I have three main research areas. One is on the political role and responsibilities of business – in particular, looking at how those responsibilities change over time, how firms and politics influence one another, and how businesses respond to populism.

The second is on business and modern slavery, both how firms are involved in contributing to modern slavery and what they can do to address or combat it. That looks at a range of things, from supply chain responsibility, to consumer responses, to how firms might report on this.

The third is broadly on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and communication. In recent years, we've looked at things like, what is authenticity in relation to communication about corporate responsibilities? We’ve also examined issues around stakeholder dialogue – how do firms interact with their stakeholders?

Those are the three main ones and then there are always bits and bobs of other things.

I've known of CBOS for a long time, and then I joined the Centre when I moved to Bath to be its Director – Bath recruited me for the role when [previous Director] Andrew Millington was retiring in 2016.

I wasn't really looking to move at the time, but it was a great opportunity. I was already directing a centre at my institution at the time so, with my research interests, this was a natural progression.

We've had some research coming out from Grace Augustine about the Post Office scandal here in the UK. It’s been super interesting and focused on an issue that's very topical and has important implications for how we might deal with such problems in the future. Some of Rob Branston's research on the tobacco industry has also been really significant, looking at issues around taxation and pricing.

And then there’s been Vivek Soundararajan's research with Pankhuri Agarwal looking at issues around worker exploitation in global supply chains. Some of their work has been looking at what's happened in Leicester since the accusations of modern slavery around [fast-fashion company] Boohoo. Those are just some of the things that I think have been particularly interesting in the past couple of years!

I've been working in this field now for 30 years and there's been a huge change over that time in terms of how businesses tackle these issues. These issues are seen as mainstream now, right? 30 years ago, they were still quite marginal and on the periphery.

You don't really have to make the argument anymore that firms should be dealing with them. The real question is: how and how much? My view is that we haven't gone nearly as fast as we needed to and still need to, particularly around things like climate change.

But I think that there's still a very strong kind of forward momentum, so even when we see governments and firms stepping back from their commitments, the overall direction of travel is broadly positive.

It’s absolutely an exciting time to be doing this kind of research. These are the biggest issues confronting us as a society and we've got companies being called upon to deal with them. You can't get any bigger than that.

We now have something like 60 faculty members and a number of PhD students, so there are a lot of people involved and we do a wide variety of different research around business and society.

In one sense you're always driven by the interests, desires and perspectives of your members, but clearly there are certain issues and topics that are becoming much more important – such as climate change, inequality, technology and the corporate responsibilities around these.

Going forward, I think the Centre is also becoming much more interested in how the research we do makes a positive and meaningful impact in practice. That’s both in terms of disseminating our work to different stakeholders, but then also working with these stakeholders to make a difference on the ground.