Funded PhD Opportunities in Enterprise, Innovation and Strategy

Advert Reference: RDF23/BL/EIS/PRICE

Social enterprises are defined by their dual objectives of pursuing a social mission through commercial activities (Mair & Marti, 2006). The social enterprise sector contributes over £60billion to UK’s GDP and employs over 2 million people or, 5% of the workforce (SEUK, 2022), yet obtaining the funding from conventional sources to scale up these organisations is often difficult (Moss et al., 2018).

The hybrid nature of social enterprises mean they can approach both philanthropic and commercial capital providers, but in the early stages, many social enterprises have weak networks, limited collateral and possess little strategic remit beyond their immediate locale (Price & Wong, 2022) making them unattractive to many philanthropic funders, who are increasingly focused on scalability and impact, driven in part, by donor or trustee expectations. Access to finance varies geographically, recent work by Kimmett et al. (2022) finds that a lack of finance and associated professional support infrastructure can limit the growth and development of social enterprises, particularly in deprived areas. Paradoxically, this leads to more social entrepreneurship in wealthier conurbations.  

Research focusing on ways in which early-stage social enterprise can better access affordable and flexible finance is important for two principal reasons. Firstly, social enterprises are increasingly integrating commercial activities as an explicit strategy (Stirzaker, et al., 2021), which in turn develops the opportunity to grow their resources, to address the social problems more effectively [i.e., to increase the scale of their impact]. Increasingly inequality means the issues that many social enterprises seek to address, are becoming increasingly acute. Second, there are new opportunities to examine financial models which attract a broader spectrum of investors, all of whom will have differing expectations in terms of ROI. Hence, a better understanding of the social ecosystem provides an opportunity to design better blended financing, which may adopt a range of instruments [grant, debt, cooperative finance, social impact bonds or loan guarantees] from a broader spectrum of investors. 

The UK government recognises social enterprise have a role to play in driving growth as part of its ‘Levelling up’ agenda. The paper states that government will “consider how best to encourage social organisations and entrepreneurship” (HM Gov, 2022, p. 216), in left-behind areas but presents no further insight into how this may be achieved and typically, the role of government in social venture investment has had mixed results (Kimmett et al. 2022). Hence, there is an opportunity to examine the propensity for public funding [through a range of entrepreneurial support organisations (ESO’s)] to drive inclusive growth. We invite proposals that seeks to tackle this important topic through a combination of the following questions:

Does the sector [health, education, arts etc] in which the social enterprise operates, determine its ability to gain access to finance?

What is the relationship between social enterprise strategies and the local, regional and national financial ecosystem?

Do existing legal and governance frameworks adequately support financial flows into the sector?

How do finance providers select projects to support and then measure impact and returns?

In the absence of funding institutions how do social enterprises obtain informal funding and what are the results?

How effective are social ESO’s and what role do they play in the entrepreneurial ecosystem?

This project is supervisred by Dr Michael Price and Professor Gary Bosworth. It benefits from additional support from Richard Adams OBE. Richard is one the UK’s leading social entrepreneurs. He brings considerable expertise to the project, as a former director of the UK Social Investment Forum. He holds honorary doctorates from Newcastle University and the University of Durham. He has previously won the New Statesman Social Entrepreneur of the Year award and was listed by The Independent newspaper as one of the top 50 people in the UK who had had most impact in “making the world a better place”.

For informal queries, please contact MICHAEL.J.PRICE@NORTHUMBRIA.AC.UK

Steiner, A., Farmer, J. & Bosworth, G. (2019) “Rural Social Enterprise – Evidence to date and a research agenda” Journal of Rural Studies 70, 139-143

Kimmitt, J., Mandakovic, V. and Muñoz, P. (2022), “Social problem scale, public investment and social entrepreneurship action”, Int. J. Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research (in press)

Mair, J., & Marti, I. (2006). Social entrepreneurship research: A source of explanation, prediction, and delight. J. World Business, 41(1), 36-44.

Moss, T.W., Renko, M., Block, E. & Meyskens, M. (2018) Funding the story of hybrid ventures: crowdfunder lending preferences and linguistic hybridity. J. Business Venturing, 33, 643–659.

Price, M & Wong, N. (2022) Scaling up? Making sense of strategies in social enterprises. In: Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, York, ISBE Conference Proceedings 2022.

Stirzaker, R., Galloway, L., Muhonen, J. and Christopoulos, D. (2021), “The drivers of social entrepreneurship: agency, context, compassion and opportunism”, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, Vol. 27 No. 6, pp. 1381–1402

Advert Reference: RDF23/BL/EIS/BOTTOMLEY

The British industrial revolution marks the genesis of modern economic growth, the transition from a universal regime of subsistence or near-subsistence, to one of material abundance. Conventionally, the role of coal (burnt to produce heat energy) in conjunction with steam-power (transforming this heat energy into mechanical energy) was believed to be critical. It released Britain from the energy restrictions inherent to any organically based economy, wherein virtually all energy inputs are derived from what can be grown from the land, be it firewood to provideheat energy or food and fodder for man and beast to provide mechanical energy (Wrigley, 2010); between 1600-1913, the per capita energy ‘budget’ in England increased 80 fold (Warde, 2007).

However, despite steam’s conceptual importance, from an empirical perspective we still know vanishingly little about the economic drivers underpinning its development, the time series for its adoption, and its tangible economic contribution. Absence of evidence has been interpreted as evidence of absence, with cliometric approaches indicating that water and wind-power remained frequently preferred alternatives and that important sectors such as agriculture remained “virtually untouched by steam” until at least 1870 (Crafts, 2005). If the transition to modern economic growth was achieved without the massive burning of fossil fuels, then a reversion to renewable power sources today might incur only a modest economic cost.

This, however, was decidedly not the view of contemporaries (Morton, 1859). The proposed PhD project relates to the development and commercialisation of portable steam engines between c.1840-1870. As the name implies, these were small(er) engines that could be moved around a work site to provide power as and where required. They were reportedly common in agriculture where they were first adopted in the 1840s to drive threshing machines and quickly adopted to a wider range of heavy farm work (Bourn, 1861). One of the PhD’s primary tasks will be to compile a time-series for the adoption of portable steam-power using extant production lists for engineering firms such as Clayton and Shuttleworth. It is much harder to argue for the significance of portable steam engines if they were seldom used. This will also feed into another primary task for the PhD, to assess the economic impact of the portable steam engine, most likely in the context of agricultural productivity. Finally, the project will examine the sources of innovation in portable steam engineering. Given the scale of the firms innovating and manufacturing portable engines, the sector can plausibly be viewed as a precocious example of the transition from individual led invention to firm led research and development; this at a time when Britain’s alleged failure to do so explains why it was supplanted by American industry (Chandler, 1990).

The project builds on on-going research in the Business History group (funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy) examining the adoption of stationary steam-engines in industry. It would also provide a historical component to iNCITE especially research on innovation, entrepreneurship and rural enterprise.

This project is supervised by Sean Bottomley. For informal queries, please contact sean.bottomley@northumbria.ac.uk

References:

Bourne, John, A treatise on the Steam-Engine, (5th ed., London: Longman, 1861)

Chandler, Alfred D., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. (Cambridge MASS: Belknap, 1990)

Crafts, Nicholas, ‘Steam as a General Purpose Technology: A Growth Accounting Perspective’, The Economic Journal 114 (2004), 338-351

Morton, J. C., ‘On the forces used in agriculture’, The Journal of the Society of Arts, 8 (1859), 53-68

Wrigley, Tony, Energy and the English industrial revolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Warde, Paul, Energy consumption in England and Wales in 1560-2000, (Naples: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Istituto di Studi sulle Società del Mediterraneo, 2007))

Advert Reference: RDF23/BL/EIS/ONJEWU

What are the firm attributes that best predict sustainable performance and export intensity?

The literature on SMEs’ environmental commitment culminating into superior firm performance and export intensity is now a developed body of work (Haddoud et al., 2021). Increasingly, scholars believe that firms’ environmental commitment is no longer a loss-making activity, but a virtuous trade-off that simultaneously generates (1) environmental as well as (2) financial gains (Onjewu et al., 2023). In this domain, studies investigating sustainability and export performance have assessed attributes and outcomes in the context of family and non-family firms (Samara et al., 2018; Onjewu et al., 2022a), alternate sectors such as food and transportation (Jovanovic et al., 2017; Beltrán-Esteve and Picazo-Tadeo, 2015), in national settings (Jermsittiparsert et al., 2019) and within SMEs in general (Tang and Tang, 2012). What is seemingly missing in the literature is a nuanced understanding of the firm characteristics that predict superior sustainable performance as well as greater export intensity. These characteristics may include size in terms of micro vs. small vs. medium entities, sector/industry type, region, gender of top owner/manager, foreign vs. domestic ownership and family vs. non-family ownership. It is likely that profiling firms along such dimensions will increase our understanding of the antecedents of both sustainable performance and export intensity.

Therefore, we invite project proposals seeking to investigate the drivers of sustainable performance and export intensity. Particular interests in our research group include environmental initiatives, environmental commitment, export propensitity and export intensity. Suitable applications will identify and conceptualise firm attributes linked to these outcomes which are underpinned by theories not limited to the technological, organisational and environmental framework, the resource-based and strategy creation view, self-selection vs. learning-by-doing view, stakeholder theory, institutional void perspective and resilience (Onjewu et al., 2022b). Relevant theories may also include the network approach, the sunk costs approach, knowledge-based view, country of origin theory, socio-emotional wealth perspective.

For unit of analysis and context, we are interested in projects examining SMEs in national contexts not limited to Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Proposals suggesting a comparison of SMEs’ sustainable performance and export intensity by micro vs. small vs. medium entities, sector/industry type, region, gender of top owner/manager, foreign vs. domestic ownership, family vs. non-family ownership, country A vs. country B and other plausible criteria will satisfy the project expectation. Particular methods that are effective include multi group analysis using structural equation modelling and qualitative comparative analysis.

The overarching research aim will be to examine firms’ intermediate attributes shaping sustainable performance and export intensity as guided by the following research questions:

What theories underpin the links between firm determinants, SMEs’ sustainable behaviour and export intensity?

How do SMEs’ sustainable performance and export intensity differ across size, sector/industry, region, gender of top owner/manager, foreign vs. domestic ownership, family vs. non-family ownership, and country?

What firm determinants best predict sustainable performance and export intensity in SMEs that differ by size, sector/industry, region, gender of top owner/manager, foreign vs. domestic ownership, family vs. non-family ownership, and country?

This project is supervised by Dr Adah-Kole Onjewu and Dr Roseline Wanjiru. For informal queries, please contact adah-kole.onjewu@northumbria.ac.uk

References:

Beltrán-Esteve, M. and Picazo-Tadeo, A. (2015). Assessing environmental performance trends in the transport industry: eco-innovation or catching-up?. Energy Economics, 51, 570-580.

Haddoud, M., Onjewu, A. and Nowiński, W. (2021). Environmental commitment and innovation as catalysts for export performance in family firms. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 173(1), 121085.

Jermsittiparsert, K., Siriattakul, P. and Wattanapongphasuk, S., 2019. Determining the environmental performance of Indonesian SMEs influence by green supply chain practices with moderating role of green HR practices. International Journal of Supply Chain Management, 8(3), pp.59-70.

Onjewu, A., Hussain, S. and Haddoud, M. (2022b). The Interplay of E-commerce, Resilience and Exports in the Context of COVID-19. Information Systems Frontiers, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-022-10342-w.

Onjewu, A., Jafari-Sadeghi, V., Kock, N., Haddoud, M. and Sakka, G. (2023) The Catalysing Role of Customer Pressure on Environmental Initiatives and Internationalisation. Journal of Business Research, (forthcoming).

Onjewu, A., Puntaier, E. and Hussain, S. (2022a) The Correlates of Energy Management Practices and Sales Performance of Small Family Food Firms in Turkey. British Food Journal, 124(7), 2343-2360.

Samara, G., Jamali, D., Sierra, V. and Parada, M. (2018). Who are the best performers? The environmental social performance of family firms. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 9(1), 33-43.

Tang, Z. and Tang, J. (2012). Stakeholder–firm power difference, stakeholders' CSR orientation, and SMEs' environmental performance in China. Journal of Business Venturing, 27(4), pp.436-455.

Advert Reference: RDF23/BL/EIS/ARTE

This project investigates the impact of ongoing geo-political tensions between countries on the exit and relocation decisions of foreign direct investment (FDI). The key research questions of the project are: (1) How and to what extent do geo-political tensions between countries affect the exit and relocation decisions of international firms; (2) How do exit and relocation decisions unfold under environmental uncertainty; (3) Do exits and relocations create value for the firm and society?

The project focuses on investigating FDI behaviour amidst geo-political tensions. Some avenues that the project may explore include: (1) pre- and post-Brexit FDI scenario in the U.K.; (2) U.S.-China trade war and its impact on bilateral FDI between the U.S. and China; or (3) effect of NATO expansion on FDI in Sweden and Finland. These tensions have had a significant impact on the regional and global economies, which has led several firms to exit foreign markets or relocate despite having profitable business in the affected countries (Dhingra et al., 2016; Ikatura, 2020).

Theoretically, the framework could draw upon the institution-based view, political economy, or corporate governance. The supervision team is particularly interested in investigating the links between different factors that motivate firms to exit or relocate; their impact on the various stakeholders including shareholders, employees, creditors, suppliers, and the local government; and how exits and relocations create or destroy value for the firm and society (Arte & Larimo, 2019).

The methodology can be flexible to include qualitative, quantitative, or mixed method approaches. A particular method that could be effective is an investigative case-study to explore the antecendents and outcomes of foreign exits and relocations. Later, a survey could be drafted by using the findings of the case-study to collect data from multiple firms. The supervision team has access to international networks to initiate joint research workshops and short-term exchange programme.

This project is supervised by Dr Pratik Arte and Dr Roseline Wanjiru. For informal queries, please contact pratik.arte@northumbria.ac.uk

References:

Arte, P., & Larimo, J. (2019). Taking stock of foreign divestment: Insights and recommendations from three decades of contemporary literature. International Business Review, 28(6), 101599.

Dhingra, S., Ottaviano, G., Sampson, T., & Van Reenen, J. (2016). The impact of Brexit on foreign investment in the UK. BREXIT 2016, 24(2), 1-10.

Gonchar, K., & Greve, M. (2022). The impact of political risk on FDI exit decisions. Economic Systems, 46(2), 100975.

Itakura, K. (2020). Evaluating the impact of the US–China trade war. Asian Economic Policy Review, 15(1), 77-93.

McGrattan, E. R., & Waddle, A. (2020). The impact of Brexit on foreign investment and production. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 12(1), 76-103.

Mihaela, S. (2018). The impact of Brexit on the UK inwards FDI. Economics, management and sustainability, 3(1), 6-20.

Sousa, C. M., & Tan, Q. (2015). Exit from a foreign market: Do poor performance, strategic fit, cultural distance, and international experience matter?. Journal of International Marketing, 23(4), 84-104.

Zeng, K., Wells, R., Wilkins, A., & Gu, J. (2022). Bilateral Tensions, the Trade War, and US–China Trade Relations. Business and Politics, 1-31.

Advert Reference: RDF23/EIS/WHALLEY

In today’s digital enabled economy, technology companies play a key role. Through the provision of services and technologies that have enabled innovative products and services to emerge that have been widely adopted. These products and services enable, for example, individuals to shop online or communicate with distant friends and family. Businesses, on the other hand, adopt such technologies to facilitate innovation or improve their operational efficiencies while governments utilise digital technologies to engage with their populations.

The digital economy is global in nature, with the products and services widely available. Many of the leading digital companies are platforms, which make their services widely available to anyone who can access them. They are often free to consumers, who ‘pay’ with data while businesses access them through innovative new business models like SaaS that are scaleable. This has created a dynamic global digital economy, and fuelled the dramatic rise in value of leading technology companies.

While the technologies and services are available to anyone who can access them, the companies providing them are based in a relatively small number of countries. Many of the leading technology companies that individuals use in their daily lives (e.g., Apple and Alphabet) are located in the United States, while specialist equipment design and manufacturing companies (e.g., Arm, ASML) are European. As companies have expanded globally and their services become more widely available, tensions have emerged. Although these tensions are numerous and multifaceted there are two key factors at play: whether the service (content) is legal in one country but not in another and how the data generated through the provision of a service is collected, analysed, used and stored.

This project will examine these tensions through the lens of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). There are considerable differences globally towards EDI issues, which are magnified by the global scale of the digital economy where companies from the US and Europe play a key role. Individuals could, for example, use Google to access content that is illegal in their own country but not in the United States. This raises questions around whether Google should tailor its services to reflect local laws and circumstances? Furthermore, the recent fine imposed on Grindr by the Norwegian Consumer Council highlights the sensitivity of data that can be collected by apps, and how this could detrimentally affect individuals depending on where they are located.

This project will critically review the EDI policies of leading technology companies, identifying the key challenges that they have faced within the company before focusing on how the tensions that have arisen as their services have become geographically widely available. Particular attention will be paid to how digital companies have reacted differently to the same tension(s), with it envisaged that prominent in this discussion will be cases relating to data, misinformation, gender and sexuality. Investigating such differences will enable the project to shed light on the relationship between EDI and the business model(s) that have been adopted.

Academic Enquiries

This project is supervised by Professor Jason Whalley and Dr Steff Worst. For informal queries, please contact jason.whalley@northumbria.ac.uk and steff.worst@northumbria.ac.uk

References:

Mukhopadhyay, S. and J Whalley (2022) The emergence and evolution of disruptive platform systems, Electronic Markets, 32 (2), 669-868

Stocker, V. and J. Whalley (2020) Prisoners of a Platform? How Connectivity, Skills and Geography Shape Participation in the Sharing Economy, ITS Online Event, 14-17 June

Worst, S (2015) Lesbian and gay people doing gender and sexual orientation well and differently. Unpublished PhD thesis, Northumbria University, Newcastle

Worst, S and S.C. O’Shea (2020) From chess to queergaming, Human Resources Development International, 23 (5), 519-541

Advert Reference: RDF23/BL/EIS/WILSON

This PhD opportunity cuts across tourism management and geography, where the candidate will be encouraged to draw from contemporary ideas in mobilities research to understand more about touristic experiences of different forms of mobility.

The development of transportation and communication technologies has produced expanded possibilities for the mobility of ideas, objects, knowledge and people. As a result, urban-rural mobility, including forms of urban-rural tourism has attracted growing scholarly attention (Eimermann, 2017 et al). The point of departure for this project is that movement is integral to the overall tourist experience and resonates with how tourists experience not only the destination, but the journey itself. Despite this, in-depth research into these phenomena is lacking (Song et al., 2012). 

With a particular focus on tourism mobilities as multi-sensual and embodied auto-mobile experiences (Wilson and Hannam 2017), this research will explore how movement and mobilities are constitutive of places. This call therefore invites human geography, tourism, sociology and specifically scholars with mobilities interests to consider the contrasting rural and urban placemaking potentialities of travels in motorised vehicles – specifically in taxis and/or in campervans and mobile homes.

Taxis are part of the architecture of the place encounter, where the lightly regarded role of the taxi driver in shaping the tourist imaginary has yet to be voiced. In the extra-urban and rural context, a sharp increase in caravanning following Brexit and the covid-19 crisis, sales of motorhomes are at an all-time high, creating tourism pressures felt acutely in rural and remote parts of the country such as North Coast 500 route in Scotland.  We ask, to what extent the use of vehicles - mobile places moving through space and time, shape the tourist experience?

Both ideas focus on the transgressive potentials of automobility. The ways meanings are shared, negotiated and mediated are partial, personal, and perhaps even disruptive, and are a key concern of the project. As such, the stranger might be afforded a 'peeling back of the layers’, in urban and rural settings, potentially revealing aspects of a fascinating cultural milieu and a thickening of the sense of place, but filtered through a very particular lens – that of the automotive traveller.

It is anticipated that mobile methods such as ‘ride-along’ ethnographies, in-car interviews and conversation analysis will be employed to examine how placemaking-in-motion is made and unmade in tourism automobilities.

This project is supervised by Dr Sharon Wilson. For informal queries, please contact Sharon3.wilson@northumbria.ac.uk

References:

Eimermann, M. (2017). Flying Dutchmen? Return reasoning among Dutch lifestyle migrants in rural Sweden. Mobilities, 12(1), 116-135.

Song, H., & Witt, S. F. (2012). Tourism demand modelling and forecasting. Routledge.

Wilson, S., & Hannam, K. (2017). The frictions of slow tourism mobilities: Conceptualising campervan travel. Annals of Tourism Research, 67, 25–36.

Advert Reference: RDF23/EIS/BOSWORTH

This project examines the relationship between housing market changes and the rural economy, allowing a PhD candidate to focus on the impacts of changing rural populations on the operating conditions for rural businesses. Extending beyond economics of population size, the study will explore how ageing populations and the out-migration of young people affect local businesses, how increased house prices (including those driven by second-home-ownership) affect their local economies and how new working patterns might further change relationships between residential preferences and rural economic development.

Over several decades, counterurbanisation has been associated with significant rural economic change. Trends of commuting, gentrification and higher house prices have transformed the socio-economic and demographic composition of many rural communities. In some areas, entrepreneurial new residents have added to the local economy (Bosworth & Finke, 2020) but the overall relationship between migration and rural service provision remains inconsistent (Cabras et al., 2019).

As demand for rural homes has increased further since Covid-19, and as new ways of working are evolving, the relationship between rural housing markets and local rural economies demands new research to inform rural economic development and planning policies. Practically, the study will generate deeper understanding of the differentiated characteristics of rural economies and the influence of residential change on their entrepreneurial ecosystems. Conceptually, it can reinvigorate rural development theories by considering residential mobility as a driving force of economic change.

To achieve this, we propose a quantitative/mixed-methods study of housing market trends, business populations and socio-economic characteristics in rural England. This comprises three phases:

With access to datasets from DEFRA and Rightmove, the PhD candidate will be supported to carry out longitudinal analysis of counterurbanisation patterns, commuting and economic change at a local scale. This would include analysis of the performance of different business sectors, business growth rates and household income levels over time compared against change in local population, house prices and housing affordability.

New Survey analysis will examine in detail how the residential preferences of rural house-seekers are changing. This may include data on the family composition and employment characteristics of movers to draw direct connections between housing and the local economy. This phase of the study aims to identify features of rural places and properties most attractive to entrepreneurial individuals, skilled employees and different occupational categories who are most likely to contribute to their local economies (see Habersetzer et al., 2021).

Analysing embeddedness and community cohesion. This includes assessing the community services that are most valued by housemovers (e.g. see Cabras et al, 2019) and measuring local economic embeddedness and community cohesion based on networks, local expenditure patterns and business dependence on their local markets/suppliers. A range of indicators will be developed to build a picture of rural community cohesion e.g. availability of services of amenities such as village shops, post offices etc. 

Overall, the study can build on business research questions of place-based/embedded business practices (Korsgaard et al. 2015) as well as geography research into the socio-economic effects of changing rural populations.

Academic Enquiries

This project is supervised by Professor Gary Bosworth and Professor Ignazio Cabras. For informal queries, please contact gary.bosworth@northumbria.ac.uk 

References:

Bosworth, G. & Finke, H.B. (2020) Commercial counterurbanisation and the changing roles of rural businesses. Environment and Planning A 52(3),654-674

Cabras, I. & Lau, (2019) The availability of local services and its impact on community cohesion in rural areas: Evidence from the English countryside. Local Economy 24(3),248-270

Habersetzer, A., Rataj, M., Eriksson, R. & Mayer, H. (2021) Entrepreneurship in rural regions: the role of industry experience and home advantage for newly founded firms, Regional Studies, 55(5),936-950

Korsgaard, S., Muller, S. & Tenvig, H. (2015) Rural entrepreneurship or entrepreneurship in the rural – between place and space. Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research 21(1),5-26