Professor Donna Marshall wins Bankinter Consumer Finance Award for Research in Business Ethics
UCD College of Business Professor Donna Marshall’s co-authored paper, “Reporting Controversial Issues in Controversial Industries“, has won the Bankinter Consumer Finance Award for Research in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability.
The Awards were set up in November 2017 in a collaboration between the Economic and Business Ethics Chair at Pontificia Comillas University and Bankinter Consumer Finance to promote and foster corporate ethics in the business world.
As recently reported by the Irish Times, Bankinter is a leading Spanish banking group that announced plans to establish Avant Money as its Irish banking branch.
As recently reported by the Irish Times, Bankinter is a leading Spanish banking group that announced plans to establish Avant Money as its Irish banking branch.
UCD College of Business Professor Donna Marshall’s co-authored paper, “Reporting Controversial Issues in Controversial Industries“, has won the Bankinter Consumer Finance Award for Research in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability.
The Awards were set up in November 2017 in a collaboration between the Economic and Business Ethics Chair at Pontificia Comillas University and Bankinter Consumer Finance to promote and foster corporate ethics in the business world.
As recently reported by the Irish Times, Bankinter is a leading Spanish banking group that announced plans to establish Avant Money as its Irish banking branch.
About the Award-Winning Paper
For the first time, the author team, which included Jakob Rehme, Aideen O’Dochartaigh, Steven Kelly, Roshan Boojihawon and Daniel Chicksand, in addition to Professor Marshall, use a new conceptualization of controversial industries focusing on the harm their products cause. These industries include agricultural chemicals, alcohol, armaments, coal, gambling, oil and tobacco. The team investigated how 28 companies reported their controversial issues. They identified seven reporting strategies: Ignore, Deny, Decoy, Dazzle, Distort, Deflect and Adapt.
The hope is that investors, consumers, managers, activists and other stakeholders of these companies can use this typology to identify the strategies they use to report controversial issues and assess if reports admit to the issue, the harm caused by a company’s products and services, and if they provide solutions to that harm. Read full abstract here.
About Professor Donna Marshall
Professor Donna Marshall is a multi-award-winning Sustainable Supply Chain scholar, an Executive Director of the UCD Earth Institute: People, Work, Society initiative and former President of the International Purchasing and Supply Education and Research Association (IPSERA). She is passionate about helping to bring systemic change to broken supply chains and how we overcome the world’s biggest crises of climate chaos and the relentless exploitation of people and the planet.
She is ranked among the top supply chain researchers, with over one hundred research outputs including journal articles published in MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Production and Operations Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management and Supply Chain Management International Journal, as well as multiple conference papers, book chapters and industry reports.
She has won research funding with multiple national and international teams amounting to over €30 million and is currently leading teams focusing on sustainable supply chains in fashion with Fashion’s Responsible Supply Chain Hub (FReSCH); just transition and the sustainable bio-circular economy; and transparency in complex supply chains including controversial industries.
Alzheimer’s Detected Four Years Earlier if Considering Banking Behaviours, Finds New Research
AI based models using clinically informed lead indicators and data related to money management difficulties can predict clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) four years in advance.
Information relating to money management difficulties is of central importance in formulating the predictions, finds new research from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, and National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
ADRD are often diagnosed too late. Early-stages of dementia, before official diagnosis, can be a vulnerable period with financial mistakes and deterioration of financial skills going unnoticed. This can lead to individuals falling victim to scams and missed payments on credit accounts, among other financial decisions that can have detrimental impact.
Professor Cal Muckley from UCD College of Business, and Shivam Agarwal, Assistant Professor from Maynooth University, examined the importance of including money management difficulties, compared to lead dementia indicators, in predicting ADRD diagnosis with a machine learning algorithm. Lead indicators include age, education, health, gender, etc.
Using a machine learning algorithm, the findings show that 71% of individuals clinically diagnosed with ADRD are identified four years in advance when considering money management difficulties alongside lead indicators.
“For individuals living in a single person household, this rate rises to 92%. Also, relative to other lead indicators, excluding age, money management difficulties are ranked the most important lead indicator of a clinical diagnosis of dementia,” explains Professor Muckley.
These findings demonstrate that financial institutions with insight into the financial transactions of older customers are uniquely positioned to identify who might be in a vulnerable situation due to early-stage dementia. Financial institutions can use this data to enhance their protection of customers with dementia and to inform the inter-generational transfer of financial control to a reliable agent.
As financial institutions have a duty of care to protect their customers, they are required to enable these individuals to achieve the same financial outcomes as experienced by those customers not afflicted by such challenging personal circumstances.
This study is the first to show money management difficulties are of paramount importance to predicting dementia. The paper can be viewed and downloaded on SSRN here.
Published in the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, researchers report that about 55,000 people in Ireland, in 2020, are clinically diagnosed with ADRD and this number is expected to increase to 141,200 people by 2050. As indicated at the Alzheimer Society of Ireland, this means that, as a percentage of the overall population, people with dementia will represent 2.49% in 2050 compared to about 1.09% today.
Corporate Emission Targets are Incompatible with Global Climate Goals
Professor Andreas Hoepner from UCD College of Business and colleagues from Utrecht University, Imperial College London and University of North Carolina, argue that any method to derive company-level emissions targets inherently distorts competition in favour of existing companies and penalizes emerging or growing businesses.
Their findings were recently published in Science, “Corporate emissions targets and the neglect of future innovators“.
Researchers found that despite their growing importance, companies’ emissions targets are not meaningful indicators to assess the ambition of their decarbonization plans and their alignment with the Paris Agreement.
“Governments or intergovernmental organizations should provide the legal and regulatory frameworks for companies to compete economically while contributing to sustainable innovation and emission reductions,” write the authors.
“To meet international climate goals, it’s well understood that the business sector must decarbonize globally,” said Professor Hoepner, who is also the Vice Principal of Research, Innovation and Impact at UCD College of Business.
The authors explain that many corporations tout that their decarbonization targets and activities are “Paris-aligned.”
However, in the absence of clear scientific methods to determine how much each company should reduce its emissions to meet climate change targets, the groups that validate companies’ voluntary emissions reduction targets often use basic formulas that suggest companies adopt emissions reduction targets equal to the decarbonization rate needed globally or within their sector.
They assume a company’s current emissions and the continued presence and market dominance of existing companies until their specified target date. By allocating the emissions space exclusively among existing companies, this accountability framework distorts competition and could shield well-established and high-polluting companies from market share losses to emerging or expanding competitors by penalizing innovation and the growth of more efficient companies that could have growing emissions in a decarbonizing market.
In the publication, researchers discuss how the widespread adoption of voluntary corporate net-zero targets cannot guarantee rapid global decarbonization and should not substitute for needed regulations.
The authors outline several recommendations for regulating the market and developing useful indicators for measuring compliance and success. Read the article in Science here.
UCD and LinkedIn Global HR Operations Lead World’s First Study of Continuous Improvement in HR Transformation
“There has been very little, if any, research undertaken on the role of continuous improvement in global HR transformation,” said Dr Linda Dowling-Hetherington from the UCD College of Business HRM and Employment Relations Subject Area. “We were interested in learning more about how continuous improvement shapes global HR transformation in multinational companies.”
Process excellence and continuous improvement methodologies are usually something associated with manufacturing environments, she explained. However, Dr Dowling-Hetherington along with co-researcher Dr Maria Belizon, ICADE, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, had a sense that these methodologies could have a useful place in the context of HR functions; and that these methodologies, including the use of lean tools and techniques, have the potential to play an important role in enabling global HR transformation.
“There appeared to be few examples of organisations that are taking a rigorous and structured approach to continuous improvement and process excellence within the context of HR functions,” said Dr Belizon.
However, in 2020, LinkedIn established a process excellence team within its Global Talent Organisation (GTO). “As a large multinational with staff located in various parts of the world, LinkedIn are an excellent example of an organisation that has created a strong culture of continuous improvement within GTO, its HR function,” continued Dr Belizon. “Their innovative and cutting-edge approach is seeing returns for the organisation in terms of the transformation of its HR processes globally.”
“Our journey of continuous improvement and HR transformation at LinkedIn has been deeply rooted in lean methodologies coupled with a strong customer focus,” said Hermann Mullers, Director of HR Process Excellence at LinkedIn, Melbourne, Australia. “By streamlining our processes and keeping the needs of our employees and stakeholders at the heart of everything we do, we’ve not only optimised our HR operations but also fostered a culture of innovation and efficiency within our organisation.”
“The lessons we’ve learned are invaluable for any organisation aiming to do more with less while maintaining high standards of process and operations,” concluded Mullers.
Dr Belizon met Mullers through her work on the HR Analytics Group and was aware that he was doing interesting work in the space. When he moved to LinkedIn to lead the Process Excellence Team within HR Operations, Dr Belizon saw the potential for a research collaboration.
Given their innovative approach, Mullers and his team were happy to showcase their success. They were also keen to gather insights on the perspectives of the HR Operations team on the enablers and challenges they had encountered in the context of driving continuous improvement and HR transformation which would help them identify ‘pain points’ and areas where further improvements might be beneficial.
The conference is sponsored by ICBE and CIPD, and brings together HR leaders from LinkedIn, eBay, Johnson & Johnson MedTech and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, as well as HR researchers from ICADE, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Spain and UCD College of Business, Ireland.
Conversations will focus on the findings from the 28 interviews with a variety of LinkedIn employees across the EMEA, APAC and NAMER regions and will critically examine the role of continuous improvement in global HR transformation. They will address three research questions:
1. How does continuous improvement shape global HR transformation in multinational companies?
2. How does a global HR transformation team adopt and legitimise a continuous improvement mindset and methodology to drive their strategic goals in their multinational organisation?
3. How do analytics and metrics support continuous improvement in global HR transformation?
The event is open to the public and will take place at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School on June 5, 2024 from 11:30 am – 3:00 pm. See full agenda here and below.