Research That Shows Impact from the Financial Times Responsible Business Education Awards

The Financial Times recently released a special report on their 2022 Responsible Business Education Awards. With the growing focus on social impact within both business schools and the corporate arena, the awards honor those institutions and researchers whose focus includes people and planet, alongside profit.

The awards were split across three categories: academic research with impact, teaching cases, and alumni change makers. The academic research award went to papers that addressed societal challenges, with evidence of impact on policy or practice. The judges (selected from the private, public, and non-profit sectors alongside FT journalists) selected four winners as outstanding examples, one as highly commended, and 17 runners-up.

Among the academic research selected by the Financial Times, winners included:

• “Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations” by Sendhil Mullainathan, Ziad Obermeyer, Brian Powers, and Christine Vogeli in Science.

• “Improving Cancer Outreach Effectiveness Through Targeting and Economic Assessments: Insights from a Randomized Field Experiment” by Yixing Chen, Ju-Yeon Lee, Shrihari (Hari) Sridhar, Vikas Mittal, and Katharine McCallister in the Journal of Marketing. The research explored ways to improve liver cancer outcomes by drawing on digital and marketing expertise. By testing different prompts, such as letters, emails, or personalized telephone calls, they could recommend targeted approaches that would be more likely to succeed.

• “Parametric Insurance and Technology Adoption in Developing Countries” by Enrico Biffis, Erik Chavez, Alexis Louaas, and Pierre Picard in SSRN.

• “Pathways for Sustainable Urban Waste Management and Reduced Environmental Health Risks in India: Winners, Losers, and Alternatives to Waste to Energy in Delhi” by Fiona Marshall, Pritpal Randhawa, Pravin Kumar Kushwaha, and Pranav Desai in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities.

SAGE Publishing Runners-up*:

• “Caste and Organization Studies: Our Silence Makes Us Complicit” by Snehanjali Chrispal, Hari Bapuji, and Charlene Zietsma in Organization Studies. The authors call for scholarly engagement with caste to study its implications in the pursuit of grand challenges and inclusive organizations.

• “The Challenges of Military Veterans in Their Transition to the Workplace: A Call for Integrating Basic and Applied Psychological Science” by Steven Shepherd, David K. Sherman, Alair MacLean, and Aaron C. Kay in Perspectives on Psychological Science. An investigation that illustrates the opportunity and potential for psychological researchers to conduct research in the context of veterans when they transition into the workplace.

• “Knocking sovereign customers off their pedestals? When contact staff educate, amateurize, and penalize deviant customers” by Aurélien Rouquet and Jean-Baptiste Suquet in Human Relations. Research on how frontline actors/contact staff react to improper conduct by customers.

• “Knowing What It Makes: How Product Transformation Salience Increases Recycling” by Karen Page Winterich, Gergana Y. Nenkov, and Gabriel E. Gonzales in the Journal of Marketing. Based on a series of studies, the authors discuss implications for the design of recycling campaigns and positioning of recycled products in the marketplace.

• “Maintaining Places of Social Inclusion: Ebola and the Emergency Department” by April L. Wright, Alan D. Meyer, Trish Reay, and Jonathan Staggs in Administrative Science Quarterly. Using an emergency department that was disrupted by the threat of the Ebola virus in 2014 as an example, the authors develop a process model to explain how a place of social inclusion can be maintained by custodians.

• “Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work–family Narrative as a Social Defense against the 24/7 Work Culture” by Irene Padavic, Robin J. Ely, and Erin M. Reid in Administrative Science Quarterly. Drawing on an in-depth case study, the authors offer two connected explanations for the work-family narrative’s persistence and its role in women’s thin representation at senior levels.

• “Shaping Small Business Lending Policy Through Matched-Pair Mystery Shopping” by Sterling A. Bone, Glenn L. Christensen, Jerome D. Williams, Stella Adams, Anneliese Lederer, and Paul C. Lubin in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. This article details the current status of the policy gap between marketplace policy protections and the lived reality of the vast majority of small business entrepreneurs and demonstrates the critical need for reliable, primary data to inform regulatory agencies.

*SAGE Publishing is the parent company of Social Science Space.