14 March 2016
Dr Angela Tregear and Dr Mary Brennan secure large European funding bid
Congratulations to Angela Tregear and Mary Brennan, who have successfully secured €410k Horizon 2020 funding.
Their Strength2Food proposal “Sustainable food chains through public policies: the cases of the EU quality policy and of public sector food procurement” went through a vigorous 2 stage application process. The total value of the project is €7 million with the Edinburgh proportion amounting to around €410k.
Strength2Food is a five-year European project to undertake research and demonstration activities to improve the effectiveness of EU policies towards agricultural product quality, public sector food procurement, and short food supply chains. The project is led by Newcastle University (Dr Matt Gorton) and is made up of 30 partners. The University of Edinburgh team is led by Angela with support from Mary. In addition, Professor Michelle Belot (School of Economics) will provide an advisory role during later years.
The Edinburgh team will lead an empirical work package on public procurement of sustainable and local food (with particular focus on school meals), as well as contribute to other phases of the project. In addition, Mary Brennan is Gender Action Officer for the project.
This is a fantastic achievement, and unfortunately the huge amount of work put in to secure the funding is only just the beginning! Well done!
Dr Xiaobai Shen secures double funding from AHRC and CREATe
Xiaobai Shen has secured a double award to explore the recent emergence in China of new models for digital film, music and e-fiction production and distribution.
AHRC Centre for Digital Copyright and IP Research in China
The AHRC Centre for Digital Copyright and IP Research in China, based in Nottingham/Nignbo Universities has awarded £31,924 for a path-breaking study entitled : Convergence or differentiation in IP protection strategies and business models? The research team from Edinburgh (also including Burkhard Schafer [Law] Martina Gerst and Robin Williams) will work with China’s leading universities Tsinghua (Xudong Gao) and Peking (Yinliang Liu). The project will explore the direct involvement of China’s Internet behemoths (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) in film production. New business models are emerging for online film distribution, despite widespread piracy of cultural content.
CREATe: RCUK Centre for Copyright & New Business Models in the Creative Economy
Following a supplementary bid to the contingency fund of CREATe, the RCUK Centre for Copyright & New Business Models in the Creative Economy, based at the University of Glasgow, additional funding of £71,776 has been awarded, specifically for extending the scope of the above project from film to new production/distribution models in digital music and e-fiction publishing, allowing a comparative perspective between the developments in China, and the CREATe research programme in the UK. PI Dr Xiaobai Shen (Edinburgh), Co-Is Prof Martin Kretschmer (Glasgow) and Prof Robin Williams (Edinburgh)
The project will run for 1 year from 15th December 2015.
Dr Celine Rojon secures RCUK-CONICYT / Newton funding
Dr Celine Rojon secured £198,739 from RCUK – CONICYT Newton Fund
Celine and her collaborators, Dr Javier Hernandez and Mr Emilio Moya, from Catholic University of Temuco, Chile, through their project, “School to higher education, work transitions and exclusion: Insights and learning from 4 countries in times of social reform in Chile”, will examine transitions from school to higher education and from school/higher education to work in Chile, the UK, Germany and Finland. By transitions, this means the processes and procedures through which individuals progress (or not) to the following stages in their lives or careers and they seek to examine two specific types of transitions: secondary school to higher education and higher education to work or job market.
Findings of the planned multidisciplinary (education, sociology, psychology, management and organisation studies), crosscultural research are expected to contribute to an enhanced understanding of the role higher education plays in the social structure in times of educational reforms in Chile, whilst also informing public policy and practice in the other three countries and further countries facing challenges relating to their educational system and equality, alongside the academic debate on life domain/stage transitions. The four specific countries have been identified as interesting cases for the research because they differ greatly on key dimensions (i.e., social equality, income, culture, educational systems) relating and/or relevant to the education, socialisation and work entry of young people.
Dr Arman Eshraghi secures Carnegie funding
Dr Arman Eshraghi has successfully secured £4800 from Carnegie’s Research Incentive Grant.
Risk and uncertainty prevail in financial markets. In such settings, fund managers are faced with the dilemma of having to outperform the market while knowing that this is very difficult to do on a consistent basis. To perform most effectively, they need to have appropriate levels of conviction and confidence in their investment decisions. Arman’s project “Fund Manager Overconfidence, Active Share, and Investment Performance” seeks to answer two fundamental questions:
- How much confidence is too much for fund managers, and what is the impact of this on their investment performance?
- How do fund managers with higher levels of conviction and active investing perform compared to their peers and how does this inform the active vs passive investing debate?
Dr Raluca Bunduchi secures EPSRC funding
Dr Raluca Bunduchi is part of a joint project being funded by EPSRC’s Trust, Identity, Privacy & Security in the Digital Economy (DE TIPS) call.
The project, “Ox-Chain: New business models toward a circular economy within second hand clothes through distributed ledger technologies”, is being led by Edinburgh College of Art and Raluca will also be working with colleagues from Informatics and Computing. The objective of the project is to use a distributed ledger to transform business models with Oxfam. A recent McKinsey report that is supported by Oxfam research, has revealed that Oxfam staff are sending between 70-80% of donated goods to the charity’s recycling centre in Batley, West Yorkshire. It is estimated if a method could be found to prevent a proportion of these valuable donations from being dispatched to Wastesaver, and instead sold in shops, Oxfam estimate an increase of £4.4 million of sales per annum. The Ox-Chain project proposes the use of distributed ledger technology to transform the existing business and logistical model within Oxfam shops by recognising that the thousands of staff and donors who contribute to Oxfam have a better sense of what is valuable as a collective, than any one individual. The Ox-Chain project will use distributed ledger technology to support the wide scale discrete valuation of second hand clothes by donors, and broker the potential distribution of these artefacts across the Oxfam network to places where they will be most valued. In doing so, the ledger
will provide a further layer in which histories of value will be stored and compared against other databases, and objects will begin to support their own valuation and assist volunteers in ensuring they remain in circulation and avoid being recycled.
Dr Kristina Potocnik secures European Commission funding
Dr Kristina Potocnik is part of a cross-European project being funded by the EC’s DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion: Improving expertise in the field of industrial relations call.
The project, “New European Industrial Relations (NEIRE): Mediation system effectiveness for collective organizational conflicts: A comparative study in Europe” is being led by Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium and was awarded a total of €395,077.81, of which €12,814.50 will come to the School.
Social dialogue is an essential instrument within the EC to prevent and regulate relations between employers and employees. Within the EC conflicts at organizational level regularly escalate at high costs, and therefore member states offer different third party interventions and mediation services to solve these conflicts. The EC promotes mediation and other forms of non-judicial conflict resolution. However, there is a lack of knowledge about a) the actual functioning of these services; b) the conditions to promote the use of mediation; c) the antecedents of effective mediation interventions. Especially for collective labour conflicts, the structuring of third party support and mediation services in itself are important elements of social dialogue. Partners feel the need to innovate social dialogue. One of the components for innovation is supporting social partners at organizational level, especially when negotiations are stuck, agreements cannot be reached, or rights are not respected, and conflict escalation might occur. Different member states have different traditions in providing such mediation assistance. However, actual knowledge on how this functions and how to further develop lacks. Are the structures adequate, accessible, and acceptable to conflicting parties in collective organizational conflicts? How do the formal structures relate to the use of independent consultants offering facilitation and mediation services? What are limitations to the use of mediation, and how can ‘preventive mediation’ be used to de-escalate in an early stage conflicts within organizations between management and labour? These questions are at the heart of further development of social dialogue in Europe, and this study aims to compare the experiences in different member states, in a search for good practices, inspiring social partners and governments of member states to promote mediation, both as prevention and conflict intervention.
The overall goal of this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of mediation as a tool for collective labour conflict resolution and strengthening of social dialogue, by assessing the effectiveness of mediation from a double perspective: structural and functional.
Ben Sila secures British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant funding
Ben Sila is part of a project, being led by St Andrews, which has secured funding from the BA Small Research Grant Scheme.
The project, “Employee satisfaction in mergers and acquisitions”, will investigate whether and how employee satisfaction in the firm affects mergers and acquisitions (M&A) decisions and post-merger outcomes. Although anecdotal evidence and case-based research suggest that employees are important and senior executives take employee satisfaction into account when assessing viability of an M&A deal, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence exploring this channel to date. We ask whether employee satisfaction of companies affects the propensity that firms initiate a deal or become targets of a deal. Further, it explores the potential synergy effect of M&A that can be captured by employee satisfaction. It uses two novel identification strategies to establish causality.
This project aims to construct a large panel data set of employee satisfaction, including a codified qualitative evaluation of the company. We seek funding to construct the first merged database of employee satisfaction and financial data and to disseminate our work with experts in the area of labour economics and M&A.