Professor Steve Wood

Dean of Surrey Business School and Professor of Retail Marketing and Management

PhD

sm.wood@surrey.ac.uk

ResearchGate profile

43 MS 02

PA: Vicki Blamey

v.blamey@surrey.ac.uk

Academic and research departments

Surrey Business School.

About

Biography

Professor Steve Wood has been Dean of Surrey Business School since 2019. Currently responsible for 120 academic staff and 2,500 students, Steve has wide-ranging experience of academic leadership, including accreditation, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) submission and forming business school strategy. He was previously Director of Research, School REF lead, as well as Head of the Department of Marketing. Earlier in his academic career, Steve was Reader in Strategy, University of Southampton (2011-2012), and Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at University of Surrey (2005-2011). Prior to 2005, Steve spent three years at Tesco plc in its marketing and property departments advising on store development strategy both domestically and abroad and has experience as a Retail Analyst for Verdict Research, a London-based retail consultancy.

Steve's research particularly focuses on retailing, including internationalization, online retailing (and product returns), store location planning, competition policy, supply networks and pricing. He is European and Africa Regional Editor for the International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, a member of the editorial board of Journal of Business Research and has been cited by the press in publications such as The Economist, China Daily and Retail Week. He has been a member of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Peer Review College since 2015. In 2019 he was Visiting Professor at Global Production Networks Centre at the National University of Singapore. Steve has received research funding from the John Lewis Partnership, SONY, Advanced Institute of Management (AIM), British Academy of Management (BAM), NEMODE/EPSRC and the Nuffield Foundation. An experienced examiner, he was most recently external examiner for undergraduate management programmes at University of Bristol (2017-2022), having fulfilled the same role at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford (2011-2014) amongst others.

Since 2018, Steve has been a Trustee of Bohunt Education Trust, a Multi Academy Trust comprising eight secondary schools and over 11,000 students, where he Chairs the Trust’s Education Committee. Earlier, between 2012-15, he sat on the governing body of Ash Manor School where he was Chair of its Curriculum Committee. He is also a leader at his local village Cub Scout pack in Hampshire and Assistant Manager of the mighty Under 14s Liphook Pumas football team. Steve is a season ticket holder at Portsmouth FC and still regularly attends matches at his first love, Chelsea FC. He is often to be found kayaking in rivers and the sea or out running.

University roles and responsibilities

Director of Research, Surrey Business School (2016 – 2020)

Member of Surrey Business School Senior Management Team (2016 – present)

Head of Department for Marketing and Retail Management, Surrey Business School (Prior to 2016).

My qualifications

2007 Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP), University of Surrey

2001 PhD Economic Geography: Corporate Restructuring, Regulation and Competitive Space: The Case of the US Department Store Industry, University of Southampton.

1998 BA (Hons) Geography 1st Class, University of Southampton.

Affiliations and memberships

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)

Member of the European Association for Education and Research in Commercial Distribution (EAERCD)

Honorary Member of the Society for Location Analysis (SLA)

Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS)

Member of the ESRC Peer Review College (2015-present)

News

07 SEP 2023

Why study your masters at Surrey Business School

01 SEP 2023

MSc Business Analytics programme receives prestigious UK-first IIBA accreditation

23 MAR 2023

Surrey Business School and SAS jointly announce SAS module accreditation

03 MAR 2023

Stakeholder Engagement, Business and International Relations Event with NTT Ltd.

30 JUN 2022

£1m donation establishes blockchain and metaverse academy at the University of Surrey

01 JUN 2022

Launch of the Future of Work Research Centre

Surrey Business School REF 2021 highlights

12 MAY 2022

Surrey Business School in the top 20

Business student talking to academic in the Business School

14 DEC 2021

What you need to know about studying at Surrey Business School

28 JUN 2021

Surrey Business School receives AACSB accreditation extension

20 MAR 2020

Meet the academic: Professor Steve Wood

10 OCT 2019

Meet the new Interim Dean of Surrey Business School

02 APR 2019

Surrey Business School forms new partnership with the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

Research

Research interests

Professor Steve Wood's research particularly focuses on:

The internationalization of retailing
Online retailing (and product returns)
Retail stores, locations, competition policy and supply networks
Retail pricing

An economic geographer by training, Steve has published widely in leading social science journals including Economic Geography, Journal of Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A, Journal of Business Research, Regional Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, The Service Industries Journal, Journal of Marketing Management and European Journal of Marketing amongst others. His research has been cited by the press in publications such as The Economist, China Daily and Retail Week. He is European Regional Editor for the International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management and regularly acts as a referee for a range of highly rated academic journals. He has been a member of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) Scholars’ Pool and the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Peer Review College (since 2015). In June 2019 he was Visiting Professor at Global Production Networks Centre at the National University of Singapore. Steve has received research funding from the John Lewis Partnership, SONY, Advanced Institute of Management (AIM), British Academy of Management (BAM), NEMODE/EPSRC and the Nuffield Foundation. An experienced examiner, he was most recently external examiner for undergraduate management programmes at University of Bristol (2017-2021), having fulfilled the same role at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford (2011-2014) amongst others.

Supervision

Postgraduate research supervision

PhD/DBA Supervision

2017 – 2023

Passed - April 2023

Zhi Han – Structural Change and Digital Transformation in Chinese Food Retailing

(Supervision with Prof Andrew Alexander and Prof Neil Coe)

Full time PhD

2012 – 2019

Passed May 2019

Helen Christmann – International Retail Expansion of SMEs

(Supervision with Prof Andrew Alexander)

Part time PhD

2008 – 2014

Passed - July 2014

Alexander Karl - The Success Factors of Horizontal Co-operations in Technical Wholesaling?

(Supervision with Prof Reinhard Bachmann)

Part time DBA

2007 – 2013

Passed – August 2013

Dieter Naegele-Preissmann – Purchasing Competence and the Role of the Service Purchasing Agent in Organisational Alignment: A Social Capital Perspective

(Supervision with Prof Panos Louvieris)

Part time DBA

Teaching

Professor Steve Wood teaches on the following modules:

MAN3107 - International Retailing

Publications

Highlights

Please see my Research Gate site where I add open access versions of all of my publications. If you want the journal typeset version and do not have access, just send me an email (sm.wood@surrey.ac.uk) and I will send you a pdf.

Wood, S. (2000) “Review of Marsden, T., Flynn, A., Harrison, M. 2000 Consuming Interests: The Social Provision of Foods”, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 25, pp137-138.

Wood, S. (2001) “Regulatory constrained portfolio restructuring: the US department store industry in the 1990s”, Environment and Planning A, Vol.33, pp. 1279-1304.

Wood, S. (2002) “Organisational restructuring, knowledge and spatial scale: the case of the US department store industry”, Journal of Economic & Social Geography [Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie], Vol.93, No.1, pp. 8-33.

Wood, S. (2002) “The limits to portfolio restructuring: lessons from regional consolidation in the US department store industry”, Regional Studies, Vol.36.5, pp. 515-529.

Wrigley, N., Currah, A. and Wood, S. (2003) “Investment bank analysts and knowledge in economic geography”, Environment and Planning A, Vol.35, pp. 381-387.

Wood, S., Lowe, M. and Wrigley, N. (2006) “Life after PPG6: recent UK food retailer responses to planning regulation tightening”, International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, Vol.16, No.1, pp. 23-41.

Wrigley, N., Shaw, H., Lowe, M., Guy, C. and Wood, S. (2007) Relocalising Food Shopping. Consumer Responses to Supply Chain Transformation in the UK Convenience Store Sector. University of Southampton.

Wood, S. and Wrigley, N. (2007) “Market power and regulation - the last great US department store consolidation”, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management. Vol.35, No.1, pp. 20-37.

Wood, S., and Browne, S. (2007) “Convenience store location planning and forecasting - a practical research agenda”, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management. Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 233-255.

Wood, S. and Tasker, A. (2008) “The importance of context in store forecasting: the site visit in retail location decision-making”. Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 139-155.

Alexander, A., Cryer, D. and Wood, S. (2008) “Location planning in charity retailing”, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, Vol. 36, No. 7, pp. 536-550.

Wood, S. (2008) “Reinterpreting the great US department store bankruptcies of the 1980s - a catalyst to strategic structural change”, Journal of Management History, Vol. 14, No. 4, 404-423.

Wood, S., Myers, H. and Alexander, A. (2009) Guest editorial, International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 313-15.

Wood, S. (2009) “Review of The Globalization of Retailing, Volumes I And II, Neil M Coe, Neil Wrigley (eds.) Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009,” Business History, Vol. 51, No. 6, pp. 978-980.

Okeahalam, C. and Wood, S. (2009) “Financing internationalisation–a case study of an African retail transnational corporation”, Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 511-537.

Wood, S., Lowe, M. and Wrigley, N. (2010) “Conceptualising innovative customer-facing responses to planning regulation: The UK food retailers”. The Service Industries Journal, Vol. 30, No. 12, pp. 1967 – 1990.

Wood, S. and Reynolds, J. (2011) “The intra-firm context of retail expansion planning”. Environment and Planning A, Vol. 43, No. 10, pp. 2468 – 2491.

Wood, S. and Reynolds, J. (2012) “Managing communities and managing knowledge: strategic decision making and store network investment within retail multinationals”. Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 539-565.

Wood, S. (2012) “Review of “The Economic Geography of the UK, edited by Neil Coe & Andrew Jones”. Invited review paper for Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 321-323.

Wood, S. and Reynolds, J. (2012) “Leveraging locational insights within retail store development? Assessing the use of location planners’ knowledge in retail marketing”, Geoforum, Vol. 43, No. 6, pp. 1076-1087.

Wood, S. and Reynolds, J. (2013) “Knowledge management, organisational learning and memory in UK retail network planning”. The Service Industries Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2, 150-170.

Wood, S. (2013) “Revisiting the US food retail consolidation wave: regulation, market power and spatial outcomes”, Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 299-326.

Nguyen, H., Wood, S., Wrigley, N. (2013) “The emerging food retail structure of Vietnam: phases of expansion in a post-socialist environment”, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management , Vol. 41, No. 8, pp.596 – 626.

Wood, S. and Reynolds, J. (2014) “Establishing territorial embeddedness within retail TNC expansion: the contribution of store development departments”. Regional Studies, Vol. 48, No. 8, pp. 1371–1390.

Wood, S. and McCarthy, D. (2014) “The UK food retail “race for space” and market saturation: a contemporary review”. International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 121-144.

Perry, P., Fernie, J. and Wood, S. (2014) “The international fashion supply chain and corporate social responsibility”. In Fernie, J. and Sparks, L. (eds.) (2014) Logistics and Retail Management, 4th Edition, Kogan Page, pp. 77-100. ISBN: 978-0749468231

Wrigley, N., Lambiri, D., Astbury, G., Dolega, L., Hart, C., Reeves, C., Thurstain-Goodwin, M. and Wood, S. (2015) British High Streets: from Crisis to Recovery? A Comprehensive Review of the Evidence, University of Southampton/Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). ISBN: 9780854329823

Perry, P., Wood, S. and Fernie, J. (2015) “Corporate social responsibility in garment sourcing networks: factory management perspectives on ethical trade in Sri Lanka”. Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 130, No. 3, pp. 737-752.

Watson, I., Wood, S. and Fernie, J. (2015) “‘Passivity’: A model of grocery retail price decision-making practice”. European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 49, No. 7/8, pp. 1040-1066.

Christmann, H., Alexander, A. and Wood, S. (2016) “Exploring brand identity and entrepreneurship as drivers of small specialist retailer internationalisation: A German case study”. International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 137-153.

Wood, S., Coe, N. and Wrigley, N. (2016) “Multi-scalar localization and capability transference: Exploring embeddedness in the Asian retail expansion of Tesco”. Regional Studies, Vol. 50, No. 3, pp. 475-495.

Wood, S. and Alexander, A. (2016) “Regulation in practice: power, resources and context at the local scale in UK food retailing”, Environment & Planning A, Vol. 48, No. 9, pp. 1848–1863.

Teller, C., Wood, S. and Floh, A. (2016) “Adaptive resilience and the competition between retail and service agglomeration formats: an international perspective”, Journal of Marketing Management, Vol. 32, No. 17-18, pp. 1537-1561.

Wood, S., Wrigley, N. and Coe, N. (2017) “Capital discipline and financial market relations in retail globalization: insights from the case of Tesco plc”. Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 31–57.

Coe, N., Lee, Y-S., and Wood, S. (2017) “Conceptualising contemporary retail divestment: Tesco’s departure from South Korea”. Environment and Planning A, Vol. 49, No. 12, pp. 2739–2761.

Wrigley, N. and Wood, S. (2018) “An economic geography of globalizing retail: emergence, characteristics, contribution”. In Cook, G, Beaverstock, J, Johns, J, McDonald, F & Pandit, N (Eds.), 2018, The Routledge Companion to the Geography of International Business. London & New York, Routledge, pp 477-492. ISBN: 9781138953345

Wrigley, N., Wood, S., Lambiri, D, Lowe, M. (2019) “Corporate convenience store development effects in small towns: convenience culture during economic and digital storms” Environment and Planning A, Vol. 51, No.1, pp 112–132.

Perry, P., Wood, S. (2019) “Exploring the international fashion supply chain and corporate social responsibility: cost, responsiveness and ethical implications”. In Fernie, J. and Sparks, L. (eds.) (2019) Logistics and Retail Management, 5th Edition, Kogan, pp. 97-127. EAN: 9780749481605

Wood, S., Coe, N., Watson, I., Teller, C. (2019) “Dynamic Processes of Territorial Embeddedness in International Online Fashion Retailing” Economic Geography, Vol.95, No.5, pp. 467-493

Alexander, A, Teller, C. and Wood, S. (2020) “Augmenting the Urban Place Brand - On the relationship between markets and town and city centres”, Journal of Business Research, Vol. 116, pp. 642-654

Wood, S, Faulconbridge, J., Watson, I., and Teller, C. (2020) “‘Business Code/Spaces’ in Digital Service Firms: The Case of Online Multinational Fashion Retailing”, Geoforum, Vol. 112, pp. 13-23.

Wood, S., Watson, I., Teller, C. (2021) “Pricing in online fashion retailing: Implications for research and practice”, Journal of Marketing Management. Vol. 37, No. 11-12, pp. 1219-1242

Han, Z., Wood, S., Coe, N., Alexander, A. (2022) “The Shifting Foundations of Territorial Embeddedness in Food Retailing: Recent Insights from China”, The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research

Amsl, S., Watson, I., Teller, C., and Wood, S. (2023) “Product Information Failures on Websites and their Impact on Mobile Shopping Outcomes”. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management

Abstract
Purpose – Inaccurate product information on retail websites lead to dissatisfied customers and profit losses.
Yet, the effects of product information failures (PIFs) remain under-explored, with the mobile commerce
channel commonly overlooked. This paper aims (1) to investigate the negative effects of PIFs on shoppers’
attitudes and behaviours in a mobile context. The authors further (2) evaluate the impacts of the cause and
duration of a PIF, changes of expectations towards the retailer after a PIF occurred and how previous mobile
shopping experience in general decreases the effects of PIFs.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a scenario-based experiment with a one-factorial
between-subjects design. The six most common PIFs of an international leading online fashion retailer are
operationalized and tested against a control group. The final sample consists out of 758 mobile shoppers from
the UK.
Findings – The results demonstrate that the perceived severity of PIFs based on showing customers incorrect
information is higher when key information is lacking. Further, when the cause of a PIF is attributed to the
retailer, it results in higher recovery expectations towards them. The results also reveal that respondents who
have shopped mobile before perceive PIFs as less severe than inexperienced ones.
Originality/value – This research expands the online service failure literature by examining PIFs and its
effects in the specific context of mobile commerce. The authors also provide recommendations for a better
management of PIFs like the incorporation of PIFs information into reporting packs.

Amsl, S., Watson, I., Teller, C., and Wood, S. (2023) “Presenting Products on Websites – the Importance of Information Quality Criteria for Online Shoppers”, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management

Online shoppers make product purchase decisions based on product information shown on a retailer’s website and potentially in comparison to that seen on competitors’ websites. Insufficient, poor quality or missing information about a product can lead to reduced retailer sales. Measuring online Product Information Quality (PIQ) is therefore an essential element in helping retailers maximize their potential success. This paper aims (1) to identify directly quantifiable PIQ criteria, (2) to assess the effects of PIQ and (3) to evaluate the moderating effect of product involvement. We conducted a scenario-based experiment within 3,544 DIY online shoppers from the UK. Within an 8x2x2 between-subjects design we manipulated the factors PIQ criteria (8), PIQ level (2) and product type (2). The findings support that poor PIQ has a negative impact on consumers online shopping outcomes. We also found that the effects of PIQ differ between the various criteria, the product category and the level of consumer involvement in the selling process. In the context of product depiction, title readability and product attribute comparability with other retailers’ websites a high level of PIQ is required. Moreover, high involvement products need a higher level of PIQ than low involvement products. This research expands website quality and service failure literature by introducing PIQ criteria and its effects in the context of online retailing. We also establish actionable managerial recommendations to assist retailers to embrace and utilize PIQ to better understand their own potential website, and thus business, improvements.

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