Research opportunities
The School’s research is governed by the following seven groups:
Accounting and Finance
The group's research embraces a wide range of accounting and finance-based topics, ranging from critical accounting to applied and corporate finance, employing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
It engages with the corporate governance agenda through specialised projects including the social analysis of risk and the analysis of risk using market and cost-based fundamentals.
Research embraces historical aspects of corporate governance and performance, particularly UK and US economic performance and long run performance in textiles and the origins and evolution of the market for corporate control.
Human Resource Management
Specialist areas include: employee share ownership plans; the relationships between finance, corporate governance, and human resource management; the impact of public ownership and privatisation on industrial relations; management development; employee participation and involvement; gender and management, with reference to women's business groups and political lobbying, human resource management and competitive advantage; the role of micro-finance in supporting female entrepreneurs and business start-ups; firm-provided financial education; the costs of labour turnover.
Members of the group utilise both qualitative and quantitative approaches in their research. The main areas of teaching for the group are on the School’s undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.
International Business and Strategy
Specialist areas include: international brand management; multinational enterprises; foreign direct investment; knowledge transfer and competitive advantage.
Marketing
This group has expertise in three main areas: international marketing and strategy, entrepreneurship and the evolution of global business. A focus of research in international marketing and strategy is on the role of brands, marketing knowledge, distribution networks, the use of trademarks in studies on the long-term evolution of industries, growth and survival of multinationals and the internationalization of firms. We are also interested in the changing nature of value and competitive resources, particularly in the marketing of ethical brands such as Fair Trade companies and social enterprises.
There is wide interest on topics such as the growth of firms in marketing-based industries; multinationals and multibrand management; brands and global marketing strategies; business history and its value for managers; path dependence, intellectual capital and intangible assets; cross-cultural transfer of marketing knowledge and institutions; marketing and marketing practices over time; mergers and acquisitions; the interplay between trade mark law and firms' marketing strategies; collective brands and branding nations.
The group also hosts the Centre for the Evolution of Global Business and Institutions
Operations Management
The group name is designed to convey staff interests in operations management as a whole, encompassing human, organisation and the technical elements.
Specialisms include critical approaches to performance improvement, supply chain management and logistics, service operations management and stochastic models for inventory and production, e-commerce, total quality management, core competence evaluation and knowledge management.
Other areas of interest include the management and dissolution of supply contracts, use of information systems including collaborative product commerce, IT strategy and decision support systems, discrete and continuous simulation, and evolutionary methods in organisational change management and interactive situation modelling in knowledge intensive domains.
The group is also researching in entrepreneurship, innovation management and SME clusters.
Organisation Theory
Specialist areas include: Organisational identity, sexuality, feminist and post-feminist theory; change and innovation management in the public sector area of health care; the production and consumption of organisational knowledge; management and leadership in relation to issues of identity and difference; digital technologies and the perceived acceleration of events in contemporary life; organisation theory, social theory and philosophy; aesthetic approaches to organisation, including the use of music and song as a form of ethnographic representation; language-based approaches to organisation; qualitative methods, ethnography and culture; globalisation and post-colonialism; the ontology and practice of play especially in organisational and social intervention; (dys-)function of multi-organisational partnerships/collaborations; the interplay of reformation and change with organising identity and new methods for research on multi-organisational partnerships.
Public Sector Management
The research of this group focuses on governance, organisational cultures and performance in the public and private sectors. Specific areas of interest include public private partnership and procurement in the health and education sectors, health policy reform, clinical governance, risk management and quality/safety improvements.
The research of the group also has a strong international and comparative dimension with a focus on members of the European Union, future accession states as well as other East European Countries.