CALL FOR PAPERS

2022-12-01

Call for papers:

“Entrepreneurship in Latin America: Perspectives for a new world order”

In his book, “The New Silk Roads,” Peter Frankopan makes the salient point that “the decisions being made in today’s world that matter is not being made in Paris, London, Berlin or Rome — as they were a hundred years ago — but in Beijing, Moscow, in Tehran and Riyadh, in Delhi and Islamabad, in Kabul and Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, in Ankara, Damascus, and Jerusalem. What he describes is a multipolar world in which China and Russia sit at the apex as cultural, geostrategic, economic, and increasingly military counterweights to the hitherto unipolar reality led by the United States (Frankopan, 2020).

The joint statement released by President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games was huge. China and Russia announced the formation of a strengthened political and military alliance, a watershed moment ushering in a new era in international relations. A move that will tip the global balance of power. (China Today, 2022)

A multipolar world requires a systemic way of thinking beyond the unipolar or command-and-control. Companies must foster multipolar discussions; leaders need to analyze the environment in their organizations and operate from different viewpoints. After decades of living under the illusion of a unipolar world, the multipolar reality is hitting us in the face. How did we fail to anticipate, address or mitigate so many challenges? In a multipolar world, embracing diversity means being open to opposing or different views, genuinely accepting and learning from them, and facilitating efforts to arrive at mutually acceptable outcomes. Companies must take this reality into account by fostering multipolar discussions. Leaders need to analyze the environment in their organizations and operate from different viewpoints. Go deeper than the first layer: What we see is not necessarily what is (INSEAD, 2022).

Open a research field to new perspectives is supported by numerous literature in diverse fields (Huse, Hoskisson, Zattoni & Viganò, 2011; Orazi, Turrini, & Valotti, 2013; Verhoef, Reinartz & Krafft, 2010; Kessler, Salwasser, Cartwright, & Caplan, 1992; Lee-Smith, & Stren, 1991). The word 'geopolitical' was proposed by geographers in Germany in the late 19th century as a contraction of geography and politics. Later, it was associated with Darwinian theses and the inequality of species and races. Theories were taken up by the Hitlerian ideology (Herwig,1999) and then proscribed to reappear at the end of the 1970s (Lacoste, 2006). It can be used to indicate a perspective or mode of analysis focused on the interrelationships between space, territory, territoriality, and power (Cohen, 2003). Thus, this is the route in which the concept of “geopolitical” is framed in this call, and the vision we have is not only for the context in which entrepreneurship and related areas (like family business) operate but within itself. In today’s globalized world, where the geopolitical sphere is more important than ever (Munoz, 2013).

Thus, entrepreneurship, and related areas, as the context has, could have space (the national context where is legally based), territory (where it operates, and its share/stakeholders), territoriality (business culture, and organizational culture), and also power (organizational and shareholder structure, as well as the context interrelations, within themselves and as individuals/teams). Then, following Cohen’s view, a geopolitical structure is defined in terms of its patterns (shape, size, physical/ human geographical characteristics, and the networks that tie them together) and ‘features’ (political–geographical nodes, areas, and boundaries that contribute to Latin American businesses uniqueness and cohesiveness), that have different degrees of ‘maturity’, evolving in fact from atomization/undifferentiation to differentiation and then to specialized integration.

Taking into account the present conflicts that are developing throughout the world, where a new order is taking place, the end of globalization and the emergence of strategic political and commercial blocks, where regionalisms and nationalisms approaches permeate, and the financial/monetary system as known is being confronted, the Latin American businesses cannot be longer see under the traditional academic lens. Now more than ever, opening debates, under multidimensional perspectives across LATAM’s countries, regions, and territories, and given the relevance entrepreneurship have in every national economy nowadays, is unavoidable. A new wave of Latin American entrepreneurship and Latin American businesses is coming (Montiel, Alvarez & Almaraz, 2020; Montiel, Tomaselli & Soto, 2020).

This special issue aims to bring an abductive debate on Entrepreneurship in Latin America. Each article must recover the different perspectives from researchers of this region had and have on both theoretical and empirical advances, and at the same time the multiplicity of processes in the national and subnational spaces, to understand the future challenges for Latin America, and especially of its competitive future on this new era. This look proposes to re-known where we come from, and the highly heterogeneous context of the Latin American entrepreneur to theorize on and build a new profile. Furthermore, we can theorize entrepreneurship from different positions and interests and show that a strategic factor in the construction of this new theory is to re-known the Latin American roots and the cultural heritage that have marked entrepreneurship, and the characteristics they need under this new world order.

We invited you to collaborate in this new era that Latin America lives, and send your proposals based on the following (not exhaustive) general questions:

How Latin America must reevaluate entrepreneurship as a development mechanism for the region?
Which new entrepreneurship theory can emerge for the Latin American region?
What psychological competencies, a “new Latin America entrepreneurial profile” should have?
Which academic and professional skills do the “new Latin America entrepreneurial profile” must have (e.g., digital, social, environmental, and economic competencies, etc.) to be able to compete in this new context?
What role must Latin American universities play in this new order within its region, in terms of knowledge transfer, education, ecosystems, and innovation?
Which should be the new role of gender in Latin American entrepreneurship? What about subsistence entrepreneurship?
Which new public policies must be implemented to foster ecosystems, and a new era of Latin American entrepreneurship on the geoeconomics of today’s world?
What are the cultural, institutional, and social obstacles in the Latin American educational system, for building a new generation of entrepreneurial individuals for the multipolar world order?
What are the future opportunities in Latin America for entrepreneurship?
How the MultiLatinas and state-owned companies must adapt and take advantage of this new polycentric order? And what about rural entrepreneurship?
How can Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Entrepreneurship in Latin America be a differentiator for the region?

Important Dates and guidelines:

Notification to editor to participate: December 01, 2022

Abstract (200 words max.): December 15, 2022

Author Guidelines: http://ojs.urbe.edu/index.php/telos/about/submissions

Final paper: Mayo 25th, 2023

Telos and editors review: June, 2023

Publication: September, 2023

Language: English or Spanish