Our goal is to rethink the role and responsibilities of business in creating a sustainable society. As part of this mission, we publish the #thinklist - a list of influential faculty thinkers on social media who focus on issues of responsible business.

The #ThinklistNext21, focusing on doctoral researchers, was selected after polling CBOS’ twitter followers. We believe this is an essential group to highlight – as the next generation of thinkers, they will advance understanding and move the dial on issues of responsible business. However, they are often overlooked and unacknowledged. With this list we hope to recognise the contribution of doctoral researchers and help get their voices heard.

The #ThinklistNext21 Methodology

The #thinklist is no longer based on metrics such as follower numbers. It is instead curated by a group of experts in the field. The Centre for Business, Organisations and Society oversee the list, but commission the input of other leading scholars.

The #ThinklistNext21 was selected by Verena Girschik, Kam Phung, Michael Rogerson and Tanusree Jain.

Our group of curators drew up the final list based on public nominations. Each nomination was considered in light of the following criteria:

• They must be a current doctoral researcher as of 28th Feb 2021.
  
• They must be registered on a PhD or DBA or DPhil programme of a business school or management department, or based in another discipline and engages on a regular basis with the broad management scholarship community.
• They must be a user of twitter, who actively engages with issues of business and society.

'Active' was defined as having consistently tweeted, commented or otherwise engaged in relevant topics of discussion over the last six months.

The curators were especially keen to include doctoral researchers who tweeted in languages other than English, to recognise the global nature of these conversations.

Since relaunching the #thinklist, CBOS has acknowledged the importance of getting the nominees consent before including them in the final list. For this reason, all nominees were contacted and asked to confirm that they wished to be named on the list. If no response was received, we were unable to include them in the final version of the #ThinklistNext21.

Finally, it is important to remember that the #thinklist is a living thing - it develops and changes over time. Each list is just a snapshot of the curators’ views - a new #ThinklistNext will be run every year. If we have missed something, or if you have thoughts about refining our selection criteria to better fulfil our ambitions of inclusivity, please let us know.