pathway: Management and Business Studies Alumni

My research interests include sustainable consumption and second-hand economies, with a specific focus on the charity retail sector. With the growth of public awareness of sustainability issues, charity shops are increasingly identified with sustainable consumption, while changing legislation puts pressure on the sector to engage with the issue directly. My doctoral research explores how sustainability is interpreted and put into practice by stakeholders in the UK charity retail sector, how understandings of sustainability interact with the other values, goals and priorities of charity retailers (for example, fundraising imperatives), and the consequences of this interaction for material flows. I favour qualitative methods, particularly ethnographic ones, and am interested in approaches which allow close attention to the material and its interplay in social relations.

My research centres on how institutions affect firm behaviours around modern slavery in the UK and Russia, with a particular focus on the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. Why have so many companies not yet reported as legally required by the law? Why is modern slavery so prevalent in modern business?

You can read a recent publication by Michael here

Collaborative Doctoral Award, The University of Exeter and Tate.

Using Tate as an intrinsic and instrumental case, my research looks at the relationships between art museum spaces, their collections and their audiences.

The research focuses on innovation policy and industrial strategy. More specifically, I am interested in the effectiveness of public R&D support measures in promoting private R&D and innovation and the associated implications for industrial strategy. Beyond the effects on R&D and innovation outputs, the study will attempt to capture firm-level behavioural changes due to the receipt of public support.

My research offers a psychoanalytic conception of underemployment in relation to the graduate labour market in the UK. It specifically adopts a critical Lacanian perspective to consider the affective nature of underemployment discourse within this context. For example, an important question that my research asks is: why might individuals desire to define themselves as over-educated / underemployed? I am particularly interested in the unconscious, paradoxical desires which might be at play here, and the role of fantasies in facilitating such desires.