Keynote Speakers
Innovating for Sustainability: Insights from Retailing
Retailing is one of the most ubiquitous but also creative and adaptive global economic sectors and is present in many forms across countries in the Tropics, ranging from traditional independent shops and markets to larger and more sophisticated modern formats. Retail businesses face particular challenges when it comes to sustainability: some consumers are becoming increasingly aware of sustainability issues (as well as in many cases being directly affected by the impact of such factors as climate change, or deforestation) and as a result more demanding of retail businesses; other consumers remain focused on consumption to achieve their personal economic goals.
In this keynote talk, Jonathan Reynolds reviews both the set of challenges facing retail businesses in the Tropics as well as the organisational responses as firms wrestle with these trade-offs, finding increasingly innovative ways, often through appropriate technology, to achieve sustainability goals within the context of economic growth.
Jonathan Reynolds
Associate Professor in Retail Marketing, University of Oxford's Saïd Business School
Deputy Dean at the University of Oxford's Said Business School
Jonathan Reynolds is Deputy Dean at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School and an Associate Professor in Retail Marketing.
Jonathan’s research focuses primarily on the retail sector and he is one of the leading academic experts in this field internationally. He is recognised for his work in the areas of electronic commerce and omni-channel retailing, innovation & entrepreneurship in retailing, retail productivity and skills, and the role of place in marketing and retail management - in particular, the consequences for retail development and planning.
He is presently Deputy Director of the ESRC-funded Consumer Data Research Centre, a multi-million pound initiative run jointly by the Universities of Oxford, Liverpool, Leeds and UCL which has created a service that has opened up the data resources routinely collected by the retail business sector to academic research, training and capacity building. He has also been Associate Director of the ESRC-funded Retail Industry Business Engagement Cluster (RIBEN), a £1.4m collaboration between Oxford, Southampton, Leeds and Surrey Universities.
His views are sought after by businesses, policy makers and the media. He is heavily committed to knowledge exchanger, actively seeking to ensure that his research can be widely disseminated amongst policy-makers and practitioners. While his academic expertise lies in marketing and geography, Jonathan’s research activities have also extended into science and technology studies and strategic management.
He is a founding member of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management, and has been its Academic Director since 1999. The Institute undertakes a range of both commissioned and public domain research with direct relevance to practitioners, but which is nevertheless grounded within rigorous academic scholarship.
Jonathan read geography as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, and then took an MA in Environmental Planning at the University of Nottingham, and a PhD at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He returned to Oxford in 1985 to work on research for the British retailer Tesco on the application of new forms of technology and e-commerce, following a post at the University of Edinburgh as founding Research Fellow for the Coca-Cola Retail Research Foundation. He has also been Visiting Professor at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College.
He is a Governing Body Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford.
Pre-Conference Sessions
Publishing in Top Journals (Virtual)
This workshop focuses on publishing qualitative work in leading journals. The idea is to have a conversation about the challenges, to do some myth-busting, and to share learning points. The workshop will pay special attention to contribution.
In this workshop, Prof Vaara will share his own experiences about the challenges faced in publishing in top journals from the author, reviewer and editor perspectives. He will offer insights from case base studies, process studies, historical studies and discourse studies. While doing so he will share his views on how to be authentic, detailed and clear in argumentation and style of writing. Finally, he will provide his insights on what ‘contribution’ means in the context of the top journals. Here he will share his experiences to highlight the distinction between the papers which make it through the review process and those which do not succeed after initial review stages.
In this 90 minute interactive session, Prof Vaara will look forward to welcoming questions from fellow academics. Accordingly, a substantial amount of time will be reserved for questions aimed at having an open dialogue, sharing each other’s experiences.
Eero Vaara
Professor in Organisations and Impact, University of Oxford's Saïd Business School
Eero Vaara is Professor in Organisations and Impact at Saïd Business School at University of Oxford. He also serves as Visiting Distinguished Professor at Aalto University. His research focuses on strategic and institutional change. This includes strategy process and practice research, studies of radical change such as mergers and acquisitions, work on institutional change and legitimation, and research on multinational corporations, nationalism and globalization. What cuts across these research interests is an attempt to better understand how communication, discourses and narratives are used in and around organisations and how they construct organisational reality. This research has been published in a number of articles in the leading journals and several books. He has received several awards for his publications such as Roland Calori Prize for the Best Paper published in Organization Studies in 2003, OMT Best Published Paper Award 2014, and JIBS Silver Medal for Significant Contributions to International Business in 2019. He has served in editorial roles (e.g., Associate Editor in Academy of Management Journal) and in leadership positions in international societies and associations (e.g., Chair of European Group for Organizational Studies, member of the Board of Governors in Academy of Management, and board member in Nordic Academy of Management, European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management, and Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research). He is an Academy of Management Fellow and a lifetime member in the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.
"Advances in Assessment" workshop by Mr Syed Mohamed PK, PBS
Teachers preparing primary school and secondary school students for secondary education and Pre-university education respectively, need to understand the changes to the assessment of English Language that have come about over the years. However, whatever changes that may come our way, the principles of assessment must be maintained and adhered to closely to ensure fairness in testing.
The "Advances in Assessment" Workshop is therefore aimed at developing and strengthening that understanding to inform our teaching practice. Indeed, teachers need to be mindful that the general principles of language assessment, however, have not changed. Given the limitation of time, the workshop will be focused on the following topics:
- General Principles of Written Assessment
- Changes in the assessment of writing skills
- Changes in the assessment of reading skills
- Changes in the assessment of speaking and listening skills
Mr Syed Mohamed, PBS, PK
Lead Assessment Specialist (Retired)
Mr Syed Mohamed graduated from the then Institute of Education in 1988 with a Diploma in Education (Credit).
He holds a B.A. (Merit) from NUS and M.Ed. from NIE, NTU.
An experienced teacher at both primary and secondary levels, Mr Syed Mohamed moved on to the Examinations Division of MOE in 1999 and subsequently to the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board where he headed the Languages and Literature Department as its Department Co-ordinator.
He retired as Lead Assessment Specialist in May 2020. Currently, Mr Syed Mohamed is a Sessional Lecturer with James Cook University and an author of several English Language assessment books.