Social Justice

Everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities. Our research explores how we can organise and manage our socioeconomic lives to proliferate fairness across society. 

We work with our students, businesses, government and society to tackle inequality and make a real impact on those we teach and the wider world.

Our researchers advise government on problem gambling, work with financial regulators and multi-national corporations on tackling and reporting modern slavery in the global supply chain, tackle gender inequalities in business and Higher Education, and increase business inclusion among under-represented groups.

Transcript for Social Justice Research at Lancaster University Management School

Social justice is caring about various issues in society which makes it more egalitarian. Research into social justice is really fundamental to the values that we have here at Lancaster as a university; we should be impacting society in a positive manner. I think it's important for business schools to look into social justice research because there's a natural relationship between business and social aspects. People are so fundamental to everything that we achieve, to everything that we are concerned with within Lancaster, so making sure that social justice is really at the heart of what we're doing and what we're teaching others really matters to us. We should have the hat for business but a passion for the world because businesses only thrive when communities thrive. In the management school, social justice is a really important theme and I think it runs through all of the work that we do. We're very keen that there isn't inequality in the opportunities that people have to work, so for instance, under this theme we would be looking potentially at gender inequalities in business or how to overcome under-representation within businesses and organisations. I think it's important for LUMS, or for Lancaster University Management School, to engage with social justice because I think it's a bit of a fallacy that business and social justice don't go hand in hand. Everybody seems to think that businesses are just about bottom lines in capitalism and that is true to a degree, but at LUMS we are very critical. There's a number of scholars in the management school who are critical of capitalism and of business practices and I think the reflexivity and criticality that we can bring and share with our students but also with businesses through our research can be a real way of transforming business practice for social good, and not tokenistic good but actually real transformative good and improvement that we'll see business practice become more inclusive and better for society. In LUMS we do a lot of research in the area of social justice which is about ensuring that everyone in society has equal access to marketplaces and business contexts. We approach this topic in multiple ways and we try to understand a range of issues including gambling, marketplace access and modern slavery. Management schools have an integral role to play in social justice. It isn't enough for us simply to teach our students patterns of consumption and production; all that results in is more of the same and I think anyone with an awareness of what's going on with the climate, what's going on with the economy, knows that that doesn't actually result in a just society. Businesses, the study of management leads I think on the development of a just society, so it's incumbent on a management school to play a role in that. My work speaks to two major issues on modern slavery reporting in the UK. First, there is a kind of a serious compliance issue here with most companies not really complying with the reporting requirements and even many companies not even complying with the basic reporting requirements. Second, the lack of comprehensive guidance and this creates two major issues: first, it's difficult to benchmark companies reporting against each other, but also it's difficult to track companies reporting over time because companies have complete liberty on how they report on these issues. My research focuses on economics of inequality and that means that I'm focusing on the distributional consequences of economic and social factors with an emphasis on wealth inequality within and between groups defined by social class, occupation, education or even countries, to name some topics. I examine how income dynamics, economic policies or external shocks like pandemics for example affect wealth and income across the population. I conduct research on refugees with a focus on how we can deliver services a bit differently. So we know that this has become a long-term problem; a lot of people who get displaced are likely never to go back home and so we need to think about how we can provide services that allow them to have a normal life. This research is important because it's about humanity, it's about more than 140 million people whose lives have been turned upside down. I started the journey on this research as a practitioner; I worked for Doctors Without Borders in the field in my home country in Zimbabwe and I had initially focused on short-term disasters which is what a lot of people in the field do, but then I started to realise that the refugee situation is one that is more important and more difficult because of the long-term implications that it has for people and the short-term focus that we tend to take in humanitarian operations. What I'm interested in is the prevent agenda which basically is interested in how do people get caught in this trap and become vulnerable to exploitation, how can we think about those at the periphery who are vulnerable and how those vulnerabilities are interconnected, how one vulnerability links to the other and then they become more susceptible to being exploited, so that's the particular aspect I'm interested in because that continues to happen. My research into disability access fits with social justice in quite a clear way; it's about promoting business practices and marketplaces that are inclusive to all but in particular to persons with disabilities and how we can make them friendlier, more welcome and more inclusive to different types of disabilities. So through the marketplace and I we've engaged with people with disabilities in various ways. Firstly, people with disabilities have actually visited our exhibitions and seen the artworks themselves and seen other people's experiences of disabilities. Secondly, we've engaged businesses in accessibility training around disabilities, so various organisations that we've worked with either have people who have visual or hidden disabilities or indeed people who work who know someone with a disability, so we've helped organisations to improve their accessibility plans, their accessibility manifestos and how they actually create initiatives which are bespoke towards disability audiences. Environmental justice about treating people fairly regardless of their income, race or ethnic background and meaningfully involved in all these people as well in sustainable development and implementing environmental policies and working towards social justice in this way. So the reason we need to know about problem gambling is because it has impacts far beyond the gambler. The government figures suggest there are 350,000 problem gamblers but we also know that for each problem gambler probably between six to eight other people are impacted, that's family, friends, employers, the wider community. The reason that we have sort of gambling research situated within marketing which might seem a little bit bizarre is because actually gambling is a legal form of consumption just as alcohol and tobacco are; it's problematic but it's legal, but we don't really understand too much about the sociocultural drivers of that type of consumption. We've got a good understanding of the psychological drivers but not what other factors impact it and really understanding how these harms develop is important for society, it's important actually for our communities, it's important for government, so that's why we need to do the work. Our health programme through collaboration with professors such as Professor Stavroula Leka aims to understand the link between health and work. Our insecure work programme has been quite successful in scaling the job insecurity across our labour market. Achieving a healthy workforce is essential for sustainable growth and thriving society. With our work we provide essential tools for policymakers, employers and worker groups to achieve a healthier and more sustainable workforce. Addressing social justice is key to achieve a fairer society that works for everyone not just a selected few. We believe that achieving a greater access to good quality work will ensure that the businesses are more sustainable as well as workers have greater rights in accessing good work practices across the country. Research into social justice is really fundamental to the values that we have here at Lancaster and the ways in which we try to disseminate those values through both our research and teaching. People are so fundamental to everything that we achieve, to everything that we are concerned with within Lancaster, so making sure that social justice is really at the heart of what we're doing and what we're teaching others really matters to us.

Commercial Experiences of Disability

Academy for Gender Equality and Social Justice Research in Organisations

Discover how the Academy for Gender Equality and Social Justice Research in Organisations at Lancaster University Management School is working to address gender inequality across business and academia.

Academy for Gender Equality and Social Justice Research in Organisations

Transcript for The Academy for Gender Equality and Social Justice Research in Organisations

Women make up 50% of the population, and yet they remain underrepresented and underpaid. This is an issue that needs a multi-pronged approach to be able to tackle it through social, economic, and political avenues. We need to get women more economically engaged and politically engaged, and I believe that universities are at the forefront of being able to tackle this issue. The Global Gender Gap report has shown us some troubling figures, that we're not going to be able to achieve gender equality for over a hundred years. The Academy is a research group based at Lancaster University Management School, and the group focuses on research issues around tackling gender inequality in work, in organisations. We are an interdisciplinary group of scholars based at the management school, and Lancaster University, and internationally as well. Universities have a key role in us tackling gender inequality in all aspects of society, particularly business and management schools, where we have students coming in to learn how to engage with different organisations and with society, and hopefully take important political roles in the future. The impact of the Academy can be seen across various projects that it's engaged in, for example, the European Commission funded Horizon 2020 project, targeted MPI, which is a project that's focusing on developing gender equality plans to tackle gender inequality in business and management schools in the UK, Europe, and the Mediterranean. We also have other projects, such as the Gender Matter projects, which focuses on understanding the issues that women face in organisations in the UK specifically, and we have other projects, such as the Entrepreneurship of Survival project, which focuses on refugee women and how they engage in entrepreneurship as a means of survival during enforceable displacement. The gender equality plans developed by the business and management schools have been implemented and monitored over the last three and a half years, and whilst the project will come to an end at the end of 2024, the legacy of the project will continue in its gender equality observatories, which will maintain the work that we've been doing over the last four years. Targeted NPI has worked very closely with Lancaster University's EDI initiatives, so it's been developing guides to incorporate gender awareness and inclusivity in teaching and research and innovation, and this way we're able to provide support for our academic staff members to incorporate issues around gender, race, sexuality, disability, and other marginalised groups as well in all aspects of their teaching and research. At the moment, the way that we do research is gender neutral, some even call it gender blind, and this is detrimental to at least half the population, and other minority groups also go unnoticed, so when we are looking to create solutions, we want to create them for everybody, and one way to do that is to cast a gender lens over all the research that we do at varying stages of the research as well, and we also need to be able to engage with these groups in a more inclusive way so that we can develop policies to support their progression in the future.

Targeted-MPI

The Targeted-MPI project is dedicated to advancing gender equality in Business and Management Schools.

Discover how working with institutions across Europe is helping to shape practice and policies on national and international levels.

Gender Matters

Through projects such as Gender Matters - in collaboration with the Work Foundation and Diversity UK – and wider research, the Academy works to change policy, attitudes and behaviours around major workplace issues: the gender pay gap, the lack of women in the leadership pipeline, and the take-up of family-based policies.

The Gender Matters project

Professor Valerie Stead, Professor Claire Leitch and Dr Sophie Alkhaled discuss the importance of their work on gender equality issues in the workplace.

Women's entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship can be a vehicle for women’s socio-economic empowerment. The Academy critically examines how entrepreneurship can tackle the work inequalities women face. 

How do women utilise entrepreneurship as a platform for social change? Dr Sophie Alkhaled, a British-Syrian researcher who grew up in Saudi Arabia, outlines how entrepreneurship provides women with a legitimate space to engage in sustainable social and political change in Saudi Arabia. 

A better life for refugees

Researchers across the Management School have worked with refugees fleeing conflict in Syria, who are attempting to build new lives in a new country. They investigated the obstacles they face, and found out how life can be made better for them.

What did Dr Sophie Alkhaled and Professor Lucas Introna discover on their separate research projects about how refugees have made a home for themselves and created a sense of belonging in a new country?

Humanitarian Aid

Humanitarian organisations play a key role in providing aid and assistance for victims of conflicts and political crises. From Syria to Ukraine, Africa to Asia, being able to deliver the correct support is crucial.

Dr Nonhlanhla Dube explains how her work assesses what international aid organisations need to consider to help those in need.

The Economics of Pollution

Researchers in our Department of Economics study the effects of industrial activity on local populations. From the benefits and drawbacks of fossil fuel deposits being exploited in a region, to how the wealth of the surrounding population has an effect on pollution levels.

Discover more about the environmental justice research of Professor Dakshina De Silva, Dr Anita Schiller and their colleagues investigating how polluting firms locate in areas with low income and education levels.

The varying economic effects of Higher Education

Not all degrees are equal when it comes to earnings in the labour market. Professor Ian Walker and his colleagues have researched the variation in graduate earnings for more than a decade. The work takes in all graduates and allows comparisons across subjects and institutions. New research strands are looking at the effects of degree class on future earnings and at the effects of graduate status on measures of wellbeing. Read more in his blog: The varying economic effects of Higher Education.

Professor Ian Walker talks us through how his work on the financial benefits of university education for graduates has influenced UK government policy.

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