Research Outputs
Grant success
Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, Matthew Cole, Penelope Tuck and Layla Branicki along with colleagues from Psychology (Jessica Woodhams) and Social Policy (Nathan Hughes), are part of a consortium comprising the Universities of Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool, Derby, Suffolk, Manchester Business School as well as Crest Analytics and Skills for Justice (and supported by several police forces) which has been awarded £1,110,691 (UOB share, £225,438) from the Police Knowledge Fund (funded by HEFCE and the Home Office via the College of Policing). The funding is to develop a programme around evidence based policing. The project aims to evaluate some of the pressing challenges that the police face, build the evidence base around ‘what works’ and create sustainable capacity within the forces to embed evidence based practices in their work. The project runs from November 2015 until end 2017.
Tom Coogan has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (£10,000) for a two-year project starting in April, looking at the experiences of Disabled Entrepreneurs on schemes to promote disability entrepreneurship.
Pam Robinson has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (£9,767) as Principle Investigator (Co-investigator Linda Hsieh, SOAS) for their project entitled “Sustainable Reshoring in High-end Fashion Clothing” to investigate how firm- and sectoral-specific factors contribute to sustainable reshoring of UK heritage brands.
Karen Rowlingson (Soc Pol), Andy Lymer and James Gregory (CHASM Research Fellow) has received £22,500 from the Barrow Cadbury Trust to develop a ‘savings manifesto’ addressing possible policy interventions aiming to support savings activity amongst those on low incomes. This project will include organisation of a day conference with policy, third sector, think tank and financial services bodies reviewing the impact of current policy in this area and looking at opportunities for innovation and for learning from best practice of other countries. Results from this study will be presented to CHASM’s annual conference on June 14th in London (see http://tinyurl.com/zkpoynu).
Academic activity and achievements
Tommaso Aquilante has been ranked among the 100 Top Young Economists as of February 2016, by IDEAS. IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. See https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.young.html for more details.
Amon Chizema has been commended for his extraordinary service as the Track Chair for Strategy and international Management for the Africa Academy of Management 3rd Biennial Conference held from 5 to 10 January 2016 at Strathmore Business School in Nairobi, Kenya. Throughout the conference, Professor Chimeza had to monitor the smooth running of his track. The Africa Academy of Management is a young academic association with a vision of becoming a significant and important community of management scholars with research and teaching interests about management and organisations in Africa.
Business enagegement case study
Jane Binner (Professor of Finance) talks about how collaborating with a U.S. Airforce Base in Dayton Ohio has advanced her research - view the full interview here (PDF - 451KB).
SME Success: Winning New Business
Professor Mark Saunders’ and David Gray’s (University of Greenwich) research report “SME Success: Winning New Business” was launched at the Museum of London on 14th March. This report details the findings of their fourth research project in the ‘SME Success’ series, funded by top 20 Accountants Kingston Smith LLP.
The research surveyed over 1,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs), examining how they acquired new business, including looking at the role of exporting to both the European Union and the rest of the World. Business performance was found to have improved for over two thirds of (SMEs) compared to three years ago, with higher turnover, increased profitability and growing staff numbers. These improvements were not found differ significantly between London and South East compared to the rest of the UK. For the 60% of SMEs who did export, the European Union and the rest of the World were found to be of equal importance, with almost all these SMEs exporting to both. A copy of the summary report can be downloaded from: http://www.kingstonsmith.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SME-Winning-New-Business.pdf.
Conferences, workshops and seminars
Access to Finance for Emerging Market Enterprises (EMEs)” ESRC Access to Finance for SMEs Conference Series
The ESRC Seminar Programme on Access to Finance Birmingham event (Access to finance for Ethnic Minority Enterprises) was held in the Business School in late March. Badged as a CHASM and CREME event, the day was a success, with the excellent support of Beulah Corbett (ASA to Finance Dept).
The morning session involved a review of the state of play with Access to Finance for SMEs in the UK led by Shiona Davis (Director of BDRC Continental), who presented an excellent overview based on the latest, hot off the press, figures form the quarterly SME Finance Monitor. Prof Richard Roberts (CREME) and Dr. Steve Walker (Art Business Loans) then presented an assessment of the changing world of small business financing in the UK, making a strong case for an increase in the provision of loan guarantees in place of the post crisis SME funding initiatives, which are being wound down. Kevin Caley (Chairman of ThiCats.com) then gave a lively presentation on risk and reward and the growing role of ‘Peer to Peer’ (P2P) debt financing over the internet. Prof. Robert Cressy then led the academic presentations with a paper on credit scoring and SME finance.
After lunch four papers were presented: by Prof Ven Tauringana (Bournemouth University) on determinants of access to finance for Ugandan SMEs co-authored with Andy Mullineux (Birmingham Business School, BBS) and Mary Nanyondo (Ph.D student, BU); by Prof Kent Matthews (Cardiff University) with Dr Tianshu Zhao (BBS) on headquarter bias in SME lending; Dr Samir Alamad (Head of Product Development at Al Rayan Bank, Birmingham), who has recently completed his Ph.D at Aston University supervised by Andy Mullineux, on Islamic approaches to SME financing; and Wei Wu (PhD student being supervised by Professor John Bryson, BBS) on the history evolution and innovation in P2P lending in China.
Financial Resilience Workshop
Professor Jane Binner chaired a Financial Resilience Workshop on 3rd March where a number of Business School academics presented their research. Approximately 30 people attended the workshop, where the group devised future plans to hold a conference on the topic, to publish a special issue of the "Journal of Financial Stability", and try bid for funds for an ESRC Research Centre in Financial Resilience.
Publications
Journal articles
A paper written by Fiona Carmichael, Joanne Duberley and Isabelle Szmigin titled ‘Older Women and their Participation in Exercise and Leisure-time Physical Activity’ was the most read article in the journal Sport and Society in 2015. The paper (available here http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17430437.2014.919261) was published first published online in 2014.
Paul Edwards, Monder Ram, Trevor Jones and Sabina Doldor have had a paper published in Ethical and Racial Studies titled ‘New migrant businesses and their workers: developing, but not transforming, the ethnic economy’. The paper draws on over 100 interviews with migrant entrepreneurs and workers to tackle these key questions. They find that migrants turn to entrepreneurship to overcome major labour market inequalities. But once in business, migrant are extremely adaptive and resourceful. They often develop resilient businesses despite facing harsh challenges. And migrant employees often use the experience of working in such businesses to strike out on their own.
David Houghton has had three papers published relating to social media. One of these articles, published in Computers in Human Behavior has received media attention. For full details of the paper, see: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216301601. For media coverage, see: http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/constant-surveillance-Facebook-social-media/story-28969997-detail/story.html and http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/facebook-leading-to-self-censorship-1-7811818.
Marder, B. L., Houghton, D. J., Joinson, A. N. and Shankar, A. (forthcoming) ‘Understanding the psychological process of avoidance-based self-regulation on Facebook’, CyperPsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. In relation to social network sites (SNS), prior research has evidenced behaviors (e.g., censoring) enacted by individuals used to avoid projecting an undesired image to their online audiences. However, no work directly examines the psychological process underpinning such behavior. Drawing upon the theory of Self-Focused Attention and related literature, a model is proposed to fill this research gap. Two studies examine the process whereby public-self awareness (stimulated by engaging with Facebook), leads to a self-comparison with audience expectations, and if discrepant, an increase in social anxiety, which results in the intention to perform avoidance-based self-regulation. By finding support for this process, this research contributes an extended understanding of the psychological factors leading to avoidance-based regulation, when online selves are subject to surveillance.
Marder, B. L., Joinson, A. N., Shankar, A., and Houghton, D. J. (2016) “The extended ‘chilling’ effect of Facebook: The cold reality of ubiquitous social networking”, Computers in Human Behavior, 61, 56-62. On social network sites (e.g. Facebook), individuals self-present to multiple audiences simultaneously 24 h a day. Prior research has inferred this results in a lowest common denominator effect (LCDE) whereby people constrain their online presentation to the standards of their strictest audience. However, this existing work neglects to address differences in the ‘value’ (social/economic) of the audience. Through the lens of self-presentation theory, the paper argues that it is not the strictest audience that constrains behavior but the strongest (i.e. that which has the highest score for standards and value combined). We call this the strongest audience effect (SAE). The aim of this research is to examine and contrast the LCDE and SAE. A survey of young Facebook users (n = 379) provides support for the SAE when compared to LCDE, with the strength of the strongest audience predicting behavioral constraint and also social anxiety. Additional insights are generated into which audiences are perceived as the strongest. This study contributes a novel and more holistic lens to understand self-presentation in the presence of multiple audiences in social network sites.
Marder, B. L., Slade, E. L., Houghton, D. J., and Archer-Brown, C. (2016) “I like them but won’t 'Like’ them: An examination of impression management associated with visible political party affiliation on Facebook”, Computers in Human Behavior, 61, 280-287. This paper contributes to theory on impression management within social network sites (SNSs) by providing an understanding of the effect of visible affiliation on page ‘Liking’ behavior in the context of political parties; specifically, the possible association with social anxiety and the use of protective impression management.
Honorary Professor Richard Roberts’ has had a paper titled ‘Predicting New Venture Survival and Growth: Does the fog lift?’ accepted for publication in Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal.
The paper looks at a cohort of start-ups from 2004 and tracks them on a monthly basis for 10 years using management information from a large UK clearing bank. As a result, the study is able to look at survival and growth in considerable depth. The objective is to be able to identify when future survival and growth of a start-up becomes more certain and less open to chance. The results suggest that the "fog lifts" much longer after start-up than has been reported in previous studies. These differences are explained in part by the shorter length of most of the previous studies and the also by the breath of the data analysed. As a result, this study provides new insights for both policy makers and business advisers on supporting entrepreneurship and business growth.
Vivek Soundararajan (Post-Doctoral International Fellow) has had a paper entitled “Small Business and Social Irresponsibility in Developing Countries: Working Conditions and ‘Evasion’ Institutional Work” accepted for publication 'Business & Society' (co-authors Laura Spence and Chris Rees, Royal Holloway University of London). Small businesses in developing countries, as part of global supply chains, are sometimes assumed to respond in a straightforward manner to institutional demands for improved working conditions. This article problematizes this perspective. Drawing upon extensive qualitative data from Tirupur’s knitwear export industry in India, we highlight owner-managers’ agency in avoiding or circumventing these demands. The small businesses here actively engage in irresponsible business practices and ‘evasion’ institutional work to disrupt institutional demands in three ways: undermining assumptions and values, dissociating consequences, and accumulating autonomy and political strength. This ‘evasion’ work is supported by three conditions: void (in labour welfare mechanisms), distance (from institutional monitors), and contradictions (between value systems). Through detailed empirical findings, the article contributes to research on both small business social responsibility and institutional work.
Blog posts
Tommaso Aquilante and Ferran Vendrell-Herrero (both Lecturers in the Department of Business and Labour Economics), together with a colleague from the University of Granada, co-authored a blog post for the Brussels-based think tank, Bruegel. This was later published by the World Economic Forum: see https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/should-european-manufacturers-sell-services-as-well-as-products for more details.