3rd Organizational Governance Conference
This conference is the third Organizational Governance Conference taking place after the initiation in 2011 at De Montfort University (DMU) in Leicester, UK. This year our focus has been on how the Financial Crisis 2007 has affected other crises such as environmental, sustainability, and CSR-crises at a global scale. The conference also had another purpose, namely to formally establish the Research in Organizational Governance Network (ROGN) and to continue our work in Organizational Governance and the multiple issues related to this field.
Our first keynote speaker is the founder of the network, Dr. David Crowther from DMU, who talked Thursday morning vividly about how the financial crisis and the current digital crisis has shown how corruption has entered new ventures. Traditionally, we conceive ’corruption’ as a kind of money transfer between citizens and authorities, but David enlightened us by reminding us that this is not what corruption is (only) about. Corruption is far more severe and includes the abuse of power to enrichment and the exploitation of others in that purpose. Seeing corruption from this point of view David suggested taking the list of Transparency International (TI) and turn it upside-down. Then we can see the effect of how the rich West has exploited and abused the poor nations in its purpose of gaining more wealth in the West on behalf of the poor, who let them utilize natural resources and cheap labour in their part of the world.
Friday we had our second keynote speaker Mrs. Lene Bjørn Serpa from A.P. Moeller-Maersk, who is Lead Advisor at Maersk Sustainability Governance and Innovation, Group Sustainability, to tell us about how they work with sustainability in throughout the company and supply chain. Lene showed us case stories from Africa and Brazil about concrete sustainability projects that Maersk is involved in especially regarding investments in local ports and infrastructure, security and occupational health, human rights and anti-corruption.
Our conference ended with the Emerald Prize, which is a prize hosted by the Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. given for the best paper in the conference. Dr. David Crowther, who is an Emerald Book Series Editor, handed together with Linne Lauesen, Chair of 3OGC, the prize award to Ms. Iffet Kesimli, lecturer at Kirklareli University, Turkey, who presented her paper concerning fraud in accountancy among the Big Four (Ernst & Young, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and with Arthur Anderson it was a few years ago the Big Five).
Finally, the network held its first formally establishing meeting and revealed future work assessed by the Research in Organizational Governance Network (ROGN) in terms of establishment of a web-platform, newsletters, new conferences, and in the future the network will work to establish its own academic journal.
The network is open and invites members through their expressions of interest. To become a member of the network contact appointed Chair of ROGN, Linne Lauesen (lml.ikl@cbs.dk). Next year’s Organizational Governance Conference will be held in Bucharest, Romania, and in 2015 we will meet in Kirklareli, Turkey. Follow our webpage for full details later.