Feeling Bullish At Durham University Business School

P&Q: The first thing I wanted to talk to you about is the proposed new building. What’s the latest on that? I understand you had a town hall type of meeting recently?

Susan Hart: Oh we’ve had several. We’ve done a lot of consultation, which obviously we have to. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting Durham, not North Carolina but Durham, Northeast England. It is quite a small city, but the cathedral that is here, they started to work on it in 1093, and they finished it 1133, so it’s a fine example of Norman architecture, really on the cusp between the sort of Norman and Romanesque, right into the beginning of the Gothic. And that sits on what’s called a peninsula, but it’s actually a raised part of geography that a river runs around — on it sits a 13th-, 14th-century castle. So you can imagine the conservation issues that we have.

And then the rest of the town dates easily back to the 17th and 18th centuries, and they’re all stone buildings and so it looks like it does have that very small, “market town” feel about it. So it’s really important that we do a lot of consultation, and we’ve tried to do that, bringing in views.

And the building that we need is a building to house a business called “House Gotten Bigger” and so we have quite a modern design that we think has elements within it that reflect modernity but using some reminiscences of the shapes if not the cathedral it’s the castle. And some people love it and some people hate it. We’ve done a lot of that, but we still have to get full planning permission from it. We haven’t finished the planning permission process, but we are completing that through the month of April and May. So it would be a building that would be around 12,000 square meters, in overall capacity it would hold about 240 academic staff and a further 100 or so, administrative staff. It would have really state-of-the-art collaborative teaching space focused on the things you would find routinely in business schools, the kind of facilities that are flexible, make full use of information technology, and that promote collaborative learning rather than the “sage on the stage”-type approach.

What’s a realistic timeline then? You’re pretty early in the process.

Should we be successful in the planning — and obviously we’re covering as many bases as possible — we want to open it in September 2022.

And we’re not behind on the schedule at all, up till now. So if we get the planning permission, we’re due to submit that within the timeline that we’ve already set ourselves, and if that comes through within the normal timeline, we’d still be on track to be able to deliver it then. But that’s when we want to open it.

So it’s very exciting, and we want to give it the highest standards in terms of its carbon footprint. We’re looking at innovative solutions on using the water from the river as part of the heating and cooling system, for example. And we’re also looking at concepts of zero-carbon concrete, so it’s cured concrete for example. We really are looking to push the boundaries on making this a very sustainable building.

That’s exciting news. What other exciting news is going on at Durham right now that we might not have picked up in the States?

At Durham, we’re part of a big university so there’s a lot going on more broadly right across the university as well. But at the business school, we have a lot of researchers across the different subjects, and I can talk about them in a minute, but they’re really bringing out some very interesting work across areas of issues like sustainability, issues to do with ethics, issues to do with diversity and responsibility as they pertain to the base subjects that we teach. We teach across five broad categories that are very similar across business schools; that would be economics, finance, management, marketing, and accounting. So we do all the standard stuff, we do all the “How do you make economies better?” we do all the “What’s gonna lead to better financing of business going into the future?” — we do all that stuff. We do “What makes great leaders great?” and “How do we get the best marketing?” and all that stuff.

But what we do in addition to that is some very interesting diverse work that is looking at how we can make this better in sustainability terms. So for example, one of our researchers, Professor Carol Adams, is an accounting professor, she’s very focused on accounting and on reporting, but she’s particularly interested in the concepts of integrated reporting. What she’s been doing is working on the good practice — I won’t say best practice, that’s a hackneyed phrase — but good practice in terms of how businesses and how organizations report, and taking that away from being simply about finances and into much more integrated metrics and ideas that are much broader than that. For example, bringing in metrics or reporting toward sustainable development goals. There’s 17 of them; it doesn’t have to be all 17, but there are some of those development goals that industries have signed up for that may be of interest, and she is encouraging, through her research and her findings, businesses to be much more involved in that. And she’s getting traction, and I think that’s an important part of that, where companies and organizations are adopting her recommendations and they’re changing the way that they report. They’re not changing away from what they have to do for market analysis, but they’re adding to it in different ways.

That’s just one example in terms of sustainability. Another one happens to be accounting: One of my colleagues, Professor Laurence Ferry, has done a whole lot of research into the effects of austerity and accounting for austerity. Austerity’s been a big deal in the UK in the duration of this current government, and he’s looking at that. And what’s happened is, that has been picked up, and he’s co-written a jazz musical about it, and it’s called “The Austerity Playbook,” and it’s been widely touted, not only in the Northeast and in theaters in the Northeast but actually it’s also been recorded in a show in London as well.

Arguably one isn’t always, shall we say, excited by the prospect of accountancy or accountancy research, but these colleagues of mine are doing some really interesting, innovative stuff, which is speaking to much wider audiences about much wider conceptualizations of what accounting can be about, and how it can add in to better society, and that’s new. That’s two examples.

Just the two then.

(Laughs) Just to take it out of accounting, we also have scholars of leadership. So we have quite traditional psychologists of leadership, and some of their work is just really fascinating, looking at the power of leadership, looking at gender, the balance of leadership. One of my colleagues, Mark Learmonth, has been looking at the portrayals in Disney cartoons of women’s work and considering the effect that that has on young girls and young women as they conceptualize from a young age how women are portrayed and how they work.

You asked what the big ideas are. I think we have to be engaged in research that’s about the betterment of the economy and the development of wealth, but we are also collectively interested in the more negative effects of doing that, and how we can do research to mitigate those and change conceptual frameworks over time that will decrease those negative effects. That’s gonna be a neverending call, isn’t it? But nonetheless, there’s a lot of research specifically addressing that. And it’s really interesting and impactful.

Apropos of Disney and women, I’d like to ask you about women in your MBA program. You have a very high percentage of women in the program — two years ago it was two-thirds, 67%. That’s altogether remarkable; even the level that you’re at this year, 44%, is quite high. What’s Durham University Business School doing right on that front in attracting women candidates?

I think partly it’s that we have different tracks on the MBA. I think it’s actually that the product attracts people in that way. So it is a general MBA that covers the things that you expect an MBA to cover, but we have three separate tracks: a technology track, a consulting track, and an entrepreneurship track. And I think that right from the outset when you’re on the website or you’re looking through brochures, you can see that it’s not just a one-size-fits-all program, and I think that’s attractive to women. I think that’s the first thing.

I think the second thing is, there’s quite a high preponderance of women that teach in the program as well. And I don’t know whether this has anything to do with it or not, but it happens to be that our associate dean for the MBA (Julie Hodges) is also female with a strong presence.

We have students who on average have about 10 years of experience, between eight and 10 years normally, so they’re not just fresh out of their first degrees. So they have developed some ways of working, but we are very clear on some of the bases of the findings that we have from our research in leadership, for example, or our research into board member diversity, that diverse teams that listen to one another are high-performing teams. We’ve made that a very clear part of what we do. And I actually think that that’s very resonant of this university, so I think we do have the MBA that you would expect to have of the mothership if I could put it that way. It is a collegiate university in both senses of the word. There’s a high level of collegiality across the university, but we actually do have colleges. They’re not the same kind of college system as Oxford and Cambridge, but we do have people living in colleges as well.

So that’s where a lot of nurturing of the individual happens, and we’re very proud of the kind of records that we have in sport or performance. But it’s an interesting question. We have a lot of women, what was it particularly that attracts the women? I don’t have a causal answer, one single cause. I think it’s not so much that we have programs that attract women, it’s that we attract a particular type of individual that really wants to grow. I think that’s what’s important.