Call for Papers and Invitation to Contribute to
An Approved Symposium of the Journal of Institutional Economics (JOIE) on
The Institutional Foundations of Stakeholder Theory. Insights from Original and Non-Mainstream Institutional Economics
This hybrid symposium is combining invited anchor contributions with an open call for papers.
Key Dates
| Extended abstracts due | 31 January 2027 |
| Fit feedback to authors | By 28 February 2027 |
| Optional online developmental workshop | April 2027 |
| Full manuscripts submitted to JOIE | By 30 June 2027 |
Invitation and Intellectual Rationale
Stakeholder theory is often presented as an ethical correction to shareholder primacy. That framing captures an important normative disagreement, but it leaves the theory’s institutional content underdeveloped. Firms and corporations are not neutral containers within which managers decide whose interests to consider. They are institutional arrangements constituted by formal and informal rules that allocate authority, voice, property claims, responsibilities, exposure to risk, and access to remedies.
The stakeholder question is therefore not only whether managers should care about non-shareholding groups. It is how institutions define relevant participants, organise their interdependence, structure conflicts, distribute decision rights, and adapt when existing rules cease to support viable cooperation.
| The symposium’s organising question |
| How do institutions constitute stakeholder relationships, distribute authority and vulnerability among stakeholder groups, and evolve in response to conflict, uncertainty, power, and changing social and ecological conditions? |
Original institutional economics offers powerful resources for this task. Veblen directs attention to evolving habits, technologies, power structures, and ceremonial valuations. Commons treats institutions as collective action that controls, liberates, and expands individual action, and analyses transactions as legally and socially constituted relations involving conflict, dependence, bargaining, and working rules. Later institutionalist work extends these insights through social provisioning, cumulative causation, institutional change, and the legal-economic nexus.
The symposium also welcomes contributions drawing on post-Keynesian, feminist, ecological, behavioural, humanistic, evolutionary, social, legal, comparative, polycentric, and organisational approaches. These traditions are relevant when they illuminate the design, operation, persistence, change, or comparative effects of identifiable institutions. The collection will not be a loose set of critiques of mainstream economics; it will be a focused institutional analysis of stakeholder governance.
What the Symposium Seeks to Accomplish
- Provide an institutional foundation for stakeholder theory by translating broad normative claims into questions about rules, rights, enforcement, organisational forms, and institutional change.
- Bring original institutional economics into direct conversation with new institutional, comparative institutional, legal-institutionalist, polycentric-governance, and organisational-governance approaches.
- Advance comparative analysis rather than presume that more stakeholder participation is always efficient, legitimate, or desirable.
Scope and Methods
The symposium welcomes conceptual, historical, comparative, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method contributions. Papers may examine corporate law, governance rights, representation systems, co-determination, cooperatives and social enterprises, benefit-corporation statutes, supply-chain agreements, multi-stakeholder partnerships, standard-setting systems, dispute-resolution mechanisms, or other working rules that organise relationships among actors affected by business activity.
Submissions should ask when stakeholder voice, representation, co-decision, contractual protection, public regulation, polycentric coordination, or other arrangements address a defined institutional problem better than plausible alternatives—and when they create new agency costs, ambiguities, exclusions, capture risks, or implementation failures.
Indicative Thematic Areas
| 1 | Stakeholder theory and original institutional economics. Commonsian transactions and working rules; Veblenian business–industry tensions; social provisioning; institutionalised power; reasonable value; cumulative institutional change. |
| 2 | Corporate constitution, ownership, membership, and purpose. The legal and organisational foundations of stakeholder status; corporate personhood; fiduciary duties; authority and residual control; stakeholder representation; the public and private dimensions of the corporation. |
| 3 | Comparative institutions of stakeholder governance. Board representation, co-determination, advisory councils, cooperatives, social enterprises, benefit corporations, foundations, mutuals, employee ownership, contractual safeguards, public regulation, and hybrid arrangements. |
| 4 | Uncertainty, commitment, and institutional time. How institutions sustain stakeholder-specific investment, long-term commitment, adaptive expectations, and revisability under fundamental uncertainty and irreversible change. |
| 5 | Care, dependence, and social reproduction. How institutions allocate paid and unpaid care, dependence, vulnerability, and the costs of sustaining labour, households, communities, and organisations. |
| 6 | Ecological limits and multi-level stakeholder governance. Institutions for climate, biodiversity, circularity, natural-resource use, intergenerational claims, global value chains, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. |
| 7 | Institutional change, contestation, and failure. How stakeholder arrangements emerge through conflict and collective action; how they are captured, ceremonialised, decoupled, or displaced; and how unintended consequences generate adaptation. |
The Institutional Test for Submissions
To keep the symposium coherent and firmly within JOIE’s remit, every contribution must satisfy the following criteria:
| 1 | Identify the focal institution. Name the institutional arrangement rather than discussing stakeholder orientation only as a value or managerial attitude. |
| 2 | Specify the working rules. Clarify the formal and/or informal rights, duties, authority relations, enforcement mechanisms, sanctions, and rules of representation or revision. |
| 3 | Define the institutional problem. Explain the conflict, incomplete contracting, externality, uncertainty, power asymmetry, collective-action failure, social-reproduction issue, ecological constraint, or other problem addressed. |
| 4 | Explain the mechanism. Show how the arrangement emerges, persists, changes, fails, or produces its effects. |
| 5 | Use comparison where feasible. Compare the focal arrangement with a plausible alternative, counterfactual, or prior institutional configuration, and engage substantively with relevant institutional-economics and JOIE debates. |
| Outside the symposium’s scope. Purely normative essays that advocate stakeholder responsibility without analysing institutions, and empirical studies that use stakeholder variables without identifying an institutional mechanism, will not be considered a good thematic fit. |
Submission Process and Timetable
Stage 1: Extended abstract
Please submit an extended abstract of approximately 800–1,000 words by 31 January 2027. This preliminary stage is intended only to assess thematic and institutional fit; it does not constitute editorial pre-acceptance.
The abstract should include:
- A provisional title and the names, affiliations, and email addresses of all authors.
- The central research question and intended contribution.
- The focal institution or institutional arrangement and the rules it comprises.
- The institutional problem and causal or interpretive mechanism examined.
- The paper’s theoretical tradition, empirical material or method, and proposed comparison or counterfactual.
- A brief explanation of the paper’s fit with JOIE and the symposium.
Send the abstract as a Word or PDF attachment to all three symposium organisers using the subject line “JOIE Symposium Abstract – [Lead Author Surname]”.
Stage 2: Development and Full-Paper Submission
The organisers expect to provide fit feedback by 28 February 2027. An optional online developmental workshop is planned for April 2027. Authors of suitable papers will be encouraged to submit full manuscripts independently through JOIE’s ScholarOne system by 30 June 2027.
Submission portal: JOIE ScholarOne manuscript system
Full-paper requirements:
- Manuscripts must be in English and prepared for anonymous review.
- The normal inclusive limit is 10,000 words, including abstract, references, footnotes, tables, and figures.
- The abstract may not exceed 200 words; include 3–5 keywords and declare the total word count.
- Conceptual precision is essential, especially when using terms such as institution, formal, informal, embedded, uncertainty, or evolutionary.
- Authors must follow JOIE’s current author instructions and publishing-ethics requirements.
Author guidance: JOIE author instructions
Review, Publication, and Open Access
Invitation or encouragement to submit does not imply acceptance. Every manuscript will undergo JOIE’s normal preliminary assessment, peer review, and joint editorial decision process. Accepted papers will be published online individually through the journal’s continuous-publication process. The editorial introduction will be completed only after all viable symposium papers have been accepted.
JOIE is a fully Gold Open Access journal. Prospective authors should review the journal’s current funding, waiver, discount, and article-processing-charge arrangements before formal submission. Editorial decisions are independent of authors’ funding situations. Open-access fees and funding information
Symposium organisers
Vladislav Valentinov, IAMO, Germany; Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany; and Kazimieras Simonavičius University, Lithuania. Email: valentinov@iamo.de.
Steffen Roth, Excelia Business School, France; Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; and CRASSH, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Email: roths@excelia-group.com.
Ermanno C. Tortia, University of Trento, Department of Economics and Management, Italy. Email: ermanno.tortia@unitn.it.
Please circulate this call through relevant scholarly associations, research networks, and academic departments.
Background literature
- Bridoux, F., & Stoelhorst, J. W. (2022), Stakeholder theory, strategy, and organization: Past, present, and future, Strategic Organization, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 797-809.
- Freeman, R.E., Harrison, J.S., Wicks, A.C., Parmar, B., & de Colle, S. (2010), Stakeholder theory: The state of the art, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Freeman, R.E., Parmar, B.L., Martin, K. (2020a), The power of and: Responsible business without trade-offs, New York: Columbia University Press.
- Freeman, R.E., Phillips, R., & Sisodia, R. (2020b), Tensions in stakeholder theory. Business & Society, Vol. 59 No. 2, pp. 213-231.
- Friedman, M. (1970), The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, New York Times,September, 13:33.
- Hodgson, G.M. (2004), The evolution of institutional economics: Agency, structure and Darwinism in American Institutionalism, London: Routledge.
- Jensen, M. C., & Meckling, W. H. (1976), Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure, Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 3 No. 4, pp. 305-360.
- Kuehnlenz, S., Andreoni, V., & Meyenburg, I. (2023), Capitalism and crises: A comparative analysis of mainstream and heterodox perceptions and related ethical considerations, Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Vol. 32 No. S1, pp. 52-64.
- Nelson, J. A. (2018), Economics for humans, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
- Raworth, Kate (2017), Doughnut economics: seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist, New York, NY: Random House
- Roth S. (2024), Spaceship Earth. A total institution, Ecological Economics, Vol. 223, 108243.
- Roth S. and Sales A. (in press), Multifunctional organisation. A systems-theoretical concept and its practical implications, Kybernetes, DOI: 10.1108/K-05-2025-1387.
- Roth S. and Valentinov V. (in press), Organisation and function: Reclaiming the third mandate in the age of grand challenges, Organization Studies, DOI: 10.1177/01708406261459.
- Tortia, E. C. (2025), Stakeholders self‐organization and adaptive governance in social enterprises: Membership representation, worker control and client orientation, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Vol. 42 No. 2, pp. 396-410.
- Tortia, E. C., Sacchetti, S., & Valentinov, V. (2020), The ‘protective function’of social enterprises: Understanding the renewal of multiple sets of motivations, Review of Social Economy, Vol. 78 No. 3, pp. 373-410.
- Valentinov, V. (2017), Comment: marrying functional differentiation and institutional economics: reflections on Steffen Roth’s article, Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 51 No. 4, pp. 1047-1053.
- Valentinov, V. (2023), Stakeholder theory: Toward a classical institutional economics perspective, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 188 No. 1, pp. 75-88.
- Valentinov, V. (2024), Advancing a system-level perspective in stakeholder theory: Insights from the institutional economics of John R. Commons, Social Science Information, Vol. 63 No. 4, pp. 443-467.
- Valentinov, V., de Oliveira Santos Jhunior, R., & de Araujo Góes, H. A. (2026), Corporate environmental sustainability via stakeholder collaboration: insights from classical institutional economics, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 203 No. 2, pp. 279-296.
- Valentinov V. and Roth S. (2024a), Relationality and contractual safeguards in stakeholder theory, Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Vol. 33 No. 3, pp. 535-546.
- Valentinov V. and Roth S. (2024b), Stakeholder theory: exploring systems-theoretic and process-philosophic connections, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Vol. 41 No. 2, pp. 301-315.
- Valentinov V., Roth S., and Will M. G. (2019), Stakeholder theory: A Luhmannian perspective, Administration and Society, Vol. 51 No. 5, pp. 826-849
