Wealth, Inclusive Societies and Ethics

Professor Eva Kipnis has collaborated with an international team of scholars across the UK, France, Italy, USA and South Africa to develop an evidence-based framework for embedding diversity and inclusion engaged marketing across research, education and practice fields of the marketing discipline.

Through empirical studies in the UK, USA and South Africa, the authors empirically identify ten barriers that limit the scale of current efforts to align marketing with the principles of diversity and inclusion. They draw on institutional theory and the concept of institutional work to recommend that overcoming these barriers requires a comprehensive programme of activities and policy mechanisms. Their findings and recommendations are integrated in a framework for encouraging, evaluating and rewarding field-specific and cross-field actions for embedding diversity and inclusion engaged marketing. The paper has been adopted by the National Diversity Council (USA) in its partner and certification programme toolkit.

The project was developed as part of co-authors’ ongoing collaboration in the Multicultural Marketplaces Network, which Professor Kipnis co-leads. The idea and design of this research was developed at the Transformative Consumer Research conference in 2019 and the paper was published in a special issue of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing on transformative consumer research in 2021.

In 2024, the paper received the American Marketing Association Thomas C. Kinnear / Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Award, which honours articles that make the most significant contribution to the understanding of marketing and public policy issues within a three-year time period.

The UK’s National Minimum Wage was introduced in 1999 to protect low-paid workers. Since its introduction, it has been expanded to cover over 2 million workers. Each year the government reviews the level of the minimum wage and is guided by recommendations from the independent Low Pay Commission.

Although the minimum wage raises incomes, there are concerns that it may put people out of work or lead employers to cut back on other valuable aspects of jobs, such as training. In his research, Professor Kerry Papps has examined the effects of the minimum wage has on a range of employment and social outcomes. He has advised the Low Pay Commission in a series of commissioned reports, in 2013, 2015 and 2021. This research has been cited in successive annual reports by the Low Pay Commission and has influenced their recommendations to governments regarding the minimum wage throughout this period.

Prof. Papps’s reports for the Low Pay Commission are broadly supportive of the minimum wage as a policy tool. He found little evidence that the employers cut back on the non-wage benefits offered to employees, such as overtime or shift pay or annual leave entitlements.

Conversely, he did find that low-paid workers are less likely to change jobs after the minimum wage rises, meaning that productivity in the labour market is higher due to the reduced need for managers to recruit replacement staff.

In his most recent report, written with a colleague from the University of Bath, Prof. Papps examined a rich source of new data – information from jobs advertised on the internet. This allowed the researchers to identify whether a job offers certain benefits by seeing whether key words, such as “flexible” or “training”, are mentioned in the job description. The research found no evidence that employers cut back on offering these job attributes in response to a minimum wage hike, although there was some evidence that employers did demand more experienced applicants after the minimum wage was increased.

Prof. Kerry Papps has been involved in research analysing trends in physical fitness over the business cycle, along with colleagues Alex Bryson of University College London and James Reade of the University of Reading.

The project draws on data from Parkrun, a free series of 5 kilometre running events held around the UK every Saturday, as well as in other countries. Parkrun has started in 2004 and has grown massively over the past two decades, so that there are now around 1,250 events in the country involving hundreds of thousands of runners every week. Parkrun draws runners of all ages, many of whom choose to walk rather than run.

Running is one of the most important factors that can reduce the probability of ischaemic heart disease, which is the leading cause of death among males and second most common cause of death among females in the UK. There is also growing evidence that a person’s walking speed can predict their likelihood of experiencing dementia, which is the leading cause of death for females and second most common cause of death for males in the UK.

The project examines whether changes in employment rates over time among people of a particular gender, age group and region affect the likelihood that they take part in Parkrun and, if they do run, how long it takes them to run the 5 kilometre distance.

The research finds that running times improve during recessions for men and women aged 50 and above but worsen for men aged 20-49 and women aged 20-29, A person’s probability of participating in Parkrun is not especially sensitive to the business cycle, which is not surprising given that Parkrun takes place on a Saturday morning, when most people are not at work.

The results provide an insight into the conflicting effects that work has on fitness. On the one hand, working provides security and the income needed to follow a healthy lifestyle. On the other hand, it takes up time that could be spent exercising. The results found in this study suggest that which of these effects dominates depends on a person’s age and gender. Losing a job has a positive effect on fitness among older people, perhaps because they are able to retire early while still remaining financially secure and therefore can spend their free time on physical activities. However, for young women and young and middle-aged men – who often have families to support – losing a job has a detrimental effect on fitness.

The research has been featured in The Observer and The Financial Times. If you would like further information or would like to discuss this topic with Prof. Kerry Papps, please contact him at: k.l.papps@bradford.ac.uk.

Professor Saeed Akbar and colleagues at the University of Nottingham, University of Liverpool, Open University Business School, and University of Hull have developed a model to explain what makes organisations ethically vulnerable.

Drawing upon legitimacy, institutional, agency and individual moral reasoning theories, they consider three sets of explanatory factors and examine their association with organisational ethical vulnerability. The three sets comprise external institutional context, internal corporate governance mechanisms and organizational ethical infrastructure. They combine these factors and develop an analytical framework for classifying ethical issues and propose a new model of organizational ethical vulnerability.

Saeed and his colleagues tested their model on a sample of 253 firms that were involved in ethical misconduct and compare them with a matched sample of the same number of firms from 28 different countries. The results suggest that weak regulatory environment and internal corporate governance, combined with profitability warnings or losses in the preceding year, increase organisational ethical vulnerability. They find counterintuitive evidence suggesting that firms’ involvement in bribery and corruption prevention training programmes is positively associated with the likelihood of ethical vulnerability. By synthesising insights about individual and corporate behaviour from multiple theories, this study extends existing analytical literature on business ethics. The findings have implications for firms’ external regulatory settings, corporate governance mechanisms and organisational ethical infrastructure.

The research was published in the British Journal of Management in 2018.

Research from Prof. Vishanth Weerakoddy, Prof. Sankar Sivarajah, Prof. Zahir Irani and Dr Amizan Omar

Many democracies around the world struggle with low levels of trust and participation in politics, particularly at a local level. To increase engagement, some local authorities in Europe invite their citizens to get involved in decisions about how public money should be spent – a process known as participatory budgeting.

University of Bradford researchers were part of an international team developing a new online platform to support this type of engagement, to determine if and how it might increase trust and participation in local politics. The platform, called EMPATIA, was initially piloted across four European cities then taken up by nine more. To date, 55,000 people have put forward their views on over 3,000 different projects.

The role of the Bradford researchers, Professors Vishanth Weerakkody, Sankar Sivarajah and Zahir Irani, and Dr Amizan Omar, was to set the targets that the platform needed to achieve and then evaluate its performance, to identify where it could be improved to further increase participation. EMPATIA differs from other platforms in that it not only allows people to put forward projects they’d like to see funded, but also to track progress on projects which win the most votes, so that authorities can be held to account. The platform can also support consultations and debates, allow people to report other issues in the local area and can be integrated with more traditional in-person events, such as focus groups, meetings or physical voting.

The Bradford team’s targets and evaluation covered both social and technical aspects of the platform. They looked at the numbers engaging at different stages of the process and how the platform functioned, including how quickly the webpages loaded and the amount of time people spent online. The team drew on existing research and focus group discussions and worked with local authorities to determine what they needed from a digital platform of this kind. They also compared the performance of the platform with previous participatory budgeting projects in the cities. The evaluation helped to highlight how the platform could be improved and how it might best be used to increase engagement.

Prof. Sivarajah and Prof. Weerakkody discuss their research into improving citizen engagement in local government through participatory budgeting and the impact of that research in a video, which can be watched here.