Interdisciplinary research vision
The School for Business and Society's (SBS) interdisciplinary research vision takes a challenge-oriented approach.
According to this conceptual framework, challenge-driven interdisciplinary clusters – designed around complex social and environmental issues – support impact-driven and academically excellent interdisciplinary research across SBS.
Building on disciplinary strengths
Our challenge-driven research clusters are intended to provide a supportive and flexible network to enable the pursuit of interdisciplinary thought, scholarship, methodological innovation and interdisciplinary research project funding. The clusters are one element of the School’s wider research strategy, designed to enhance our interdisciplinary potential within the framework of supporting our hugely rich and diverse disciplinary excellence across social science, the humanities and physical science.
The clusters are fluid, dynamic and agile, designed to work together in building new dimensions of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity across the School. In working together, the clusters will support multilateral engagement with complex, intersecting and polycentric challenges, including the twin green and digital transitions.
Our interdisciplinary research clusters
Led by Luisa Huatuco
This cluster considers circularity and environmental sustainability in business ecosystems. Impact-driven interdisciplinary research supports policymakers as well as decision-makers in the private, public, and third sector. The cluster informs value creation and delivery processes and help enhance the preservation of natural resources and the mitigation of climate change.This includes the circular economy, green finance and doughnut economics.
led by Philip Garnett and Sunny Yang
This cluster explores the meaning of being human in the face of rising disruptive technologies, particularly in the digital space, including AI. The cluster includes research on understanding human/computer interactions, through affect, materiality and human relations, within and across organised work and society. This includes ‘wicked’ problems around digital transition and responsible innovation.
led by Hannah Jobling
This cluster explores the intersections between different dimensions of inequalities, in life chances and employment, and in the lived experience and consequences of poverty. We seek to understand the ways in which people with lived experience, business leaders, public administrators, social enterprises, charities, NGOs, policymakers and community groups can better understand and more effectively counteract inequalities in society. There will be particular emphasis on how dynamics of inequity in health, life chances and disadvantages stem from or intertwine with the built environment people live in and share, alongside a place-based perspective within the broader transformational changes towards creating sustainable places within a rapidly changing economy and society.
led by Elizabeth Cookingham Bailey
This cluster focuses on new approaches to service delivery in the public sector, that increasingly rely on the emergent coordination and cooperation dynamics across public, private and third sector organisations which are creating new ecosystems of public service. This cluster centres on conceptualising the role of policy in this context and understanding the implications of these new public service ecosystems for organisational decision- makers and the professional workforce. Fields of interest include the financialisation of public services, hybrid organisations and governance.
led by Jenny Threlfall
This cluster focuses on developing integrated and holistic strategic and managerial approaches to health, social care and social work. The cluster explores how to deliver compassionate, equitable and coordinated services through using a whole system approach. Alongside this, the cluster is also concerned with how effective, participative and integrated systems can address increasingly complex challenges, including the role of integrated and holistic public health, social work and social care policy in promoting healthier, socially cohesive and economically sustainable communities and regions. Areas of interest include holistic, integrated health, social care, social work and public health systems.
led by Shane Hamilton
This cluster explores new, system-wide, approaches to promoting radical change in production and consumption in food systems, both locally and worldwide. This includes, for example, promoting regenerative farming, supporting food banks and influencing food policy. It enhances policy and practice in public, private and third-sector organisations involved in food supply chains and produces impact- driven research focused on addressing health, environmental and social issues generated by food insecurity and inequity, poor farming practices, poor dietary habits and food waste. Areas of interest include ‘wicked’ problems in the green transition, regenerative farming and the social justice challenges surrounding access to healthy food.
led by Katharina Bader and Lynne Baxter
This cluster investigates the history and evolution of work practices and professional identities across the public, private and third sectors with a focus on how to create equitable work environments that promote well-being, diversity and social justice. This cluster also explores the extent to which cultural changes and the shifting dynamics of acceptable business practice are influencing workplace justice. Research in this cluster includes areas like family and wellbeing and the impacts of privatisation and marketisation on workplace justice.