Maximilian Schormair

Maximilian Schormair is Assistant Professor in Business Ethics at Trinity Business School. In 2018, he received his doctoral degree in Business Ethics & Business Administration from the University of Hamburg, one of the top research universities in Germany. He studied Business Administration & Philosophy at Germany’s leading business school (Mannheim Business School, University of Mannheim) and studied one year abroad at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy).

Maximilian’s research adopts a conceptual as well as qualitative-empirical approach focusing on areas such as political CSR, multistakeholder governance, stakeholder engagement, business and human rights and the sharing economy. His research explores relevant international business ethics issues such as how companies can address value conflicts with their stakeholders, how businesses can remediate human rights violations, and how corporations increasingly adopt and enact political roles in multistakeholder initiatives that aim to address social and environmental issues on a global scale.

Maximilian has published his research in edited volumes as well as widely recognized academic journals, such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Business & Society, and the Journal of Business Ethics. He presents his research regularly at international conferences and collaborates with scholars and practitioners on business ethics issues. Together with esteemed colleagues, he has conducted several recent research projects within the German textile industry, such as, for example, a study on the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh or a project on the “Detox my fashion” campaign by the environmental NGO Greenpeace. Moreover, Maximilian is currently studying the ethical implications of recent developments in the digital economy, such as the advent of the sharing economy. In addition, he is currently working on a research project exploring the role of deliberative democracy in strongly sustainable, de-/postgrowth companies.

He is a member of the Society for Business Ethics, the Academy of Management, the European Group for Organizational Studies, and the German Academic Association of Business Research (VHB). His doctoral dissertation received the best dissertation award of the Dr. W. Kapaun foundation for ethics in business in 2018. In 2019, he was nominated by the University of Hamburg to participate as outstanding emerging scholar at the prestigious 7th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Economics. In 2020, he received the Research Excellence Award of Trinity Business School. He is currently co-guest-editing a special issue of Business Ethics Quarterly on deliberative democracy and he is invited reviewer for Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly, Regulation & Governance, Business & Society, Journal for Business, Economics & Ethics (zfwu).

During his years as doctoral and postdoctoral research associate at the University of Hamburg, Maximilian has gathered extensive teaching experience in the business ethics and CSR area at the undergraduate as well as postgraduate level. His teaching approach rests on the assumption that business and society are integrated rather than separated. Therefore, he pursues a multidisciplinary and research-oriented approach by teaching current theoretical insights from international business ethics research alongside practical cases and impulses from film, art, and literature. Maximilian regularly invites CSR practitioners and discusses cases and examples from business practice in class.