Research
Competition and cooperation
Rob Moir looks at the balance between industry competition and cooperation. How do we instil competition where competition is needed and cooperation where it’s needed? His research explores how to build mechanisms that can maintain that balance — avoiding too much of one or the other (e.g. companies collaborating to try to raise prices).
Social and environmental disclosure
Can disclosure be an effective tool to help us resolve issues like climate change and human rights violations? This is a question Matt Wegener examines in his research on corporation’s social and environmental disclosures. He examines the effect of disclosures from both an investor and regulatory perspective. For example, greenhouse gas emissions must be disclosed to Environment and Climate Change Canada. Are these disclosures reliable? Dr. Wegener explores whether they’re a good measure of company investment in improvements and whether these investments are successful.
Environmental efficiency
Gholamreza Amin is published widely on both the methodology and application of data envelopment analysis.His current focus is on environmental efficiency — specifically, developing mathematical models to minimize the production of substances that are harmful to the environment.
How startups adapt for growth
Greg Fleet and Dan Doiron study how local startups adapt in order to try to address the market or grow their business. In 2017, they partnered with the Wallace McCain Institute to study the impact of the Effective Leaders Program on graduates’ businesses — gaining insight into what has made the program so successful.
Bullying in the workplace
Shelley Rinehart is working with a Saint John lawyer and a Dalhousie University medical school professor and other researchers from the Faculty of Business to identify appropriate remedies for bullying in the workplace. Reader’s theatre is used to understand all perspectives of a situation and to develop solutions from that place of greater understanding.
Visual rhetoric and tourism
Keith Dewar’s research focuses on heritage and visual rhetoric, meaning photographic and image analysis. He explores how commercial companies use images in marketing and advertising — with an emphasis on tourism. Locally, he’s studied the relationship between Saint John tourists are interested in and what’s highlighted in the city’s tourism advertising. He’s done similar research in Denmark.
Additional highlights
- Relationship between geographical locations and food
- Innovation in social inclusion
- The unintended consequences of messaging in political communications
- How cruise ship passengers spend their money in Atlantic Canadian ports
- Perception of an online degree vs. traditional degree
- Unintended impact of shared risk pension models on organizations
- Customer satisfaction and energy efficiency
- What drives innovation?
- Discrimination of First Nations people within the job market
- Expanding the concept of merger and acquisition
- Global understanding of the concept of world heritage
