VHB: Home game for sustainable business economics
84th Annual Conference of the Association of University Professors of Business Economics
2024-03-05 Leuphana University Lüneburg is the meeting place for more than 500 business administration academics until the end of the week. The 84th annual conference of the Association of University Professors of Business Administration (VHB) is inviting around 130 participants. The future of sustainable business administration will be a central topic of discussion. "This is a home game for the Faculty of Management and Technology (MuT) at Leuphana," says the scientific organisation team on the Lüneburg side. This is because the integration of several disciplines around a long-standing, basic understanding of sustainability is being reorganised here.
That fits. This is because business studies is fanning out everywhere and incorporates the aspects of entrepreneurship, digitalisation, sustainability, impact and interdisciplinary issues from business psychology and information technology. Lüneburg has gone one step further and has also firmly anchored engineering sciences in this organisational realignment since 2022. "In times of economic uncertainty, it is also important to work out the opportunities of transformation for companies and society as a whole," explain Lüneburg Professor Monika Imschloß and Professors Markus Reihlen and Matthias Wenzel in a brief interview.
- What is the central point of the conference?
- The major challenges of our time cannot be solved in isolation from one another. It is precisely new ideas and impulses with which we as a discipline can make a contribution to the social debate through our research.
- What actually characterises today's modern business administration?
- From a marketing perspective, for example, business administration research is concentrating more on conducting research together with practitioners and generating findings that are relevant to companies and organisations. The fundamental new topics are, for example: Sustainability, digital transformation and also artificial intelligence. These are all issues that have been firmly established at the MuT faculty for some time.
- How do you recognise the importance of the criterion of impact - the effect of business administration research in practice - at the VHB conference?
- The fact that we in business administration work on topics that have a practical basis - you can see this clearly in the sessions at the conference on the energy transition, for example with the companies Enpal, Ørsted and Shell or the practical keynote speech by Henkel. Findings emerge in dialogues with economic and social stakeholders and also have an impact on their actions beyond the scientific communities.
- What messages will Lüneburg send out?
- The conference is in line with the topics that Leuphana stands for as a whole and offers a great opportunity to bring these fields of content to the breadth of business disciplines. This will provide impetus for further research work. Thanks to less conventional formats that are geared towards dialogue, a puzzle of interlinking topics is created that form an interdisciplinary whole.