Editorial

Citation

Cairns, G. and Roberts, J. (2009), "Editorial", Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 5 No. 1/2. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib.2009.29005aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: critical perspectives on international business, Volume 5, Issue 1/2

As Critical Perspectives on International Business prepared to enter its fifth year of publication, we found ourselves faced with a situation which was considered by some as the major crisis of the twenty-first century – global financial meltdown. In September 2008, the possible consequences of this crisis overshadowed concerns about climate change, AIDS and terrorism in the media – or, at least, in the Anglo-American media. In response to the problem, UK academic Stefano Harney was reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement (Corbyn, 2008) as blaming business academics for contributing to the origins of this crisis through ignoring social and political questions in their teaching – the very questions that CPoIB has sought to address.

In order to contribute to the debate at an early date, CPoIB sent out a call for short, critically reflective papers which would be subject only to editorial review, so that they might appear as quickly as possible and stimulate further academic debate. In response to the call, we received a substantial number of submissions from across the world, engaging both with theoretical issues and empirical examples. We have selected the best of these papers for inclusion in this double Special Issue in order to provide the broadest range of critical and stimulating inputs to the debate.

We set the scene with David Weitzner and James Darroch’s paper on “Why moral failures precede financial crises”. This leads into a series of theoretical discussions from: Giorgos Kallis, Joan Martinez-Alier and Richard B. Norgaard; Suhaib Riaz; Roy E. Allen and Donald Snyder; and Loong Wong. These papers approach the issue from a range of theoretical perspectives, including institutional theory, systems theory, and political and economic theory. Federico Caprotti’s paper ponders the future role of the state in relation to financial frameworks and leads into the group of empirical studies by: William V. Rapp; Manuel B. Aalbers; Arvind K. Jain; Jon Cloke; Robin Klimecki and Hugh Willmott; and André Filipe Zago de Azevedo and Paulo Renato Soares Terra. These papers present critical analysis of a variety of financial institutions in the USA, the UK and Brazil. We end the Special Issue with Steven Pressman’s call for a return to the economics of Keynes and Jan Toporowski’s short reflection on the implications of the financial crisis for the field of international business.

We hope that this collection will stimulate further discussion in the academic literature, will be found of relevance to those engaged in determining future financial institutional frameworks and practices, and will inform the types of critical management education called for by Stefano Harney.

George Cairns, Joanne Roberts