Business School research

Research in the Business School consists of individual scholars and small groups working on a range of projects.

If you would like to find out more about our research, please get in touch.

Areas of research

• Organisational Leadership, Learning, Development and Management
• Business Modelling and Lean Processes
• Operations Management with specific focus on Supply Chain Management (including Logistics and Agile Supply Chains)
• Organisational Culture and Culture Change Management
• Emergency Services Management, Organisational Resilience & Interoperability
• Public Sector Management
• Accounting and Institutional Perspectives
• Business History
• Human Resource Management and Development
• Business and Employment Law
• Marketing, Consumer Behaviour, Radical Marketing
• Multi-level Marketing, Network Marketing
• Services (Retail) Marketing
• Customer Engagement, Retail (High Streets), Experience Marketing, Retail Consumer Behaviour
• Transformative Service Research, Place Management, Place Marketing, Place Development, Visiting Places, Leisure and Tourism Studies, Responsible and Sustainable Tourism
• Digital Economy, New Business Models & decision-making
• Enterprise and Entrepreneurship
• Strategising in SMEs
• International Trade (including Brexit and FTAs), Foreign Investment and Regional Economic Integration
• Renewable Energy, Sustainable Business and Low-Carbon Development
• Applied and Developmental Economics (including Poverty and Inequality)
• Social Networks, Microeconomics and Econometrics
• East Asia’s Economies (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia)
• Media and Gender Studies

Postgraduate research

Business School academics are actively involved in collaborative research projects, organising conferences, workshops and publish research in international journals.

If you are interested in studying for a PhD, professional doctorate or other postgraduate research (PGR) qualification, please see our Postgraduate courses.

Our projects

Project title	PERSIST: Purchasing Education Research Syndicate: Industry 4.0 Skills Transfer
Dates	September 2019 – August 2022
Project website	www.project-persist.eu/
Funding source	Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships – European Commission
People involved	Dr Stephen Kelly (Business School), Dr Peter Vangorp (Computer Science)
Description	In the modern network economy, over half of a firm’s income is directly routed through to its suppliers. Therefore, the competitiveness of a firm’s Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) is critical for those firms and also for wider European competitiveness. This necessitates world-class PSM training and education. Since the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution (I4.0), cyber-physical systems with autonomous machine-to-machine communication are re-shaping parts of our economy and PSM is one of the areas that is most strongly affected. The skill set PSM professionals need to manage and organise such systems and to efficiently prevail in an I4.0 world is therefore changing. Within education, as well as in industry, there is now a strong demand for direction on how to manage this change in and how to educate and prepare the current and future PSM workforce. The aim and innovation of the PERSIST project lies in: a) identifying those skills which are needed to be added to the profile of a European PSM professional through the development of an I4.0 PSM Skill framework and b) developing a module-based course for higher education to teach these skills and c) to develop gamification and playful interaction oriented teaching and learning elements in a student-centered approach, including a gamified massive open online course (MOOC). Project PERSIST is coordinated by the University of Twente (Netherlands) and consists of partners across another four countries, Technical University of Dortmund (Germany), Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (Finland), Edge Hill University (United Kingdom) and University of Economics in Bratislava (Slovakia).