Research Seminars
12th September, 2019 - Towards Understanding the Anatomy of Brand Transgressions
Speaker: Professor. Shailendra (Shelly) Pratap Jain
TITLE: Towards Understanding the Anatomy of Brand Transgressions
Note: This seminar will be taking place in the Bank of Ireland lecture theatre, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 14.00pm.
ABSTRACT: Frequently we observe brands committing transgressions, i.e., engaging in advertent or inadvertent behaviors which influence various stakeholders negatively. Examples of such transgressions include brands showing a poor understanding of racial/ethnic/gender sensitivities, purportedly using harmful chemicals in product manufacture, misunderstanding/miscommunicating body image issues, and facing unexpected product failure whose consequences vary from mild to serious. This presentation will feature 8 experiments and quasi-experiments across 3 research projects that examine the interactional influence of different types of brands, transgressions, their consequences, and consumers on perceptions and judgments about the transgressing brands. Both, mundane product brands as well as human brands and their transgressions are investigated.
BIO: Shailendra (Shelly) Pratap Jain is James D. Currie Professor of Marketing at Foster School of Business, University of Washington. Formerly a Chair of Department at the same school, he does research in consumer behaviour and psychology on topics including brand strategy, categorization, comparative advertising and the economics of information. His research is published in leading marketing and psychology journals such Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Marketing Science or Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
19th September, 2019 - From Bureaucracy to Citizen Centricity
Speaker: Dr. Laurent Muzellec, Dr. Deepak Saxena
TITLE: From Bureaucracy to Citizen Centricity
Note: 'Class of 1980' Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 14.00pm.
ABSTRACT: Although there exists extensive information about consumer decision-making journey and best practice in the private sectors, there is a dearth of studies focusing on citizens and public services. This study covers this gap by focusing on the journey of Irish citizens in availing selected public services. Five common pain points are identified for the citizen journey. Based on international benchmarking, our analysis reveals five key insights for government to move from administrative authority to citizen centricity in successfully managing the digital transformation.
BIO: Laurent Muzellec is Associate Professor at Trinity Business School, Dublin, where he is founder and director the Trinity Centre for Digital Business and the M.Sc. in Digital Marketing Strategy. He advises senior managers and talks to audiences worldwide on digital opportunities. Laurent’s research focuses on digital business models and multi-sided platforms as well as digital advertising and fictional brands.
Dr. Deepak Saxena is working as a Research Fellow with the Trinity Centre for Digital Business. He holds a PhD in Business from Trinity Business School and a Master in Technology from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
10th October, 2019 - The Network Structure of Knowledge Flows
Speaker: Associate Professor Stephen Kinsella, University of Limerick
TITLE: The Network Structure of Knowledge Flows
Note: 'Class of 1980' Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 14.00pm.
ABSTRACT: TBC
BIO: TBC
31st October, 2019 - Would an Expert Driver Adopt an Autonomous Car? Effects of Consumers’ Task Expertise on Forming Intentions to Adopt Autonomous Products
Speaker: Dr. Radu Dimitriu
TITLE: Would an Expert Driver Adopt an Autonomous Car? Effects of Consumers’ Task Expertise on Forming Intentions to Adopt Autonomous Products
Note: 'Class of 1980' Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 14.00pm.
ABSTRACT: TBC
BIO: TBC
7th November, 2019 - Sell or Die : What happens "pulled" IPOs?
Speaker: Dr. Samuel Vigne, Dr. Brian Lucey, and Dr. Pia Helbing
TITLE: Sell or Die : What happens "pulled" IPOs?
Note: 'Class of 1980' Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 14.00pm.
ABSTRACT: TBC
BIO: TBC
11th November, 2019 - HRM in Project Based Organizations, Networks and Platforms: New Theoretical Perspectives
Speaker: Professor Anne Keegan, UCD
TITLE: HRM in Project Based Organizations, Networks and Platforms: New Theoretical Perspectives
Note: 'Class of 1980' Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 13.00pm.
ABSTRACT: Drawing on her long-standing research on Human Resource Management in project based organizations (Keegan and Den Hartog, 2019; Keegan et al, 2012), and her more recent research on HRM in online labour platforms (Meijerink and Keegan, 2019), Anne will reflect on new theoretical perspectives for understanding contexts where HRM practices are implemented across organizational boundaries (internal and external) and beyond standard employment relationships. She will look at ways of extending current theoretical perspectives as well as exploring new theoretical perspectives for contexts including multiple organizations (Keegan and Den Hartog, 2019) and where standard employment relationships are either present alongside other contractual forms, or absent (Meijerink and Keegan, 2019).
BIO: Anne Keegan is Full Professor of Human Resource Management at University College Dublin. She works in the HRM and Employment Relations Subject Area. Before joining UCD in 2017 she worked at the Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam as Director of the Graduate Business School, and at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has held visiting professorships at Vienna University of Economics and Business and Trinity College Dublin where she completed her PhD studies. She has published in leading academic journals such as Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Resource Management and the International Journal of Human Resource Management. She is on the Editorial Review Board of several journals and collaborates in international research projects with scholars in the fields of Paradox HRM Studies and HRM in Project Based Organizations.
28th November, 2019 - The Poverty of Strategy
Speaker: Dr. Mike Zundel, Associate Dean, University of Liverpool
TITLE: The Poverty of Strategy
Note: 'Class of 1980' Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 14.00pm.
ABSTRACT: From the beginning, strategy is woven with an idea of a vantage point and oversight, both over space and through time. But the complex and often globally implicated organization of human affairs (and our relationship with wider nature) belies such a static and singular perspective. Yet strategy remains resolutely associated with the creation and use of overviews (maps, plans, reviews) to direct what has still assumed a manageable world, albeit one that is large, open and forever on the move.
Now more a system than a mere word, strategic activity reveals a habituated way of understanding the world as something revealed as an object of knowledge and then regulated in ways that make it predictable. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘enframing’, we conceptualize this systemic sense of strategy as a technological practice, indeed the most impressive and dominating such arrangement by which human beings have sought to organize their affairs, and yet find themselves being organized by them.
We identify three strategy epochs: technē, technology and technogenesis, each characterized by a growing intensity of organization in which human agency (the instrumental capacity to envisage and bring about effects through thought and action) finds itself increasingly written or programmed out of productive relays. Agency itself is considered as an aspect of such a technological condition. Drawing on Agamben (2004), we reflect on the term poverty and end by considering whether the third (current) epoch – strategy as technogenesis - is all there is.
BIO: Mike Zundel is Faculty Associate Dean at University of Liverpool and Professor of Strategy at Liverpool Management School. He is a senior editor for Organization Studies, and he serves on the editorial boards for the Academy of Management Review and for the Academy of Management Learning and Education.Mike's research interests revolve around the areas of strategy, learning in organisations, and research methodology. His published work reflects on stability/change relationships, the interplay between individual action and wider institutional processes, as well as possibilities of practice and process theoretical perspectives for studying organisations.
Thursday, 6th February, 2020 - Institutional Strengthening as Ethical Obligation: An Agonistic Approach to Business Ethics
Speaker: Professor Harry Van Burren
TITLE: Institutional Strengthening as Ethical Obligation: An Agonistic Approach to Business Ethics
Note: B132 Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 14.00pm.
ABSTRACT: Business ethics scholars often write about institutions as relatively static guidelines with which companies may or may not comply (e.g., “rules of the game”). While some institutions, such as rule of law or stable monetary and fiscal policy, are good for business, we also know that (some) businesses (often) seek to manipulate institutions so that the “rules of the game” are tipped in their favor. In this article, we argue that conceiving of institutions in this way limits the role institutions can play in addressing conflict or contention. Instead, we draw from recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe on agonism and apply it to the corporate context. We develop the notion of agonistic business responsibility, which overcomes the existing limitations in the literature by legitimizing stakeholder voices. This approach acknowledges the perennial nature of dissensus and, rather than lamenting it, recognizes that greater legitimacy may be gained through contestation.
BIO: Professor Harry Van Buren is a visiting professor of business ethics at the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business at the American University of Beirut and is on leave from the University of New Mexico’s Anderson School of Management, where he holds the Rust Professorship in Business Ethics. His doctorate in business environment, ethics and public policy is from the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business, and he also earned an M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary. His current research interests include relational stakeholder theory, business and human rights, preventing human trafficking in global supply chains, employment ethics, gender and social capital, and intersectionality analysis in diversity management.
His research has been published or is in press at Academy of Management Review, Business and Human Rights Journal, Business & Society, Business and Society Review, Business Ethics Quarterly, Futures, Human Resource Management, Human Resource Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics,and Journal of Management Studies, among other journals. He is currently president of the International Association for Business & Society and a former division chair for the Social Issues in Management division of the Academy of Management. He is the religion, spirituality, and business ethics section editor for the Journal of Business Ethics, a current co-editor of a special issue of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion on feminist epistemology in business ethics, and has co-edited special issues of the Journal of Management Studies (on accounting for stakeholders) and Business & Society (on a religion as a macro-level social force that affects business).
Thursday, 13th February, 2020 - The Darker Side of Social Integration on Knowledge Transfer
Speaker: Professor Ulf Andersson, Mälardalen University Sweden and BI Norwegian Business School
TITLE: The Darker Side of Social Integration on Knowledge Transfer
Note: Room 334 Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 13.00pm.
ABSTRACT: This paper conceptualizes the knowledge transfer implications of social (lateral) integration mechanisms in the MNE. The generation and transfer of knowledge among geographically dispersed units is one of the primary concerns for the multinational enterprise (MNE). One prominent tool for the MNE headquarters to use for stimulating cross border knowledge transfer between sub-units is social or lateral integration mechanisms, for example, committees, meetings, liaisons, expats. Although these mechanisms are perceived as costlier than alternative coordination mechanisms, i.e. formal or centralized coordination mechanisms, a range of studies have found that these social integration mechanisms to open up for communication, dialogue and trust which in turn facilitate knowledge sharing and capability development. In reality though, knowledge is a strategic resource with property rights not easily commanded by ownership wishes and fiat power. This, together with the idea that different parts, or levels, in an MNE, e.g. divisions, subsidiaries, individuals, etc., exist in different competitive spaces, gives rise to contingencies in terms of under what conditions social integration mechanisms are facilitating cross border knowledge transfer.
We argue that social integration mechanism facilitate cross border knowledge transfer when the knowledge exchanging individuals and units exists in different competitive spaces bot that when they compete for resources within the same competitive space such mechanisms impede cross border knowledge transfer. In a study of an MNE with activities in more than 24 countries, we have data from 115 foreign units informing on the extent of their social integration with the rest of the MNE and the extent of knowledge transfer between individuals and units. Our findings suggest that social integration on the level of the individual employee increases cross border knowledge transfer between units, but that social integration viewed from the management level has the opposite effect. These findings suggest that there is a darker side of social integration in MNEs warranting further scholarly attention.
BIO: Professor Ulf Andersson, Mälardalen University Sweden and BI Norwegian Business School, explores the strategy and management of the MNE, subsidiary development, knowledge governance and transfer, and network theory. Ulf is also Senior Editor of Journal of World Business and an AIB Fellow. He teaches in the International Business Management and International Marketing programs and regularly speaks at conferences in Europe and North America.
Thursday, 20th February, 2020 - The Effect of Subcontracted Labor Mix on Financial Performance: Evidence from High-Tech Project Teams
Speaker: Dr Emmanouil Avgerinos, IE Business School
TITLE: The Effect of Subcontracted Labor Mix on Financial Performance: Evidence from High-Tech Project Teams
Note: Room 438 Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 15.30pm – 17.00pm.
ABSTRACT: We investigate the effect of using subcontracted workers together with permanent employees on long and complex project’s financial performance. Organizations are increasingly staffing project teams with subcontracted workers, in order to adapt to variations in demand and access specialist expertise. Despite the importance of this phenomenon, there is scant research on the effect of subcontracted workers on project performance. Investigating such an effect is important because past findings on the effects of subcontracting in retail or assembly lines cannot be simply extrapolated to the more demanding tasks associated to project environments. We first develop a theoretical model to conceptualize how and under what conditions subcontracted workers impact project performance. We then test our hypotheses analyzing 413 projects of a European high-tech firm.
We find that greater use of subcontracted workers increases profit margins. This positive effect becomes even more prominent as team size is increased. However, in projects with many scope changes, the positive effect of subcontracted workers is attenuated. Finally, we focus on the level of expertise of subcontracted workers and find that the positive effect on project performance is stronger for lower skilled subcontracted workers than for higher skilled ones. Our analysis shows that reliance on subcontracted workers in complex projects can positively impact project margins, especially for larger teams.
KEYWORDS: Subcontracted labor mix; project performance; team size; scope change.
BIO: Emmanouil Avgerinos is an assistant professor in Decision Sciences at IE Business School of IE University. He obtained his PhD from UCL School of Management, his research interests include team and task dynamics in healthcare and professional service operations and his work has appeared in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Operations Management and Human Relations.
Thursday, 5th March, 2020 - Emotions, learning from experience and self-change
Speaker: Professor Paul Hibbert, University of St. Andrews
TITLE: Emotions, learning from experience and self-change
Note: 'Room 435 'Class of 1980' Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: 12.00pm – 14.00pm.
ABSTRACT: This work focuses on two central themes. The first part is focused on the ways in which individuals deploy reflexive practices in order to avoid or engage with a call to change either oneself or the social context. Building on a categorization of the modes of reflexive practice associated with avoidance or engagement, a relationally reflexive research process is employed to develop three contributions. First, an understanding of what a repertoire of reflexive practices may include, and ‘what is going on’ in such reflexive practices. Second, how reflexive practices can be mobilizing, thereby enabling shifts between avoidance and engagement modes, or fix action within a single mode. Third, an understanding of the ways in which emotions and relationships influence how reflexive practices of either kind are deployed.
The second main part, following a similar relationally reflexive approach, extends and focuses the research programme to consider how reflexive practices can enable learning to be developed from emotionally challenging or traumatic experiences. The main contribution is to show that while such experiences are impactful in ways that can enable learning, it is not necessarily realized unless reflexive practices and enabling factors help the individual to move on from containing a painful memory to explicating and exploring it. A framework of emotional experiences and reflexive learning that is shows how learning from ‘contained’ emotional experiences can be enabled by the legitimization of emotions, temporal distance from the difficult emotional experience, and the helpful attention of others.
BIO: Professor Paul Hibbert is the Professor of Management at the University of St Andrews and an Honorary Professor at the University of Auckland Business School. His research is principally concerned with collaborative and relational processes of organizing and learning. He is an Associate Editor of Academy of Management Learning & Education and is the former Chair of the Management Education and Development Division of the Academy of Management. He sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Management Education, Management Learning, and Organizational Research Methods. His research has been recognised with awards from the Academy of Management, the Australia and New Zealand Academy of Management and the British Academy of Management. His work is published in leading international journals including AMLE, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Studies, Management Learning, Organizational Research Methods, Organization Studies and Research Policy.
Date TBA, 2020 - Social Sustainability and Organizational Learning: Do Organizations Learn from Rare Failures?
Speaker: Dr Mary Parkinson, UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business
TITLE: Social Sustainability and Organizational Learning: Do Organizations Learn from Rare Failures?
Note: Room 438 Lecture Room, Trinity Business School. Time: TBA
ABSTRACT: This research addresses the question of whether organizations learn from social sustainability failures, in the form of worker accidents, because there are conflicting predictions on the relationship between past accident experience and future accidents. Learning from failure has been increasingly highlighted in recent years as being important to organizational theory and social sustainability in organizations. Failures provide valuable learning opportunities, if those opportunities can be exploited (Dahlin, Chuang and Roulet, 2018). Worker illnesses and injuries are an example of a rare failure, which poses some unique challenges for learning. We examine the relationship between past and future accidents using a large sample of secondary longitudinal data for organisations situated in Oregon, U.S.A. The objectives are to determine 1) whether organizations learn from accidents 2) boundary conditions and moderators organizational learning (such as investment in human capital). The research aims to provide insight on when organizations do and do not learn from accidents.
BIO: Mary Parkinson is a post-doctoral researcher in the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research interests are focused on the question: what drives organizations to become more socially sustainable? Dr. Parkinson uses quantitative methods to address questions in Sustainable Supply Chain Management, Behavioural Operations, Organizational Behaviour, and Moral Judgment. This involves the investigation of factors driving socially (un)sustainable behaviour in organizations using big data, and the use of behavioural experiments to understand cognitive factors in sustainable operations and supply chains. She has published in leading journals such as Management Science, Judgment and Decision Making, and the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. She holds a PhD. in Cognitive Psychology from Trinity College Dublin.