Events

Abstract
This paper arises from work undertaken to revise and update ‘Organisational Misbehaviour’(Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999) which is now being republished in a revised and updated edition. In 1999 the topic of Managerial misbehaviour was not covered in our book for a number of reasons. Although there was some evidence for managerial misbehaviour – including some spectacular examples (Punch, 1996) - by and large it seemed a marginal subject matter. At the time, managers defined what counted as organisational misbehaviour almost exclusively, and for us that was a key point of our thesis. Today, of course, much has changed. Today, it is seldom possible to read a serious newspaper without encountering reports of misbehaviour and alleged malfeasance amongst managers, and especially their top echelons. Today, journalists have an active interest in reporting misbehaviour and certain aspects of it have become matters of public politics. What is considered in this paper is not so much whether there is more managerial misbehaviour, as the capacity to assess this adequately evades us; but why managerial beliefs and practices have moved so far from the norms of acceptable conduct held by educated opinion and that of the general public.

The School of Management Seminar Series is proud to present Dr Gábor Péli to give a talk titled "Managerial bias supports market wave formation: evidence with logical formalization".

Surrey Business School is proud to present Dr Timotheos Angelidis, (University of Peloponnesse, Greece), presenting on the topic 'Cross-Sectional Return Dispersion: Global Evidence'.

Thinking on your feet, taking the unexpected in your stride and working well with others are all attributes we need in the fast changing business world.  The ability to adapt, collaborate and deal with constant change are essential to your progress.  

The presented paper discusses and evaluates the impact of cognitive (or self-perceived) age on the grocery store patronage (behaviour) of elderly shoppers. I propose that cognitive age moderates the effects between the perception of store attributes, satisfaction, (re)patronage intentions and ultimately share of visits. The test of hypotheses uses a sample of 404 supermarket patrons aged 60 and older. The latent construct of cognitive age was operationalised by six items representing feel, look, do, interest, health and think age. The chronological age of our respondents proved to be significantly higher than cognitive age. To evaluate the moderating effects I applied the product indicator approach based on variance based structural equation modelling. As a result the impact of product range, manoeuvrability and atmospherics on patronage behaviour becomes significantly stronger with increasing cognitive age whereas the negative impact of personnel becomes significantly weaker. The contribution of this paper is to provide theoretical rational and empirical evidence to consider cognitive age as a substantial influencer and predictor of patronage behaviour of elderly shoppers and call for a stronger consideration of self-perceived age dimensions along with chronological age in the research of older consumer cohorts.

The traditional view of the university administrator is someone engaged in disinterested processing in the civil service tradition, playing a supporting role to academic staff. In recent years, the term ‘professional services’ has been introduced to describe the activities of non-academic staff engaged in the administration and management of English universities. It could be argued that this is long overdue and simply rectifying earlier injustices; alternatively, it could be viewed as symptomatic of a reconstitution of relations between academics and administrators in which the latter have begun to ‘carve out critical space’ in universities, and, at senior levels, move into roles previously reserved for senior academics (Szekeres, 2011:679).There has been little acknowledgement of the repositioning of professional administrators and managers in higher education, nor broader consideration of the implications. This study addresses these gaps in the literature. It queries whether the organisational professionalism of administrators and occupational professionalism of academics are dichotomous, gauges the state of academic / administrator relations, and explores the implications of the continued professionalisation of the administration in English universities. Does the professionalisation of the administrator herald the deprofessionalisation of the don?

Surrey Business School is proud to present Professor Rolf von Lüde, University of Hamburg, as part of it's Research Seminar series.

Professor Nancy Puccinelli’s research explores customer attributes influencing price perception and persuasion in retail promotions. Her previous research finds that retail promotions and employee behaviour need to be tailored to the affective state of the customer. This research finds that customer mood impacts tolerance for ambiguity (Braun-LaTour, Puccinelli & Mast, 2007), preference for spokespeople in an advertisement (Puccinelli, 2006), and choice of retail outlets (Puccinelli, Deshpandé and Isen, 2007). Surprisingly, this work finds that people in a bad mood avoid options that make them feel better and suggests that successful retailers will seek to customize their offerings to match these customer attributes. Professor Puccinelli will talk about her current program of research that builds on this earlier work and examines: 1) the cost of consumer mood improvement and its impact on decision making, 2) the effect of price color on price perception, 3) regulatory fit as a driver of retail format preference in India.

This presentation starts with a reflection on three different notions of “the implicit”. Drawing on Personal Construct Theory, ‘Repertory Grids‘ will then be discussed as a powerful methodological approach to analysing the implicit dimensions of human reality construction. Following on from there, the analytical potential of this methodology will be exemplified in the context of building and destroying trust in business relationships. Empirical research will be presented to illustrate the argument of this paper.

This study explores the management of performance in food retail operations from the perspective of the store manager. Critical Incident Technique is used to collect data on where these managers draw performance information from and how they perceive it influences their behaviour. The method is novel in this context and yields insight to the world of retail store management. Corporate performance measures are a part of this world, but the study finds some support for the existence of informal performance information being used by front-line retail operations managers.

Contextualised in the multi-disciplinary debate on the emergence of ‘modern’ retailing systems in Western Europe and North America in the early post war decades, this paper explores the growth of supermarket retailing in the UK.  An introduction to the current debate reveals an emphasis on describing the uneven development of the format, and its impact on so-called ‘cultures of consumption’.  In contrast, this paper focuses on some of the implications of the rapid growth of supermarket retailing for retail management practices, particularly those related to matters of knowledge transfer. It does so through two perspectives: first, the role of inter-locking directorates in enabling the transfer of knowledge fundamental to the success of the earliest supermarket retailing operations; second, the changing characteristics of retailers’ governance of their supermarket store estates as the format became more firmly established in the UK retail market.

Digital environments have become a significant influence on our consumer behaviour. They help determine decision making, buying behaviour, information management and shape brand perception and learning. The recent boom in the use of smartphones and smartphone applications, as additional marketing tools, challenges existing theories in online consumer behaviour (TAM, MIAC, Flow construct theory, mind-sets). While these theories contribute to our understanding of how online consumers make decisions, the effect of smartphone technology on the consumers’ pre-buying behaviour has yet to be addressed. This prompts three questions: Is smartphone consumer behaviour different from online consumer behaviour? Can conceptual frameworks help understand “smartphone consumer behaviour” and, how can marketers apply a theoretical model to support the customer experience? This paper adopts the conceptual framework of the Collaborative Information Management Behaviour, but suggests the term collective as opposed to collaborative. Focusing on the technical possibilities smartphones offer such as collective information sharing and managing, is a novel approach that contributes to the field of consumer research and to the emergence of new forms of consumer behaviour based on technological advances such as smartphone consumer behaviour.

There is a growing body of research which seeks to explore the complex social, cultural, financial and psychological factors influencing choice of higher education institution. The term student choice tends to be used when students make decisions about whether to attend university, and which university to attend although it is often acknowledged that student choice is neither rational, nor linear and is influenced by numerous factors including cost, information, access, academic achievement, life and school experience. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of the literature on student choice of higher education institution. The objectives of the review are to: systematically collect, document, scrutinise and critically analyse the current research literature on higher education choice; to establish the scope of studies in higher education choice and map the factors associated with choice; to identify the key strengths and weaknesses in the research literature; and to critically analyse the extant research and make recommendations for further research in the field. All searches were tracked and processed using a database and the selected citations were documented using reference manager software and an Excel database. Following strict application of the search parameters a list of 59 papers forms the basis for the review: 35 surveys; nine secondary data studies; four longitudinal studies; eight qualitative studies; and three studies that use both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Choice factors are discussed under the following headings, which emerged from the analysis: student characteristics; institutional factors and the interrelationship between the students and the institutions. The review also provides the basis for forthcoming quantitative research to model university choice.

Surrey Business School's Centre for Advanced Research in Entrepreneurship (CARE) is proud to present William Lanham-New, Entrepreneur and Founder of D3TEX.

Surrey Business School is proud to present Professor Graham Hollinshead, University of Hertfordshire Business School.

Surrey Business School is proud to present Jana Fidrmuc, University of Warwick, to present a seminar on 'One Size Does Not Fit All: Selling Firms To Private Equity Versus Strategic Acquirers'.

The Surrey Business School's Marketing and Retail group is proud to present Monica Hope, delivering a seminar on 'Developing Business Engagement with the Curriculum'.

Surrey Business School's Marketing and Retail Group are proud to present Dr Jason Sit, delivering a seminar on 'Demystifying the Entertainment Value of Shopping Centre Entertainment Events: Insights from the Value Facilitator and the Value Creator'.

Surrey Business School is proud to present Professor Pushkar Maitra, University of Monash, Australia to deliver the seminar 'Intermediated Loans: A New Approach to Microfinance'.

Surrey Business School is proud to present Dr Beverly Tyler, Poole Management School, North Carolina State University, USA, who will be delivering a round table discussion of the SMJ paper 'A Behavioral Theory of the Reciprocal Relationship Between Innovative Output and R&D Alliances' (see right of page to download paper).

Surrey Business School is proud to present Dr Beverly Tyler, Poole Business School, North Carolina State University, USA, to deliver a seminar on 'Who I Am and How I Contract: The Effect of Contractors’ Roles and Responsibilities on the Evolution of Contract Structure in University-Industry Research Agreements'.

Is the categorisation of investment funds useful in extremely volatile market conditions? Which method of style analysis, if any, dominates in terms of consistency, accuracy and robustness? We analyse the turbulent period 2000-2010 using Returns-Based (RBS), Characteristics-Based (CBS) and a new combined BFI-CBS method. All three perform well in terms of explaining out-of-sample cross sectional returns of a large sample of diversified US equity funds. The combined methodology performs best 2000-2005 but the CBS method performs best in the second period, (including 2007-2008 financial crisis). We attribute this to the timeliness of a portfolio snapshot relative to time-series analysis in a period of extreme economic and market turbulence.

Surrey Business School are pleased to present Christos Mavis, University of Surrey, to present a seminar titled 'How have M&As Changed? Evidence from the Sixth Merger Wave'.

The fight against corruption has figured high on the agenda of the international community since the mid 1990s resulting in the adoption of regional and international conventions. Civil society is regarded by many of these conventions as an important tool in this fight. While Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) have an obvious role in raising awareness, their more direct involvement in fighting corruption has proved vexing. For example, following the Third Conference of the States Parties to the UNCAC, Doha, 2009, proposals for a peer review mechanism were adopted. These were widely criticized by CSOs for allowing states would to produce reviews that were secretive and lacking transparency. Similarly, CSOs argued for observer status in the Implementation Review Group at the 2010 Fourth Conference in Marrakesh 2010, to be refused by the States Parties. 

This reluctance on the part of states to allow substantive involvement of CSOs raises a number of interesting questions that merit further delineation and investigation. The UN continues to insist that “CSOs are UN system partners and valuable UN links to civil society . . . .  and are indispensable partners for UN efforts at the country level”.

Surrey Business School are pleased to present Evangelia Varoutsa, University of Surrey, to present a seminar titled 'Trust and control building in evolving inter-organisational relationships: Evidence from the aerospace industry'.

The Marketing and Retail group is pleased to introduce Sree Beg to speak 

The Finance and Accounting group is pleased to welcome Olga Kuzmina to speak at the University of Surrey.

The Finance and Accounting group are pleased to welcome Dr Suman Banerjee to speak. 

The Marketing and Retail Group is pleased to to have Arne Floh Senior Lecturer in Marketing from the University of Surrey to speak. 

The Finance and Accounting Group would like to welcome Dr Neslihan Ozkan to speak 

The Finance and Accounting group would like to invite you to Professor Dimitris Petmezas seminar.

The Centre for Advanced Research in Entrepreneurship (CARE) would like to welcome Professor Alan Brown to speak  

Abstract 

Innovation in software and product delivery is essential to every company’s success. However, larger companies have particular challenges driving innovation into their products and practices due to their culture, size, and context. In this presentation we look at innovation challenges in largescale software development and delivery organizations. We particularly focus on agile software development methods being used in such organizations and their role in innovation. While there have been many successes in creating innovative software solutions, too often there have been disappointments delivering that software as part of a governed product delivery approach. This presentation looks at the challenges to agile product delivery, and examines the role and characteristics of an agile organization in delivering innovative solutions.

Abstract

Many firms collect tremendous amounts of personalized transaction data and integrate them in their customer databases to analyse the profitability of their customers. Prior research shows that focusing on those customers with high estimated lifetime value can result in higher profitability and thus in a more efficient investment of scarce marketing resources. However, in spite of their forward looking properties, such metrics typically ignore the dynamic nature of evolving customer relationships. This paper develops a modelling framework for studying the profitability dynamics of non-contractual customer-firm relationships. Our approach is based on the building blocks of the customer lifetime value concept, but explicitly accounts for the evolution of customer profitability over time. We classify each customer's period-wise profitability contributions to the firm into profitability tiers and model period-to-period transitions between these tiers as a Markov process with unknown transition matrix. Unsupervised heterogeneity is captured by assuming a finite mixture of Markov chains. The model parameters are estimated using empirical Bayesian methodology. We demonstrate that the presented Markov chain clustering model enables loyalty managers to detect customer segments which differ significantly in terms of the profitability evolution of their respective members. The approach is empirically illustrated using transaction data of a customer cohort acquired by an apparel retailer. We conclude with a discussion of managerial insights gained from the study and outline some extensions of the proposed approach as an agenda for future research.

Biography

In parallel with his role at Surrey Business School, Thomas is a Professor of Marketing and Head of the Institute for Service Marketing and Tourism at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna). He currently also serves as Academic Director of WU's Master's Program (MSc) in Marketing. Thomas received his doctoral and habilitation degree from WU. He spent one year as a Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney (AUS) and has held other visiting or substitute positions at universities in St. Gallen, Bangkok, Wollongong, Frankfurt/Main, and Munich. He also previously worked as a full-time consultant with Simon-Kucher & Partners, Marketing & Strategy Consultants. This and other prior business experiences give his research and teaching activities a strong focus on issues of managerial relevance. Thomas serves as a referee for numerous academic journals and was recently appointed as a co-editor of the WU-based Jfb (Journal für Betriebswirtschaft).

Biography

Jacqueline Mees-Buss is a casual lecturer and PhD candidate from the University of Sydney. Jacqueline started her career as a graduate trainee with Unilever in her country of birth, the Netherlands. She has worked as a senior executive for large multinationals in Europe, Asia and Australia. Frustrated that she did not have answers for the social and environmental challenges MNCs were facing in the 21st century, she returned to university in 2010. She hopes to complete her PhD in 2013.

Contact details:  j.mees@econ.usyd.edu.au

Abstract

Adverse side effects of rapid industrialisation and globalisation challenge the role and responsibility of large multinational corporations (MNCs) in the 21st century. Although sustainability and social impact appear on top of the agenda wherever top managers of the largest MNCs gather around the world, substantive change is still deemed ‘contentious at best’. This study is a critical study of the process of implementing a social mission in a large MNC that is publicly acknowledged as being at the forefront of CSR (Unilever). The focus is on the sequence of events that shaped the emergence of a global brand with a social mission (Dove). Seventy interviews were conducted with participants at all levels and in different locations around the world. It became clear that there were multiple (conflicting) stories about what happened and why. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was used to analyse these conflicting accounts and to unmask the underlying ideologies to explain the conflicting perceptions of reality. The analysis sheds new light on the inner workings of the MNC ; the underlying ideological forces that enable as well as restrict the MNC’s transition towards greater social responsibility ; and the unavoidable (but suppressed) political process driving this.

Abstract

We develop a theory of income smoothing by firms when insiders know more about income than outside shareholders, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. Insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations and underproduce in order not to unduly raise expectations about future income. The observed income and payout process are smooth and adjust partially and over time towards a target. The underproduction problem is more severe the smaller is the inside ownership and results in an “outside equity Laffer curve", but the problem is mitigated by the quality of independent auditing information and by introducing stock-based compensation.

Jointly written with Viral Acharya, Stern Business School, New York.

A copy of the full paper can be found here

The Surrey Business School's Marketing and Retail group is proud to present Evmorfia Argyriou delivering a seminar on 'Are highly attractive models in advertising a social issue?'.

The Finance and Accounting Group is proud to present Marc Goergen speaking on the Market for Non-executives

The Retail and Marketing Group is delighted to present Professor Steve Wood 

The Accounting and Finance group is pleased to present Professor Sanjay Banerji

The Finance and Accounting group is pleased to present Dr. Ettore Croci

The Marketing and Retail group is pleased to present Jing Yang Zhong