Research Outputs
Awards
- Dr Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay - Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research Supervision
- Charles Rahal - The Michael K. O'Rourke prize for best PhD publication for “StatFact: An Eviews Addin for Static Factor Extraction and IPC Computation”, with a guide in Computational Economics (DOI: 10.1007/s10614-015-9507-6), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594927
- Professor John Child received the Richard Whipp Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Academy of Management at the opening of its annual conference on 8 September.
- Dr Etlyn Kenny and Dr Rory Donnelly were awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant of £9,990.00 for a project entitled ‘Women, computing and identity: The salience of gender in the IT profession’. The study aims to increase understanding of gender issues within the IT industry by investigating how and when female IT professionals become more aware of their gender identity at work, and the valence and meaning they give to increases in gender identity salience.
Conferences
Dr Scott Taylor co-organized a conference track, ‘Fourth Wave Feminism? Bodies, practices, politics, ethics’, at the Critical Management Studies conference in Leicester, July – co-organizers: Emma Bell [Keele], Susan Merilainen [Lapland, Finland], Janne Tienari [Aalto, Finland]. Around 20 papers were presented. Participants came from the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, and Australia. Among other topics, they presented papers about gendered state policymaking, gender quotas for executive boards, service work in Las Vegas, representations of women working in Disney films, and Muslim women’s work-related identities on social media.
Publications
- Find publications from previous news articles
Journal articles (alphabetical order)
Bell, E. & Taylor, S. ‘Vernacular mourning and corporate memorialization in framing the death of Steve Jobs’, Organization.
This article explores the role of vernacular mourning in framing the death of Apple co-founder and former chief executive, Steve Jobs. Using the concept of heterotopia to explore the spatio-temporal power relations of contemporary organizational memorialization, we show how the construction of temporary shrines and visual imagery rendered spaces and objects temporarily sacred and maintained Jobs as an ongoing presence in the lives of consumer-believers. Our analysis of these mourning practices identifies three themes: the construction of shrines as temporary organizational memorials in vernacular mourning; the distribution of photographs as memento mori; and the role of official, corporate memorialization in disciplining mourners into letting go, severing their connection with Jobs so that the organization could survive. This highlights the importance of organizations in attempting to control mourning through official, corporate memorialization and reveals the power relations entailed in determining who and what is mourned in organizational life and how the dead are remembered.
Fraher, A. L. 2015.“Technology-Push, Market-Demand and the Missing Safety-Pull: A Case Study of American Airlines Flight 587”. New Technology, Work and Employment, 30(2): 109-127.
Through a critical case study of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, this paper draws upon ‘the Social Shaping of Technology’ (SST) approach to offer a reconceptualisation of the technology-push and market-demand model for High-Reliably Organisations (HROs), providing support for a third factor, called here a ‘safety-pull’. A safety-pull is defined as organisationally supported reflexivity in which technology innovators and frontline operators collaborate to consider the potential implications of adopting new technologies in HROs and the complex ways this change may impact human operators’ work performance, often in risky and unanticipated ways. In contrast to accidents occurring solely as the result of individual operator error, analysing the safety-pull provides a way to tease out the wide range of factors that can contribute to HRO failures and offers a new SST perspective through which to examine high-risk operations.
Rowbottom, N. & Locke J. (2015). The Emergence of Integrated Reporting. Accounting & Business Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00014788.2015.1029867
The emergence of <IR> as developed by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) is traced from antecedent concepts of ‘integrated reporting’ and earlier voluntary corporate reporting initiatives. The paper uses actor network theory and its conceptions of detour, affordance and laboratory to examine the development of <IR> while still controversial and where meanings remained open and malleable to the inscription of interests from a wide coalition of actors. The programme of action is interpreted through interviews with key individuals, official documents, publications and integrated reports circulated by the IIRC. The analysis highlights the imperatives of private standard setters and indicates how integrated reporting corporate governance regulation in South Africa provided a laboratory prototype for reshaping the UK ‘Connected Reporting’ initiative into the IIRC <IR> framework. The analysis reveals important detours and the associated affordances made during the development of <IR>: (a) the repositioning of <IR> in the corporate reporting infrastructure to ensure that it did not usurp the pre-existing frameworks of supporting actors; and (b) the specification of providers of financial capital as the intended reporting audience to ensure that it could meet the interests of those actors seeking a solution for more entity-specific, communicative, ‘de-cluttered’ corporate reporting."
Book chapters
Bell, E. & Taylor, S. (2015) ‘Spirituality’, in Greenwood, M., Mir, R. & Willmott, H. (eds) Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies. London: Routledge.
Other publications
Birmingham researchers’ work on Smart City leadership has been featured in this first newsletter of the HoC All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Smart Cities ‘Smart City Leadership – University of Birmingham, Middlesex University London and Birmingham Business School. Advocates of the Smart Cities movement argue that important advantages for cities can be secured through a digitally-enabled integration of their physical, social and other technological assets. At the same time, knowledge-oriented leadership approaches are influencing the design and delivery of urban policy innovations. This is early research output and the leadership R&D work will be ongoing between the university partnership.
Dr David Houghton’s documentary ‘Me, My Selfie and I: Aimee Fuller’s Gneeration Game’ is now on BBC iPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06084kl#auto