th Turkish National Marketing Conference (NMC). The conference will be organised around four keynote addresses (Sameer Deshpande – Seeking a balance between demand creation and demand fulfilment in the social marketing and social business context; Gerard Hastings – Marketing in a post-consumer society; A. Fuat Firat – The Symbolic and Social Business; Ken Peattie – Places Where People Matter: The Marketing Dynamics of Fairtrade Towns) and five parallel tracks, three in Turkish and two in English. This Call for Papers is for papers for presentation at the English language tracks focused on social business and social marketing.

As is evident from the curricula of leading Business Schools ‘business’ is multi-disciplinary and draws on contributions from a wide range of disciplines. The challenge is to integrate and synthesise the content and perspective of these separate ‘mono’ disciplines into a holistic interdisciplinary exploration and understanding of successful business in practice. Inevitably, some disciplinary approaches have prevailed over others with the result that two themes have increasingly dominated theory and practice in modern times – the pursuit of economic growth as a means to increase human welfare and, second, the adoption of ‘scientific’ methods to enhance theoretical understanding and inform practice.

For the past forty years or so the underlying assumptions on which these themes are based have been subject to growing criticism and calls for an alternative approach identified as ‘social business’. This is the issue that is the focus for the conference. Simplistically, the two themes that have dominated academic research on which public policy has been based have lost sight of the objective of increasing human welfare by assuming away the ‘human’ factor so as to make their analysis more tractable to ‘scientific’ analysis. Hence our theme "Social Business – Business as if People Mattered" which is a play on the subtitle of Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful. A Study of Economics as if People Mattered’ (1973).

The notion of ‘social business’ embraces a wide range of subjects including: corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, environmentalism and climate change, microcredit and microfinance, sustainability, and transformational marketing including green marketing, marketing for NPOs and social marketing, volunteer and charitable organisations and well-being.

Clearly these issues go well beyond the scope of any single discipline. But it is also clear that the marketing discipline has made and continues to make a major contribution to the debate. Accordingly, the objective of the Conference is to showcase current thinking and research with a view to the future research agenda. All papers will be required to show how they contribute to the overall aim of social business – the elimination of poverty and enhancement of human welfare – and may be either conceptual and/or empirical in their approach.

Competitive Papers must be original and a maximum of 5 pages (single-spaced) excluding abstract, appendices and references. (Papers may contain tables and figures) and Working Papers must be a maximum of 3 pages (single-spaced) excluding abstract, appendices and references. (Papers may contain tables and figures). Full guidelines may be found at the Conference website:

and also at the Social Business website:

Submissions should be made in accordance with these guidelines not later than 1 March 2015 by email to sbconference@westburn.co.uk

For more information about the Keynotes, and Guidelines for Submissions, please visit the Social Business website:

Conference website:

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