New professors at WBS add depth and breadth to faculty expertise

In recent months, WBS has appointed six new professors and promoted two existing members of faculty to professor level, bringing the total number of professors at WBS to 45. In this the second feature, we profile three of these professors - Davide Nicolini and Victor Podinovski, promoted from within WBS, and new to WBS, Daniel Read. The first article featured Söhnke Bartram, Gerard Hodgkinson, Duncan Shaw and George Wright, all new to WBS.

Davide Nicolini, Professor of Organisation Studies

A specialist on organisational knowledge, learning and practices

Professor Nicolini says, "I joined WBS because of its unique way of combining collegiality, ambition and excellence."

Before joining Warwick, Davide held positions at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and the University of Trento and Bergamo in Italy. His work has appeared in journals such as Organisation Science, Organisation Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Management Learning, and Social Science and Medicine. In 2009, he became Associate Editor of Management Learning.

He is co-Director of the research centre on Innovation, Knowledge & Organisational Networks (IKON) and co-Director of the Warwick Institute of Health.

Davide is one of the founders of the practice-based approach to the study of organizational phenomena and for several years he has explored the implications of this novel approach for the understanding of knowing, collaboration and change in organizations. His new book Practice Theory, Work and Organisation will be published by OUP in 2012.

Most of his current research is conducted in healthcare organisations where he is studying the generation and circulation of safety knowledge, how top managers mobilise knowledge in their day to day work, and the process through which several ways of knowing are worked together. He is also exploring innovative approaches for triggering change through the use of video reflection and intensive shadowing.

While these days he spends a lot of time in hospitals, in the past he also studied construction sites, factories, public organizations, scientific labs, and pharmacies.

Victor Podinovski, Professor of Operational Research & Management Science

A leading authority on the analysis of efficiency of organisations

Professor Podinovski says, "Professionally speaking, WBS is a great place to be affiliated with. It offers a stimulating research environment and high visibility on the world academic scene."

Victor joined WBS in 1996 after leaving his position of Associate Professor at the department of Applied Mathematics at Moscow State University. In October 2011 he was appointed Professor at WBS, based in the Operational Research and Management Sciences Group (ORMS).

Victor's main research areas are the analysis of efficiency and performance of organisations, multiple criteria decision analysis and decision support systems. In particular, he has introduced numerous theoretical, computational and methodological innovations to the area known as data envelopment analysis - an optimisation-based branch of productivity analysis. These have been used extensively in practical applications by Victor's doctoral students and in the current large EU grant concerning the efficiency of European agricultural farms.

Victor has published in leading academic journals, including Operations Research and European Journal of Operational Research. He is Editor of Journal of Productivity Analysis - the flagship journal spanning the areas of production economics, econometrics, statistics and management science, and has served as guest editor and associate editor of several other reputable international journals.

Daniel Read, Professor of Behavioural Economics

An international scholar whose career brings practitioners and government face to face with academic rigour

Professor Read says, "I was initially attracted to WBS because it promised a nurturing and challenging research environment - who wouldn't want to interact with the best people in their field and learn from them? There is a real buzz around WBS, with exciting new teaching challenges and working with top students. I am enjoying being part of the WBS journey."

Daniel has held faculty positions at Leeds University Business School, London School of Economics and Durham Business School, and visiting positions at INSEAD, Yale School of Management, and Rotterdam Business School. His early academic career launched with his interest in psychology, and has since developed to cover economics, management science, and thereby behavioural economics. He is a member of the Behavioural Science Group at WBS.

He has consulted for the UK government and the Financial Services Authority on many aspects of behavioural economics, especially as it relates to consumer welfare and environmental marketing. He has published widely in leading journals including Psychological Review, Management Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Risk Analysis, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. He is a former associate editor of Management Science, and former editor of Journal of Economic Psychology.

Daniel's primary research interests are judgment and decision making including intertemporal choice, choice under uncertainty, risk, heuristics and biases, and philosophical psychology. His research aims to find at least some answers to these two questions: Do humans want results now or are we prepared to delay our gratifications until later? Does the way we describe time affect our decisions and choices? Organisations, marketers, and governments are interested in the answers, particularly in relation to influencing and even controlling human behaviour with 'nudges' rather than coercion and legislation.

In conclusion, Dean of WBS, Professor Mark Taylor, comments, "I am delighted that WBS has succeeded both in recruiting such talented professors across a wide spectrum of specialties, and also in promoting two members of our own faculty whose performance merited such promotion. As one of the largest business schools in Europe, we not only benefit from the synergy with other departments at Warwick, but our size also gives us greater depth and breadth of expertise across subjects and sectors which we can offer to students who learn here, and to organisations who come to us for the latest research."

"We are a forward-looking and creative business school, evidenced by these appointments of professors working across disciplinary boundaries and in new subject areas such as behavioural science."