2023 KBS Research Seminar Series

The seminar format is informal and interactive facilitating discussion and Q&A and will take place on MS Teams.  The title and abstract are below.

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B-Schools as D-Schools in the design and realisation of sustainable market futures By Dr Annmarie Ryan

Business Schools (B-Schools) have come under increasing scrutiny to do more to support the development of sustainable business practices (Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang, 2015). There has been increasing call for B-Schools to do more to support businesses and organisations to adapt to climate change and understand implications “for the c-suite” (Kross & Wingert, 2023). For example, there have been calls for new types of leaders (Adams, et al 2011) able to respond to climate change challenges. According to Kross & Wingert, (2023) accountants will need to plan for the effects of climate on valuations, risk analysts of the future will need to be able to take climate risks into account and marketers will have to meet increasing expectations of consumers for sustainable products and services. This paper goes further to suggest that not only should B-Schools help businesses adapt but to also apply our expertise in the design of (new) sustainable and even regenerative market futures. To address the grand challenges we face, we must move away from a short-term perspective to longer term vision in order collectively imagine preferable market futures (Waddock et al 2015). To achieve this, B-Schools need to act more as Design Schools (D-School), to not only educate students on how business is done today, but to collectively reimagine and design for future business and market systems.

 Designers act to bring about change through visual thinking, making, prototyping and iterating. Design educators coach, prompt and critique. Design students are trained to be heutagogical, self-determined learners seeking out new areas of knowledge to help address the challenge at hand. This all points to an educational environment that is mission-led, where existing knowledge is respected but always open to challenge in the creation of new objects, devices or systems. I am calling for b-school faculty and students to design the models, frameworks and theories of economic and market systems of the future. This work goes beyond how design thinking is incorporated into business education, towards a deeper engagement with design and studio-based education. In this paper these themes are explored, and pathway presented for how B-Schools can act more like D-Schools in the design and realisation of sustainable market futures.

The seminar format is informal and interactive facilitating discussion and Q&A and will take place on MS Teams.  The title and abstract are below.

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Getting ahead versus getting along: Investigating gendered perceptions of senior academic tasks in higher education

by Prof Deirdre O’Shea (KBS), Dr Audrey Giles (TUD), Prof Mary Kinahan (TUD) and Prof Lisa Van Der Werff (DCU)

The present study forms part of a broader research project which aims to investigate gender inequality that stems from stereotyping of ‘female’ and ‘male’ roles in academia, and how this contributes to women’s underrepresentation in senior levels in higher education institutions (‘HEIs’). According to the HEA (2018), women account for only 24% of professor and 34% of associate professor positions; despite holding 51% of assistant professor positions. This trend highlights the inequality at the centre of academia, that is, it remains more difficult for women to experience the same level and pace of success in academia as their male counterparts.

Gender stereotypes follow from a societal division of labour whereby women have traditionally tended to be in communally-demanding roles and men in agentically-demanding roles (Eagly 1987). Such stereotypes can be likened to the distinctions of ‘getting along’ versus ‘getting ahead’ as performance criteria, with ‘getting ahead’ associated with leadership emergence (Marinova, Moon, & Kamdar, 2013) and the stereotype of leaders as masculine (Koenig et al., 2011). We proposed that ‘getting ahead’ performance criteria are emphasized to a greater extent in academic performance and promotion, and thus may disadvantage women. In line with this, Van Veelen and Derks (2021) demonstrated that academics perceive agency as more descriptive of the successful academic than communality. Our current research moved a step beyond this and investigated whether specific tasks in academia vary in terms of being perceived as agentic and communal in nature. We discuss initial findings from this research in this seminar.

The seminar format is informal and interactive facilitating discussion and Q&A and will take place on MS Teams.  The title and abstract are below.

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Coverages and gaps of Cyber Insurance: An Analysis of the Suitability of German Cyber Policies By Frank Cremer

Effective risk transfer and a well-functioning insurance market are crucial components of cybersecurity that enhance stakeholder resilience. However, the insurance industry and its customers face significant challenges due to rapid cyber threat adaptation, limited data availability, and inadequate risk understanding. To address these issues, this study employs a mixed methods approach to assess the current state of cyber insurance wordings in the German market, including their inclusions, exclusions, and suitability. A total of 41 cyber insurance wordings, accounting for approximately 80% of the German cyber insurance market, were analyzed, and 23 cyber insurance experts were interviewed. The findings suggest that there is no standardization of policy wordings, and insurers use different terms and definitions in their policies, resulting in a lack of clarity regarding coverages and exclusions. This research contributes to the cybersecurity risk management community by providing a better understanding of cyber risk management for businesses, insurance companies, and policymakers.

The seminar format is informal and interactive facilitating discussion and Q&A and will take place on MS Teams.  The title and abstract are below.

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Why Living Labs and Why Now? by Dr Helena Fitzgerald 

To meet the commitments of international treaties to limit global warming, legally binding obligations exist at national level and within the EU to reduce GHG emissions by 2050. A transformation of our society and economy is proposed requiring an acceleration in innovation to achieve defined climate goals. Against this backdrop living labs have extended beyond their origin in user-centred technological innovation, to be utilised in a variety of contexts and sectors including in energy, mobility, and in agriculture and food. Urban living labs have emerged to address complex societal challenges (Bouwma et al, 2022) to support participatory and evidence-based policy generation (Mahmoud et al., 2021; Cerreta & Panaro 2022); the transition from a linear to a circular economy (Cuomo et al., 2020) and in the context of smart climate-neutral cities (Borsbuum-Van Beurden & Costa, 2021). Embraced by the European Commission whose Joint Research Centre operate living labs in digital energy and future mobility solutions, living labs feature as experimentation spaces in the 2022 New European Innovation Agenda, are the delivery mechanism for the Horizon Europe Mission on soil, and are included in other Horizon Europe research calls. 

 This seminar will introduce a series of projects implemented by the Department of Economics as living labs since 2019, and the Citizen Innovation Lab – a “city as living lab” collaboration with Limerick City and County Council initiated through the Positive City Exchange (+CityxChange) Horizon 2020 project – will be described. Presenting the research projects as a cluster will allow a focus to develop not on the objectives of each discrete project, but on their systematic co-creation approach, the theoretical basis for this, and on the cumulative impacts of the projects over time. The common characteristics of living labs will be introduced and the implementation of living labs as both a place for innovation and a methodology will be described. Finally, the adoption of living labs by HEIs as mechanisms for transformation in the context of progress towards the UN SDGs (Leal Filho et al., 2022; Purcell et al., 2019; Tercanli & Jongbloed, 2022) and by business schools to advance sustainability in management education (Sroufe, 2020) is explored. 

The seminar format is informal and interactive facilitating discussion and Q&A and will take place on MS Teams.  The title and abstract are below.

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Female Entrepreneurship, Public Relations, and the Dun Emer Press: A Case Study from Irish Business History  By Dr Caoilfhionn Ni Bheachain  

This paper explores an intersection between business and cultural history, reaching across disciplinary boundaries to consider the Dun Emer Press, an influential and innovative publishing house founded by female artist and entrepreneur, Elizabeth Corbett Yeats, in 1902. Such business histories from within the creative industries are often overlooked, and yet theatre, literature, and art have been significant contributors to the Irish economy and have played a critical role in soft power and informal diplomacy. Related to this is the occlusion of women within the narratives of business history, thus producing what Dean et al (2022) suggest are “partial, unsatisfactory, histories”.[1] As a well-connected new business with clearly articulated aims, the Dun Emer Press was a manifestation of - and engine for - the Cultural Revival and the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. It formed a self-contained department within the Dun Emer Industries, a cooperative association with three women directors and an ancillary manifesto to provide young women with professional opportunities. Information about the management, public relations, and branding practices of this avant-garde press can be gleaned from letters, legal agreements, prospectuses, and financial accounts. Such frequently overlooked materials in the business sections of literary archives can be revealing and, by deploying this lens, it is possible to uncover the ambition, reach and strategic communication practices of the Dun Emer Press and thereby discern its role in publishing the Irish Revival for an international audience.    

 [1][1] Dean, H. Perriton, L., Taylor S., and Yeager, M. (2022) ‘Margins and Centres: Gender and Feminism in Business History', Business History,  available,

DOI:10.1080/00076791.2022.2125957

The seminar format is informal and interactive facilitating discussion and Q&A and will take place on MS Teams.  The title and abstract are below.

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Is ChatGPT trustworthy? Exploring the notion of trustworthiness in conversational agents by Juliane Ressel

Since the public release of ChatGPT, we have started to wonder if this abstract, the email received this morning, or the latest social media post has been generated by a large language model (LLM). In a recent study, participants could only differentiate between human-written or LLM-generated text samples on social media platforms with up to 52% accuracy [1]. The same applies to some AI detection tools that flag LLM-generated text. This opacity raises significant concerns about deception, considering that LLMs are prone to perpetuate stereotyping and disseminate false or misleading information as if it were fact. The perceived human likeness induces people to entrust the seemingly coherent text with the communicative intent between individuals and place undue expectations on its trustworthiness. In this seminar, we will explore the social science notion of trustworthiness for human-AI interaction and discuss what it means to trust ChatGPT and other conversational agents.

[1] Jakesch et al. (2023): Human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawed. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 120, No. 11. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208839120

The seminar format is informal and interactive facilitating discussion and Q&A and will take place on MS Teams.  The title and abstract are below.

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Power Disparities and Knowledge Hierarchies: The Dilemma of Knowledge Sharing and Co-creation in Uganda’s Agriculture Sector

By Rebecca Tumwebaze

Knowledge management research in the agriculture sector has largely explored homogeneous knowledge networks. This framing of the sector reproduces a hegemonic view & ignores the fact that the typical agriculture sector is heterogeneous in nature, encompassing diverse knowledge actors. The agriculture sector is inhabited by multiple actors, including but not limited to farmers, local communities, technical experts, extension agents, scientists, researchers, private sector agri-business players, government and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). These actors from varied backgrounds possess diverse, sometimes conflicting and other times mutually supporting knowledge (both formal and informal). However, these actors have often been embroiled in struggles due to strained relations, conflicting perspectives and goals. Despite belonging to the same sector, the actors are largely disconnected from one another. Researchers have acknowledged that there is a general disconnect in the knowledge generated and possessed by the diverse agriculture sector actors.

Using Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit as a lens to examine the agriculture sector, the researcher carried out empirical studies and engaged 232 diverse agriculture actors in Uganda, studying their relations and the complex set of logics that underpin knowledge sharing among these actors. According to Pierre Bourdieu, practices, which are a reflection of knowledge, result from relations between people’s dispositions (habitus) and their positions of power (capital) within the state of play of their social arena (field). Findings from the empirical study show that power relations, social structure, culture, individual values and wider structural frameworks are the catalysts of the disconnectedness observed among the sector’s actors and consequently their knowledge and practices. Bourdieu’s toolkit puts into context the system of inequality, social classes and class consciousness that characterizes Uganda’s agriculture sector and how this system creates boundaries among the actors and hinders collective knowledge sharing that can enable co-creation of contextual knowledge on sustainable agriculture.

To leverage the sum of knowledge that arises out of sector, is currently working towards developing an agriculture knowledge sharing model that can enhance co-creation of context specific knowledge on sustainable agriculture among the heterogenous agriculture knowledge actors.