Doctoral education is pivotal for shaping future business scholars, yet PhD candidates and supervisors increasingly face tensions between traditional academic expectations and the demand for research to have social impact. Social impact in business research is “creation of value for people through business scholarly activities resulting in intentional improvement in micro, meso or macro economic, human and environmental phenomena over time with the market and organisations leading, partnering, supporting or yielding (to) change” (Russell-Bennett and Reid 2026, p5). Recent studies underscore these challenges: Li et al. (2025) show how supervisory styles shape both student outcomes and supervisor well-being, while Tikkanen et al. (2024) demonstrate that supervision quality strongly predicts doctoral engagement, burnout, and overall well-being. Complementing this, Vähämäki et al. (2021) argue that doctoral supervision is embedded in leader–member relationships, highlighting power dynamics and institutional pressures that become especially salient in impact-oriented projects.
At the early career stage, Wróblewska et al. (2024) identify conflicts between pursuing academic credibility and societal contribution, while Wierenga et al. (2025) show how ECR communities can empower scholars to pursue impact despite institutional barriers. From an organisational perspective, Alfirević et al. (2025) reveal how business schools signal impact and reputation through SDG-aligned research and collaborations, while de Jong and Balaban (2022) demonstrate how university structures and strategies shape academics’ sense-making around impact. Importantly, accreditation bodies such as AACSB (2023) now explicitly call for societal impact as a core criterion in business school evaluation.
Despite these insights, there remains limited cross-national evidence on how PhD students and ECRs in business research disciplines themselves navigate these tensions in the practice of creating social impact. This special issue directly addresses this problem by positioning their experiences and contributions at the centre of debates on the social impact in business research.
List of Topic Areas
- PhD and ECR-led research for social impact: Empirical, conceptual, or methodological contributions where doctoral students and ECRs lead the research agenda on impact-oriented business scholarship.
- Supervisory practices for impact-focused projects: How supervisors and doctoral students navigate tensions around timelines, methods, and stakeholder engagement in socially impactful research.
- Navigating publication pressure and societal value: How PhD students and ECRs reconcile career demands for top-tier publications with commitments to applied or impactful knowledge.
- Methodological innovations for impact research: Novel approaches (e.g., participatory action research, design science, longitudinal fieldwork) that PhD/ECR scholars employ to connect rigorous research with social outcomes.
- Doctoral identity and career trajectories: How engaging in socially impactful research shapes academic identity, employability, and pathways into academia, industry, or policy.
- Collaborations and partnerships in doctoral/ECR projects: The opportunities and challenges of working with businesses, NGOs, governments, and communities as part of doctoral or postdoctoral research.
- Institutional systems for enabling PhD/ECR social impact: Curricula, reward systems, and doctoral programme structures that support or constrain early-career scholars in pursuing social impact.
- Policy and accreditation frameworks shaping doctoral pathways: The influence of accreditation (e.g., AACSB standards) and funding bodies in embedding social impact into doctoral and ECR training globally.
Submission Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here:
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see:
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
This is a fully open access journal, which means all articles are published under the gold open access route, using a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 user licence. Open access journals are supported through the payment of an article processing charge (APC). APCs are typically paid for by the author’s funder or institution. However a number of organisations have established partnerships with us to cover the cost of an agreed number of gold open access articles or an agreed discount for their regions. Check to see if your institution is eligible for an open access publishing voucher https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/publish-with-us/publish-open-access/open-access-publishing-agreements
Key Dates
Opening date for manuscript submissions: 12 February 2026
Closing date for manuscript submissions: 10 August 2026
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