By Jill A. Brown, Frank G. A. de Bakker, Hari Bapuji, Colin Higgins, Kathleen Rehbein, & Andrew Spicer

What an amazing 60 years Business & Society has had! In the journal’s 60^th volume this year, we celebrate the success of the journal with several new initiatives. Some of these will be announced later in the year, but we’d like to reflect now on what has been established in the domain of business and society and what opportunities lie ahead of us.

Last year, we issued a call for proposals for review articles and, in response, received contributions from a wide variety of scholars who proposed to review topics across a diverse set of business and society issues. In over 70 submissions, scholars tried to unpack issues related to ethics in technology, stakeholder management and theory, corporate political activity, CSR, sustainability, business and human rights, income inequality, and more. We facilitated several interactive manuscript development workshops, with lively discussions and fruitful debates. Manuscripts have since been submitted and reviewed and we look forward to seeing them develop and, depending on the outcomes of the review process, eventually be published in the journal. We see the 60^th volume as a great way to highlight what the field has been working on, and what emerging themes are anticipated, in a field that seems to be increasingly relevant across disciplines.

Indeed, as we write this, we continue to see the mainstreaming of our domain. Scholars who have not historically written about business and society issues are now weighing in on such issues, with recent articles in mainstream journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies, or the Academy of Management Review, for example, highlighting CSR and sustainability topics, governance and environmental issues, or the intersection of stakeholder/strategy issues – themes that all have been discussed extensively in Business & Society for decades. Nevertheless, there still is plenty to examine, and we can “share the love” for those topics that Business & Society has fostered over decades. Hence, we continue our commitment to advancing the business/society domain and the forthcoming review issue to celebrate our 60^th volume is one way to showcase this.

In considering our 60^th anniversary, we should also mention the International Association for Business & Society (IABS) to which Business & Society is historically connected. The smaller conference settings of IABS have invited many high-level discussions about business and society issues, as well as provided support for newer scholars with developmental workshops and supportive mentors. Some may recall seeing Donna Wood squirreled away at IABS 2016 in Deer Valley, surrounded by a bevy of junior scholars who wanted to discuss measures of corporate social performance at one of the first IABS pre-conference writing retreats. At that same event Jay Barney, Ed Freeman, and Rob Phillips engaged in a lively debate about stakeholder theory that spurred the discussion about the intersection of stakeholder theory and strategy – debates Business & Society has contributed to (e.g. Barney & Harrison, 2020; Freeman, Phillips, Sisodia, 2020). Fast forward to our last in-person IABS conference before COVID-19, in San Diego in 2019, where newer scholars writing about business and human rights pitched their ideas to a group of mentors, and a development workshop on income inequality was filled to the brim. Such gatherings fuel our thirst for attacking wicked problems in a collaborative setting. The outcomes often are rich, providing new ideas and new contacts, while Special Issues can be the result of such sessions. As we write this, we have forthcoming special issues on a range of themes with submissions that are inevitably linked to some of these IABS sessions, but also connected to work presented at many other scholarly associations such as AOM, EGOS or SMS. Overall, it is clear that business and society themes are becoming more central to management and organization research.

These anecdotes reinforce that we are privileged to work with a dedicated and expanded community of scholars who continue to see opportunities to publish in the broad domain of business and society. And while COVID-19 presents challenges to the way that we might gather right now to nurture our ideas, we have also noted in an Editorial Insight that the pandemic offers opportunity for scholarly research—and, in fact, demands it—in the business and society domain. Additionally, while we continue to see a need to engage in crossing disciplinary boundaries and fostering interdisciplinary research, we also see that much more work could to be done by scholars in utilizing/advancing theoretical frameworks and engaging with the business/society literature to do this. There are rich opportunities to do so, with evolving challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, changing business/government relations, racial justice, sustainability, accounting/finance regulatory changes, social inclusion, and such. As scholars pursue these, theories like integrated social contract theory (ISCT), institutional theory, political activity, and behavioral governance, to name just a few, might offer explanatory power across different contexts. The review manuscripts for the 60^th volume currently under development will without doubt spur these debates, as will our future initiatives, including forthcoming manuscript development workshops.

In sum, we are excited to celebrate our 60 years, as we look ahead to the challenges and opportunities provided in the business and society domain, even as more and more scholars join the pursuit to make a difference to businesses and societies.