Accountability, Governance, Ethics and Sustainability (AGES)
Welcome to AGES!
The AGES research group at Newcastle University Business School is a friendly and supportive community of researchers that are engaged in a range of research interests clustered around the three important and highly interconnected themes of accountability, governance and ethics. Comprising experienced academics, doctoral students and a number of good friends from outside the university, we seek to lead and encourage research that is world class in its academic rigour and at the same time is relevant and timely. We are always looking for well-qualified and intellectually inquisitive people to come and research with us – email David Campbell if you want to discuss. Our work has enjoyed recent funding from ESRC, Nuffield Foundation and ACCA.
Members of the group have been involved in some very exciting and influential projects in recent years including:
- CSR strategies in the finance sector (interviews with 12 financial sector chief executives, funded by Nuffield Foundation),
- interviewing sell-side analysts in the City of London (funded by ACCA) on their views on the materiality of voluntary reporting,
- the use of corporate philanthropy in strategic positioning,
- the role that photographs and human representations can play in corporate reporting,
- the role that interpersonal trust plays in mediating strategic success in organisations,
- intellectual capital reporting in UK companies,
- social accounting in third sector organisations,
- environmental discourses used by business organisations,
- environmental reporting in UK companies,
- research into ‘fair trade’ and supply chain ethics,
- strategies for teaching business ethics in French business schools,
- the components and metrics of corporate environmental strategies,
In addition to our research and scholarly activity, we also disseminate research and engage with practitioners through a range of activities, prominent among which is our popular Newcastle University Business School Ethics Forum which we run in association with the Bridge Club. This is a regional event that we run about three or four times a year where invited speakers discuss a range of corporate or professional ethical themes with managers from many private and public sector organisations in the north east of England. This forum attracts speakers of national and international influence – more information about Ethics Forum events.
AGES is a research group of enthusiastic people researching into a range of subjects in reporting, governance, ethical and environmental issues. Find out more about the members of the group.
We are the proud custodians, along with our colleagues at Newcastle University library, of a nationally important collection of corporate annual reports with most companies having complete collections running from the present day back to the mid 1960s. This is an archive of many thousands of documents that is an excellent source of data for longitudinal or historical reporting research. We are gradually marrying this collection with the excellent collection over at Northumbria University and we hope the total collection will be an important resource for reporting research for many years to come.
Thank you for visiting the AGES website and please contact me if you want to get in touch.
Dr David Campbell
Convenor of the Accountability, Governance, Ethics and Sustainability Research Group.
