Subject Award · Social Sciences · 2026
The ten finalist universities are the ten highest-ranked on the Business, Management & Accounting collaboration index, listed here alphabetically until the full index publishes on 15 September. Each finalist is represented by an academic whose recent work exemplifies why: a real project, drawn from the open scholarly record, cited so you can check it.
The finalists
FinTech as a Game Changer: Overview of Research Frontiers
Mobile payments, cryptocurrencies and the digitisation of business assets have pushed financial technology to the stage of disruptive innovation. Surveying this emerging FinTech landscape, the work reviews the technological, pedagogical and managerial issues involved, focusing on market trading, artificial intelligence and blockchain in finance, and maps research directions to stimulate future work across information systems and finance.
Smallholder farmers often cannot borrow enough to plant, and this study models what happens when the platform they sell through steps in. Comparing traditional bank lending with direct loans from an intermediary platform and with the platform acting as guarantor, the analysis shows production can exceed the centralised benchmark, and identifies when a farmer prefers each option.
Organizational capital, corporate tax avoidance, and firm value
Some of a firm's value sits in its organisational capital: its systems, know-how and management practices rather than its machinery. Examining the links between organisational capital, corporate tax avoidance and firm value, the work brings those three strands into a single analysis of what makes an intangible asset pay.
CSR contracting and performance-induced CEO turnover
Boards increasingly tie executive reward to social and environmental goals, and this study looks at what that means when performance disappoints. Its subject is the relationship between corporate social responsibility contracting and performance-induced chief executive turnover, a question that bears directly on how firms hold their leaders to account.
Designing a supply chain that also collects and reprocesses returned goods is a hard optimisation problem, and this paper tackles it with energy use included. The model spans suppliers, manufacturers, distribution and collection centres, customer zones and disposal, weighing total profit against energy consumption and jobs created, and is solved using Lagrangian relaxation, reformulations and heuristics.
The green fog: Environmental rating disagreement and corporate greenwashing
When rating agencies cannot agree on how green a company is, that disagreement itself may be telling. The study examines the relationship between environmental rating disagreement and corporate greenwashing, treating inconsistency between environmental ratings as its starting point rather than as a nuisance to be averaged away.
Digital transformation, for better or worse: a critical multi‐level research agenda
Digital technologies are reshaping customers, organisations, markets and society, yet research has largely stayed at the level of the single firm. This paper proposes a broader definition of digital transformation as socioeconomic change and sets out a multi-level research agenda spanning individuals, organisations, ecosystems and societies, deliberately keeping both the benefits and the harms in view.
The Effects of Mandatory ESG Disclosure Around the World
This study compiles a novel dataset of mandatory environmental, social and governance disclosure requirements across many jurisdictions and examines their effect on stock liquidity. It finds that disclosure mandates improve firm-level liquidity, with the strongest effects where rules are implemented by government institutions, enforced robustly and not applied on a comply-or-explain basis, particularly benefiting firms with weaker information environments.
Improving PLS-SEM use for business marketing research
Reviewing more than two decades of studies in business marketing research, the work examines how partial least squares structural equation modelling has been used and where practice falls short. It shows that justifications, reporting and model assessment are often insufficient, and points researchers towards more appropriate tests and advanced techniques that strengthen the robustness of results.
Board Sustainability Committees, Climate Change Initiatives, Carbon Performance, and Market Value
Do boards that set up a sustainability committee actually cut emissions? Using a panel of 8,408 observations from 35 countries between 2002 and 2019, the study finds higher greenhouse gas emissions associated with lower market value, and reports that such committees are linked to higher market value without evidence of improved carbon performance.
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Explore partnership →The wider slate
Leadership and Job Demands-Resources Theory: A Systematic Review
Conceptualizing the Circular Economy (Revisited): An Analysis of 221 Definitions
Thirty years of research in family business journals: Status quo and future directions
Artificial intelligence and knowledge sharing: Contributing factors to organizational performance
The biggest business process management problems to solve before we die
The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Finance and Beyond
Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies
Corporate directors' implicit theories of the roles and duties of boards
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