I am a member of the Financial and Social Innovation group and the Innovation, Management and Policy Division of the School.  My recent research focuses on three areas: the digitalisation and reorganization of large companies and the ways in  which knowledge is identified in these settings; digital innovation in reformulating and moving service work especially in shared service centres; development, emerging markets and information and communication technologies.  I am interested in supervising PhDs in these areas.

I am a member of the ESRC funded Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) and the Centre for Development Informatics within the University of Manchester.  I am also a member of the IFIP9.4 Working Group on ICTs and Development.

Research Projects

My current research project is entitled 'Adopting Web 2.0 collaborative technologies in business: The implications for Management accountants' funded by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) (£36.5k) (with Heba El-Sayed) which runs between January 2009 and June 2010.  The focus on this study is to investigate the transformative/disruptive effects attributed to the set of technologies called Web2.0 and how management accountants in three large companies in the UK act, react and reassess their expertise.

My last research project was a fifteen month project (2007-2008) on Women in Shared Services in North West England funded by European Social Fund  (£154k) (with Debra Howcroft (joint PI) and Susanne Langer).  This project investigated shared service centres as a new form of ICT enabled organizing of service work in Manchester, NW England and, to a limited extent, in India.  My previous project was on the role of ICT based applications in business knowledge processes, part of the ESRC Evolution of Business Knowledge Programme, which ran from 2003-2006 (£86k) in which I was the Principal Investigator working with Theo Vurdubakis (Lancaster), Damian O'Doherty (MBS) and Hannah Knox (CRESC, Manchester).   In 1999-2000 I was a joint PI with Mike Newman (MBS) on an CIMA funded project (£36) investigating the implications of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems on Management Accountants and in 1998 I had an ERDF grant (£52k) with Trevor Hopper (MBS) analysing the use of World Class Manufacturing systems in SMEs in North West England. 

PhD Supervision

My recente PhD students have been: Heba El-Sayed on the Implementation of ERP systems in Egypt (completed 2006); Wei Liu on the use of ICTs to co-ordinate and control Chinese subsidiaries and associates of UK multinationals (completed 2005) and Saheer Al Jaghoub on ICT enabled development and the Jordanian state (completed 2005).  Currently I am jointly supervising Pattanant Petchchedchoo (with Bob Scapens) on knowledge and performance measurement in Thailand and  Jillian Yeow (with Anita Greenhill) on ICTs and distributed work practices.