Advances in Appreciative Inquiry, Volume 4 - Call for Papers

Positive Design and Appreciative Construction: From Sustainable Development to Sustainable Value

Tojo Thatchenkery, David Cooperrider, Michel Avital (Volume Editors)

Sustainability has become a widespread aspiration in all walks of life that has sparked new hopes as well as new concerns. It introduced a new logic and new considerations that touch upon social, technical, economic and environmental aspects of life at any level. While there is a consensus around the overall need for sustainability, a plurality of somewhat conflicting approaches is offered to address it. Some approaches are reactive in the form of regulations and international treaties, and others are based on free market solutions, such as trading in CO2 emission quotas. In this volume, we propose taking a generative approach to sustainability. Building on positive design principles inherent in the appreciative inquiry methodology, we propose moving from sustainable development to sustainable value. We recognize that replacing profit value with sustainable value is a radical shift. The energy and momentum needed for creating sustainable value is massive. The process is akin to a paradigm change and needs the concerted efforts of policy makers, business leaders, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations. We invite anyone who has a passion for sustainable value to contribute a chapter. Although we will consider any related submissions on the topic, we encourage three streams of chapter proposals.

Positive Design for Sustainable Value
Design is about reframing ideas and shaping of alternative courses of action. Contributors to this stream should think as designers about how they could help generate a new discourse and action around sustainable value. The design approach is concerned with how things ought to be and how we can get there. Contributors to this stream may focus on questions such as: how can we use the potential of the design attitude in a generative way? How can the design approach help enhance the sustainable value over profit value? How can socio-technical design configurations enhance sustainable value? How can "Green" IT and other initiatives turn to affirmative and life-giving discourse in pursuit of sustainable value? Combining a positive lens on organizing with the transformative power of design thinking opens new horizons for creating organizational processes, contexts and associated informing practices that can create sustainable value.

Appreciative Intelligence and Social Innovation for Sustainable Value
Appreciative Intelligence is the ability to reframe, to perceive the positive potential in a given situation, and to act purposefully to transform the potential to outcomes. More than twenty years ago, David Cooperrider and his colleagues launched the social innovations in global social change research project and studied organizations such as the Nature Conservancy, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Hunger Project, and the ICA. By reframing global problems with an appreciative lens, each of these organizations was aiming for creating sustainable value even though the term was not in vogue a quarter of century ago. Contributors to this stream are invited to craft thoughtful case studies and lessons learned from businesses and nonprofit organizations that have embraced the sustainable value as a core operational value through reframing. They should articulate clearly how a reframing from sustainable development to sustainable value has already occurred or could emerge, and to the extent possible, demonstrate the “business case” for sustainable value.

Social Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Value
Sustainable development is embedded in a modernist development paradigm called progress. The social construction of the development paradigm assumes a linear progression of unlimited prosperity if we know how to make development sustainable. Organizations such as Ashoka have demonstrated the power of massive social entrepreneurship. Changemaker, one of Ashoka’s recent initiatives attempts to develop new models of social entrepreneurship among the university student population all over the world. Social entrepreneurship bridges the gap between established organizations such as the businesses, and citizen initiatives. It has the greatest potential for validating sustainable value as a legitimate goal for organizations of all sorts. Contributors to this stream should either extract lessons learned from high impact social entrepreneurship or conceptualize how this nascent movement with unbridled potential may contribute to the radical shift necessary for moving from sustainable development to sustainable value.

Overview and Series Scope
The Advances in Appreciative Inquiry series features positive scholarship that is focused on social constructionist theories of organizational and social transformation. Part of the inspiration for the series comes from the 2009 BAWB Global Forum: Manage by Designing in an Era of Massive Innovation. The Forum was co-convened by the Center for BAWB, the United Nations Global Compact, and the Academy of Management in June 2009 (http://worldbenefit.case.edu/forum2009). The Advances in Appreciative Inquiry series is refereed and published by Emerald Publishing.

Article Submission
Prospective authors are encouraged to contact the editors concerning the appropriateness of their submission. Please send submissions via email as an attachment of a single file that includes all images and figures. The preferred format is MS Word for Windows. All manuscripts should be generally outlined and edited to conform to the APA writing style. Papers are expected to be between 5000 and 7500 words and double-spaced. Write authors’ affiliation and contact information on the cover page.

The submission of a manuscript implies that the author certifies that the material is not copyrighted and is not currently under review for any refereed journal or conference proceedings. If the paper (or any version or part thereof) has appeared, or will appear, in another publication of any kind, the details of such publication must be disclosed to the editors at the time of submission.

Important Dates
-Paper submission: July 15, 2009
-Notification of review outcome: August 15, 2009
-Final manuscripts due: September 30, 2009

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Contact Information Tojo Thatchenkery (thatchen@gmu.edu) George Mason University Arlington, VA 22201, U.S.A. thatchen@gmu.edu Office: +1 703 993 3808 Mobile: +1 571 259 4245