The 34th International Conference organized by the Scientific Association of Economics and Business Management (ACEDE) is themed Back to the Roots to Rethink the Future of Organizations: New Frontiers. The objective of the congress, therefore, is to foster an academic debate that will help outline the major challenges business management will face in the coming years.
Concern for and management of organizations to ensure competitiveness, viability, and performance in a globalized and competitive world require focusing on practices such as: using technology to create value, empowering employees to make decisions, transforming organizational structures, and fostering new styles and forms of leadership.
The competitiveness and sustainability of businesses are not immutable objectives; rather, they shift and evolve over time. Technologies are advancing at a spectacular pace, individual motivation changes and evolves across generations, and styles of leadership and influence have moved toward new approaches. Disruptive technological change, driven by AI, demographics, and new societal expectations surrounding climate change and environmental degradation, is energizing and transforming the environment in which organizations operate. Businesses must respond to and adapt to these radical transformations occurring in the economy and society.
By their very nature, businesses are diverse in multiple dimensions: sizes, activities, goals, structures, internal operations, and results. Business research aims to understand this context and the immense heterogeneity observed in the real business world, its nature, and its causes. To examine this, we rely on a conceptual framework and solid foundations that provide powerful insights into the logic behind this business diversity. At times, we characterize the firm as technology and costs, or as a complex organization of people with diverse interests and objectives. Other times, we describe it as a set of resources and capabilities interacting to create and distribute value and wealth among the participants in collective action. More recently, firms have been represented as a set of diverse activities that may or may not provide a competitive advantage that ensures their survival and growth.
These diverse approaches and perspectives are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are unified by the idea that the responsibility of CEO—the individuals ultimately accountable for the organization's progress—remains the same: understanding the external environment, formulating strategy, and designing the appropriate organization to execute it. Managing a business involves defining the strategy, executing it, and controlling and evaluating the results. This means that a company achieves positive results by maintaining coherence among its strategy, organizational design, and the broader market and general environment in which it operates.
Today, the environment is turbulent and complex, technology is increasingly disruptive, and people's expectations are constantly changing, diverse, and highly heterogeneous. Uncertainty for managers has increased significantly, and the process of adaptation and alignment is much more challenging and complex than it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, the perspective and role of managers remain the same: to evaluate the environment and shape the core elements of the organization, whether these are its purpose, culture and values, creativity and motivation of people, or the integration of technology into processes—elements that underlie and define strategic decisions.
The responsibility of corporate management—and our source of concern and analysis as business researchers—is how to design a strategy and structure that enable sound decision-making grounded in individual rationality within contexts of collaboration and conflict. As social analysts, we broaden our normative view of facts to accommodate an evaluation of business from the perspective of the general interest and not merely private profit. For this reason, we assess business results not only in terms of benefits for shareholders and employees but also considering societal interests, incorporating aspects such as sustainability and equity into our study and analysis.
This task is both exciting and challenging. As business scholars, curiosity, originality, humility, and rigor—using basic theoretical and statistical tools and strong conceptual and applied foundations—are essential components of our work. In this context, the Organizing Committee of the XXXIV ACEDE Conference invites the national and international scientific community to contribute to scientific discussion and debate aimed at understanding the role and nature of business in our society by presenting their research at the congress, which will take place at the Public University of Navarra in Pamplona on June 15, 16, and 17, 2024.
