Research Roundup
Awards and appointments
The prestigious award of Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences has been conferred on two of our esteemed Professors. Jo Duberley, Professor of Organisation Studies here at BBS, and Simon Collinson, Professor of International Business and Innovation at BBS and Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Regional Economic Engagement, are the worthy recipients.
Congratulations to Wafa Ben Khaled (Lecturer in Accounting), who has been awarded the prestigious ‘Prix de la Chancellerie de Paris Richelieu’ for her PhD.
Each year, the « Chancellerie de Paris » related to La Sorbonne University delivers several PhD awards in different discipline. Wafa Ben Khaled has been awarded €10,000 as part of the award and will be presented with it at a ceremony at La Sorbonne University in December this year. Her thesis, Formalization of ethics within firms : study of the design of multinational corporations' ethical tools (Formalisation de l'éthique au sein des entreprises : étude du design des outils éthiques des firmes multinationales) was superivsed Pr. Nicolas Berland (Paris Dauphine University).
From January 1st 2018, Scott Taylor (Management) will be serving as Section Editor for the Journal of Business Ethics (JBE), on the section ‘Leadership: Philosophical/Theoretical/Qualitative Issues’. JBE was established in 1980, and publishes contributions to understanding all aspects of business and ethics from a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives. It is currently co-edited by Ed Freeman (Virginia, US) and Michelle Greenwood (Monash, Australia), and is one of the 50 journals used by the Financial Times as part of its Business School ranking system.
Staff from Birmingham Business School and SIM celebrated graduation with over 300 BBS students in Singapore last week (see group image, right).
In other student-focussed news, Chris Collinge and John Gibney have been awarded £3,000 from the CoSS 'Enhancing Student Learning Fund' for a project entitled ‘A Birmingham Business School Teaching & Learning Project: Teaching about Leadership: Enhancing the UG Student Learning Experience’. The project will run through the 2017/18 academic year.
Project overview: Keenly aware of the rapidly changing world(s) and roles of business and of the increasing competition they face for good graduate-level jobs - our Undergraduate Business School cohort(s) are demanding from us that we develop more creative, engaging and more relevant approaches to our teaching of/about leadership in modern business settings. This BBS leadership T&L project will allow us to:
- Develop and improve the quality of our teaching about leaders, leading and leadership to Undergraduate Business School students by capturing and interpreting the learning from the Business School student experience, our own Lecturer and small group teaching experience, and our guest leader speakers experience across the delivery of our UG BSc ‘Fundamentals of Leadership’ module through the forthcoming 2017/2018 academic year;
- Develop and improve our UG leadership curriculum design, teaching materials and improve our delivery of leadership teaching to Business School Undergraduates.
We are very pleased to announce the launch this September of two new pathways to the MSc International Accounting and Finance. These pathways allow suitably qualified students to complete either half or all of the ACCA professional level examinations as part of their MSc study with us. This means successful students will graduate with both our MSc degree and part or all of their professional examinations necessary to become a full member of the ACCA. The pathways are 12 months and 16 months long (depending on whether students opt for 2 or all 4 of the exams) and the ACCA elements are taught by a new external partner to the School – Kaplan Financial. These pathways are being managed alongside the existing and continuing main MSc International Account and Finance pathway by Ann-Christine Frandsen, the suite’s Programme Director.
This is a new style of programme partnership for the School developed over the last two years by Andy Lymer in his role as the School’s Business Development Director. We are likely to see more of this kind of partnering going forward as degree apprenticeship style arrangements are developed and launched across the School.
Students at UK business schools value financial rewards over honesty, report reveals
New research from the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues reveals that financial aspiration trumps the moral virtues of honesty and integrity among business undergraduates. Whilst the study identifies honesty and integrity as being important virtues for experienced business professionals, such an awareness is lacking among undergraduates. The Character Virtues in Business and Finance report, conducted in the wake of a series of high-profile corporate failures and financial scandals, draws from a total sample of almost 800 business students, educators and professionals, and reveals significant differences in moral reasoning between undergraduates and experienced practitioners. As a result, the report points to the importance of students gaining practical experience to learn about moral conduct in the business environment and suggests that the inclusion of real-life scenarios in business ethics teaching could expose students to workplace dilemmas and encourage them to consider virtuous ways to resolve them.
The Department of Economics is pleased to announce that the final year Economics student Daniel Cueva submitted his undergraduate dissertation to "The Undergraduate Awards" 2017 competition. The Undergraduate Awards is the world’s leading undergraduate awards programme which recognises top undergraduate work, shares this work with a global audience and connects students across cultures and disciplines. For more information, please see here:
Events and external engagement
Pervez Ghauri was Keynote Speaker, member of Faculty for Doctoral Consortium and Executive Board Member of the Vaasa Conference, Biannual conference, Vaasa, Finland, August 23 – 25, 2017.
He was also Keynote Speaker at the Annual ANPAD (Brazilian Academy of Management), Sao Paulo, Brazil, October 2, 2017.
In early September, Viktor Pekar delivered an invited talk on his joint research with Jane Binner at a workshop held during Empirical Method in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), a major international conference on text analytics. The talk, entitled ‘Forecasting Consumer Spending from Purchase Intentions Expressed on Social Media’, was about interdisciplinary research which uses machine learning techniques applied to social media data to analyse and forecast consumer behaviour.
Publications
Cathy Cassell has had the following book chapter published.
Cassell, C. (2018) ‘Exploring the visual in organizational research’, in R. Mir and S. Jain (eds.) Routledge Companion of Qualitative Research in Organizational Studies, London: Routledge.
Pervez Ghauri has published the following book and papers.
Book:
Ghauri, P.N., Fu, X., and Vataanen, J. (eds.) (2017) Multinational Enterprises and Sustainable Development, London: Emerald.
Papers:
Han, H., Liu, X. Gao, and Ghauri, P.N. (2017) ‘Chinese Multinational Enterprises in Europe and Africa: How do They Perceive Political Risk?’, Management International Review, Accepted in 2017
Abstract: The traditional concept of political risk is defined from the perspective of developed country multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) and focuses on the impact of an unstable political environment on the operations of such firms’ in a developing host-country. However, we have limited understanding of how emerging market firms perceive political risk when operating in diverse institutional contexts. By adopting a qualitative analysis, this study examines how Chinese MNEs perceive and manage political risk when operating in developed and developing host countries. Our findings show that Chinese MNEs perceive industry-related regulations and country-of-origin related business practices as major political risks in the European Union, while they consider environmental volatility as one of the main threats in African countries. Chinese MNEs adopt different strategies for building non-market relationships including leveraging bilateral political relations to manage different types of political risk accordingly.
Ho, H., Ghauri, P.N., and Larimo, J. (2017) ‘Institutional Distance and Knowledge Acquisition in International Buyer-Supplier Relationships: The Moderating Role of Trust’, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, DOI: 10.1007/s10490-017-9523-2
Abstract: Institutional distance can generate expanded opportunities for multinational firms to facilitate learning and responsiveness. However, such distance can also create hurdles as regards knowledge transfer and integration. A theoretical puzzle concerns the mechanisms and conditions in which international buyers and suppliers can overcome institutional distance and acquire new knowledge. We develop an integrative moderated-mediation model in which institutional distance inhibits parties from accessing to knowledge but when it is obtained, while behavioral trust is developed, it promotes cross-border knowledge acquisition in international buyer-supplier exchange particularly between international firms and firms from Asia Pacific region. The findings indicate that firms can overcome institutional distance challenges and facilitate access to knowledge and knowledge acquisition when they are able to develop and cultivate trusting relationships with their foreign partners.
Pervez Ghauri, John Child and Simon Collinson have had the following paper accepted for publication.
Elg, U., Ghauri, P., Child, J., and Collinson, S. (2017) ‘MNE micro-foundations and routines for building a legitimate and sustainable position in emerging markets’, Journal of Organizational Behavior, DOI: 10.1002./job.2214
Abstract: A number of studies have been performed to analyse how MNEs develop appropriate strategies for managing the institutionally different contexts on various markets. However, we still know rather little about how MNEs manage different institutional pressures when they operate in emerging markets. These markets have a higher level of uncertainty and are in a phase of transition, where values and structures are changing. This paper investigates the microfoundations and routines that can be part in developing such a capability that will give the firm a legitimate and sustainable competitive position on emerging markets. We focus upon the microfoundations and routines for managing regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pressures. The paper is based upon an extensive qualitative case study approach. We have studied three Swedish MNEs on the four BRIC markets as well as their corporate head office. The study identified a set of routines for managing each of the three institutional forces and microfoundations that support all of the identified routines, considering the individual, interactive and structural level.
Alessandra Guariglia has had the following paper accepted for publication.
Yang, J., Guariglia, A. and Guo, J. (2017) ‘To what extent does corporate liquidity affect M&A decisions, method of payment and performance? Evidence from China’, Journal of Corporate Finance.
Abstract: Using a panel of Chinese listed firms over the period 1998-2015, we examine the extent to which liquidity impacts firms’ acquisition decisions, method of payment choice, and performance following mergers. We observe that cash-rich firms are more likely to attempt acquisitions, especially if they are subject to tunneling. Next, we find that bidders with higher growth opportunities are less likely to use cash payments in acquisitions. This effect is stronger for financially constrained bidders, who face greater opportunity costs of holding cash. Our last set of results highlights the under-performance of cash acquisitions in both the short and long term.
Sheena Leek and David Houghton have had the following paper accepted for publication.
Leek, S., Houghton, D., and Canning, L. (forthcoming) ‘Twitter and Behavioral Engagement in the Healthcare Sector: An Examination of Product and Service Companies’, Industrial Marketing Management
Abstract: This paper examines Twitter use by product and service companies in the healthcare sector. This four company study aims to identify the type of content posted in Twitter that drives engagement in terms of ‘likes’, retweets and comments. A sample of 838 tweets were thematically coded as to the perceived tweet function. The tweets were analyzed to determine whether the function was significantly associated with greater or lesser engagement. Linguistic content of tweets was then analyzed using LIWC to determine the type of content associated with greater engagement. Results suggest that company type (product vs. service) and tweet function influence the degree of engagement. Engagement also differed significantly based on the linguistic content of messages, such that word categories associated with greater engagement were identified. Thus, to drive greater engagement with a wider network, the business marketer should consider the nature of the company as well as the function and linguistic content of messages posted to Twitter.
Andy Mullineux has co-edited the following book.
Biekpe, N., Cassimon, D. and Mullineux, A. (eds.) (2017) Development Finance: Innovations for Sustainable Growth, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
This book presents a broad range of empirical research papers covering key issues in development finance. Despite having gained significant momentum in Africa and other emerging economies, textbooks and research publications on development finance are still very limited. This book shines a light on the main focal areas of the international ‘finance for development’ agenda and outlines innovative approaches to enhance economic growth and development finance to contribute towards realizing global sustainable development goals. Chapters from expert contributors cover topics such as domestic resource mobilization, debt relief, microfinance, financial sustainability, tax buoyancy, Foreign Direct Investment, foreign capital flows, and labour productivity. This book serves as a valuable reference tool for researchers, students and practitioners in this field.
Ganna Pogrebna has published the following paper.
Gua, W., Del Vecchio, M. and Pogrebna, G. (2017) ‘Global network centrality of university rankings’, Royal Society Open Science, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.171172
Abstract: Universities and higher education institutions form an integral part of the national infrastructure and prestige. As academic research benefits increasingly from international exchange and cooperation, many universities have increased investment in improving and enabling their global connectivity. Yet, the relationship of university performance and its global physical connectedness has not been explored in detail. We conduct, to our knowledge, the first large-scale data-driven analysis into whether there is a correlation between university relative ranking performance and its global connectivity via the air transport network. The results show that local access to global hubs (as measured by air transport network betweenness) strongly and positively correlates with the ranking growth (statistical significance in different models ranges between 5% and 1% level). We also found that the local airport’s aggregate flight paths (degree) and capacity (weighted degree) has no effect on university ranking, further showing that global connectivity distance is more important than the capacity of flight connections. We also examined the effect of local city economic development as a confounding variable and no effect was observed suggesting that access to global transportation hubs outweighs economic performance as a determinant of university ranking. The impact of this research is that we have determined the importance of the centrality of global connectivity and, hence, established initial evidence for further exploring potential connections between university ranking and regional investment policies on improving global connectivity.
This paper has also been featured in media with a specific mention of Economics at Birmingham (see https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/airport-proximity-key-factor-university-rankings-rise for more details).
Scott Taylor has had the following paper published.
Chertkovskaya, E., Korczynski, M. and Taylor, S. (2017) ‘The consumption of work: Representations and interpretations of the meaning of work at a UK university’, Organization, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508417734056
Abstract: This paper focuses on representations of the nexus of work, meaning and consumption as experienced by university students. We develop an empirically based argument that the meaning of work is being constructed as an object of consumption on a British university campus. We suggest that this indicates two key changes in representations of the meaning of work. First, there is a significant shift in the social construction of orientations to work towards what we term ‘consumption of work’. Second, we argue that this new social construction is made up of three dimensions: consumption of an idealised image of work, consumption through specific work processes and consumption of self-development opportunities at work. We conclude by suggesting ways in which this argument could be researched further.