Research strategy
The Southampton Management School’s Research Strategy is to build on its well-established expertise in the quantitative modelling of business and management problems while broadening its scope to develop related areas within the business and management canon. The School's mission is to produce research of international standing, which covers all areas of management and business studies including; management science, finance and banking, accounting, information systems, human resource management, organisation behaviour, marketing, strategy and entrepreneurship, supply chain management, operations management and quantitative methods.
Our aim is to make a significant contribution to theoretical developments across this broad set of disciplines and to solving problems of concern to commerce, industry, the public sector and society in general. The wide cross-section of disciplines within the School provides disciplinary homes for individuals as well as serving to coordinate teaching and administration. Our research centres provide the forum and focus for cross-disciplinary research and supplement coordination of single disciplinary research afforded by the disciplinary groups. The research strategy of the School feeds into our education strategy through research led teaching.
The research strategy has the following key objectives:
• To maintain and enhance a thriving research culture which attracts internationally recognised staff, visitors and research students.
• To reinforce the School’s research strengths in Management Science and Accounting and Finance, particularly through our existing strengths in inter-disciplinary areas such as risk and health management and leveraging these strengths in new areas, such as consumer credit and taxation.
• To develop our existing commercial, industry and public sector contacts to ensure that our research is well informed by the issues of relevance to real world decision makers.
• To establish focused research strengths in the Management field, using synergies with existing decision modelling expertise. For example, to continue to develop research capacity in the Marketing area.
• To expand our expertise in organisational behaviour, integrated with a research presence in strategy and entrepreneurship.
• To embrace the combination of high quality academic work with practical relevance. This is actively encouraged through close involvement of our academics and students in real business situations, both in research and in consultancy.
• To engage more in the USRG themes and the number of cross faculty research bids.
• To leverage the strength of our portfolio of successful specialist MSc and post-experience programmes to (i) expand applications to our already strong PhD programme and to establish our DBA programme and, (ii) use commercial/industry-based MSc projects as a source of research publications and commercial/industry contacts and collaborations.
The School’s research is characterised by a synthesis of quantitative decision sciences (eg in risk analysis) in the context of intra and inter-organisational activities, drivers and relationships (eg emotional intelligence, leadership, team working, change management, supply networks), coupled with professional stewardship of resources within the organisation (eg international banking). Specific research initiatives develop from research centres, individuals and groups, across the range of subject areas and we believe that we have an excellent and recognised record in the creation of innovative research and new research centres to support new initiates.
