Michel Ajzen, PhD in Management, is Research Manager of the labor-H Chair in Human Management and New Ways of Working. In line with his PhD dissertation entitled « While the “new” world of work naturalizes flexibility. A conventionalist analysis of telework uses”. His research focuses in new ways of working and managing, in a critical and interdisciplinary perspective. More precisely, he questions how the so-called « New » world of work (as a set of practices – e.g. telework, flexwork, distributed workplaces, flexdesk and flexitime – and discourses – e.g. freedom, empowerment and entrepreneurship) produces and/or reflects a new social order within which power issues take place to define the « newness ». From this perspective, he questions (a) How social relations are (re)shaped in times and spaces?; (b) How and why traditional organizational roles and places are (re)defined in particular for managers, workers and trade unions ?; and (c); How (new) worklife balance reconfigurations are shaped from both domestic and professional spheres and what are the impacts on the attitudes to family and work?

Nicolas Burny is a PhD student and teaching assistant in Computer Science. His thesis project is related to the replicability of experimental studies in the field of Human-Computer Interactions (HCI), more specifically in the domain of the visual design of graphical user interfaces (GUI). There is currently a “reproducibility crisis” in HCI where a large number of experimental studies are published without being able to be put in perspective with each other. This is due among other things to the lack of publicly available data and the tedious process to build data sets in this research field. The purpose of his research project is to build a platform automating parts of the process of experiment design and deployment in the field of GUI visual design. Automating the various time-consuming tasks in this research field will reduce the design and deployment time of experiments and will hopefully facilitate their replicability.

The objective of my project is to investigate persuasion processes at play in the very specific context of a new type of endorsers: Social Media Influencers (SMIs). SMIs create content that they post on social networks. In their content, they mostly share their opinion on different products from different brands. By expressing their opinions, they have an impact on attitude and behaviour of their followers -people who follow the content of SMIs. The context of SMIs presents several differences with traditional endorsement which suggest an original persuasion process. The first one is the strength of the relationship between SMIs and their followers, relying on parasocial interaction. A second difference is the fact that they are “serial recommenders”, implying high frequencies of influence attempts for numerous brands. For this project, we therefore focus on the relationship between SMIs and their followers with its positive and negative aspects and the impact of the repetitive influence attempts.

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Today’s world is flooded with a huge amount of data and analyzing it is a daily challenge in many sectors. In my thesis, I am interested to analyze through the ‘bag-of-paths’ framework one specific data structure that are networks (social networks, transportation networks, etc). My main objective is to extend this framework and use it to solve managerial problems. I have already been able to demonstrate its effectiveness for detecting bank fraud in collaboration with Worldline and solving optimal transport problems. I am currently working another application in viral marketing.

His research is in sport management with a focus on sport organizations’ governance. In this vein, Arthur has studied the collaborations between non-profit sport organizations, their antecedents, processes and effectiveness. More recently, Arthur's research has focused on the "good" governance and organizational performance of sport federations. Currently, Arthur is working on a project that focuses on gender diversity and women's participation in sport federations and clubs.

Recommender systems are an important feature in many modern fields, notably information and e-commerce ecosystems. However, most recommenders are evaluated using accuracy, which results in algorithms recommending items similar to a user profile. As a result, users only receive recommendations for items similar to those they already consumed, often leading to low user satisfaction. My research focuses methods to increase novelty and unexpectedness in recommendations to alleviate this overspecialization phenomenon. The suggested approach relies on a random walk biased towards unexpected items to avoid obvious recommendations. The model is based on a formalism inspired from transportation sciences that interpolates between a predefined random and an optimal, least-cost, behaviour. The proposed procedure is not limited to recommendation and can be used in many other contexts to define a Markov chain driving the walk towards nodes having some specific properties of interest, like seniority, education level or low node degree (hub-avoiding walk).

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Laurianne is a PhD researcher in Critical Management Studies, Human Resource Management and Organisation studies at UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve campus). Her research seeks to unveil the way identity regulation is at play during organisational transitions. More specifically, her PhD thesis focuses on the transition of a Media Company towards more collaborative and participative management, investigating the way this transition and the organisational discourses it conveys alter managers’ attitude and behaviours. In order to address this issue, her research is based on a qualitative empirical research in which data are collected through an ethnographic approach, including observations, interviews and documentary analysis. Her first results outline the outbreak or persistence of alternative sources of authority than the traditional ones, such as the ownership over people and budget as well as the possession and/or withholding of information. By doing so, her work provides with strong findings that support a better understanding of managers' response to a deep organizational transformation of their environment.

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The advent and proliferation of emerging technologies such as cloud computing, social media, big data and analytics, are changing the strategic context of organizations to a profound extent leading to Digital Transformation (DT). One of the main challenges in embracing DT is the fact that it affects every function and business unit of an organization and changes their traditional way of working. These fundamental changes, together with the rapid growth of technological advances subject an organization to a large variety of unprecedented risk that cannot be successfully managed using traditional risk management approaches, especially at the strategic level. For that, my research aims to study the strategic risks that are associated to DT strategy. This includes three main research areas:
1) providing a DT strategy representation,
2) providing a representation of risk at the strategic level and,
3) identifying strategic risks associated to each of the DT strategic objectives.

Due to the worldwide focus on sustainability, sustainable entrepreneurship education is a topic present in a growing number of higher education institutions. This context leads academics to question themselves about the construction of sustainable entrepreneurship programs in higher education institutions and about the way stakeholders, such as organizations, considered it. Therefore, my thesis project can be sequenced in 3 keywords:

1. The matching: The first article will provide the state of the current implementation of sustainable entrepreneurship programs in higher education institutions through a deep analysis in terms of distance in sustainable entrepreneurship learning outcomes expected versus realized ones.

2. Then, the efficiency: The main goal is to discover what types of pedagogy are the most efficient in sustainable entrepreneurship programs in higher education institutions to enhance the motivation of students to pursue in sustainable entrepreneurship.

3. Finally, the relevance: The third article will aim at testing if organizations value such types of curriculum and the content behind it, mainly through competencies. .

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Her research questions to what extent urban cultural vibrancy can be a key strategy for organizations to boost their creativity and innovation capacity – and consequently a valorizing factor for cities to attract such organizations. Mobilizing the institutional theory and agglomeration theory, this study is quantitatively carried out on 190 cities in 30 European countries. Among others, it measures to what extent cities’ cultural vibrancy induces business creation (via start-ups’ development) and innovation (via patent and community design applications), by focusing on the movie and music industries’ urban level of development to translate cultural vibrancy.

The main objective of my research is to study and develop recommender systems that take into account different stakeholders of this technology. We will therefore move away from traditional recommender systems that only focus on the needs and interests of the consumers by exploring recommender algorithms that incorporate the utility functions of the consumers but also of the sellers and the owners of web applications. In particular, this project focuses on consumer behaviors when they are faced with biased recommendations from this type of system. The research will thus mobilize many tools and aspects of management research such as the analysis of data, the development of various algorithms, mathematical modelling and multi-objective optimization as well as marketing and the study of consumer behaviors (loyalty, trust, retention, etc.).

I am doing a PhD dissertation about hybrid work and its effects on productivity in institutes of higher education. The focus is not only on universities as educators, but as employers as well.

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Her research is in Information Systems, with a focus on Recommender Systems and fairness. The aim of her work is to alter state-of-the-art recommender systems in purpose to enhance fairness and decrease bias while recommending relevant items to users. With that purpose, she has studied different definitions of fairness to find the best suited to recommender systems. Her work has focus recently on how to alter systems to incorporate fairness in their objectives while maintaining the personalization feature of those systems.

Recently, organizational learning has been analyzed as a business strategy in the development of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices. Organizations and individuals continuously learn by interacting at different levels, inside and outside the organization, in both formal and informal settings. A significant extent of CSR knowledge is developed informally, which is a largely invisible process resulting in the production of explicit but also tacit knowledge. Current discourse is dominated by explicit and codified knowledge; it is therefore crucial to find ways to leverage both explicit and tacit knowledge from ongoing practice and disseminate it. Among informal settings, we focus on Communities of Practice i.e. social and spontaneous communities that are driven by common interests and passions (here, CSR). First, we observe what type of knowledge of CSR is produced and shared within these communities. Second, we analyze how participants act as gatekeepers between the community and the organization by extracting and translating CSR knowledge. Finally, we look at how this knowledge is disseminated and stored in the organizational memory.

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My research investigates which cultural variables enable actors’ entrepreneurial behaviour and which tactics actors use to implement their entrepreneurial project. In this context, entrepreneurship is a multi-level activity of actors who change the organizations, institutions or fields they live in. In particular, I study actors’ behaviour to bring about innovative solutions and to face grand challenges such as climate change, waste-management, mass migration or pandemics. Currently, I am working on a project related to the subnational responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. As Italy was the first western country to face the spread of the virus, the Italian management of the crisis is a compelling case to study non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) when unexpected events unfold. The different responses of the Italian subnational level account for the high uncertainty on the best state-guided interventions in the initial stage of the first wave. My research investigates and explains these differences.

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My research interests lie on understanding the possible negative effects that some widespread business practices have on people’s lives, ─ specially for those who are typically placed in disadvantaged positions in our society. Hence, in my PhD I am studying how the New Ways of Working affect the work experience of people with disabilities (PWD). Specifically, my research goal is to understand how PWD are affected both positively and negatively by typical contemporary HRM-related practices, such as teleworking and open-plan offices.

As part of my doctoral research, I am studying the corporate income tax with a focus on its societal goal. The goals of the research project are to identify the existing reasons of the corporate income tax (with a new focus on the Corporate Social Responsibility) and to identify the current corporate income tax tools that meet this paradigm; to identify objective criteria that could be used to determine a “fair tax burden”; to investigate how the “fair amount of corporate income tax” can be calculated, in particular using data from different kind of industries (primary, secondary and tertiary sectors). The expected contribution is to make a model available that can be implemented by a government to charge companies the “fair amount of tax” they owe the society, with a consideration for their CSR activities. This is consistent with Avi Yonah’s work on CSR and tax aggressiveness, as it appears legitimate “to use the corporate tax to steer corporate behaviour in the direction of CSR” (2008, p.27).

Graduate from the Louvain School of Management and CEMS (2019), Lionel Joined LouRIM as a PhD researcher in May 2022. He conducts research in the field of innovation management and focuses more specifically on the entrepreneurial ecosystem in a corporate context. He investigates how large corporations define, decide to manage and implement collaboration processes with start-ups and more broadly with what they identify as their entrepreneurial ecosystem. At the crossroads between the concepts of open-innovation, corporate venturing and entrepreneurial ecosystem, his research aims to contribute to the existing literature by filing the gap on that specific topic. Before joining LouRIM, he worked for 3 years as consultant in audit and financial advisory.

My name is Pauline de Montpellier and I have started my PhD on the topic of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in 2019. My research focuses on the different perceptions that individuals have of CSR, and how these perceptions vary according to their cultural and individual profile. I am also interested in the evolution of CSR perceptions, and in the learning process of this contested concept. For this purpose, I analyse a MOOC on the topic of CSR. I study, in particular, the interactions between individuals on discussion forums and how constructive debates can help to understand the concept more globally. My research project includes an educational component to the study of CSR, as I am part of an interdisciplinary project analysing the conceptual learning of contested concepts in online educational platforms. This will, hopefully, contribute to a better understanding by consumers, employees and leaders of the responsibilities and challenges of companies in the transition towards a more sustainable society!

My research in marketing focuses on problematics related to the retail industry and new technologies. More specifically, the goal of my research is to study the impact of smart technologies in the retail environment on customers’ experience and, as a result of that, the impact on their engagement towards a retailer. This project aims at employing experimental research methods in a controlled laboratory environment that takes the form of a store with many technologies at hand.

Our society is facing several crises, which makes consumers feel lost when it comes to making their purchase decision, particularly for food. Many injunctions occur, even if they are contradictory: you must eat healthy, local, organic, while enjoying taste. My research consists in analyzing food behaviours: describing the mental process involved when consumers choose their food, face contradictory information, or think about certain food products. A part of my project is to work on consumers' expectations in the future.

I am a ph.D student working on food waste. One third of food produced in the world is wasted, leading to many negative environmental, social and economic consequences. Food waste is thus a relevant current issue and an interesting topic of research. More precisely, my research focuses on the suboptimal products (i.e. products close to the expiration date, with a default in the packaging and ugly fruits and vegetables). These products are often rejected by consumers and constitute a large amount of food waste. In reaction to this rejection, retailers try to trigger their sales by offering price reductions for these products. However, this monetary incentive might lead to some backlash in terms of food waste and more generally in terms of subsequent eco-friendly behaviours. It seems thus relevant to study the antecedents, but also the consequences on subsequent behaviours of the purchase of suboptimal products with a reduced price.

Ophélie Duquesne is a PhD Student and Teaching Assistant in the marketing department of UCLouvain FUCaM Mons. In today’s connected world, retailers need to rethink their strategies and effectively execute across online and offline channels (Jindal et al., 2021). Embracing an omnichannel strategy would not only allow retailers to get low-cost access to new markets, but also leverage synergies between touchpoints and build a strong competitive advantage (e.g., Chen et al., 2018). While omnichannel strategies offer several potential benefits to retailers and customers alike, managing customer experience across all touchpoints remains challenging (Kuehnl et al., 2019). Against this backdrop, practitioners have started investing in customer journey design to differentiate and provide customer value (De Keyser et al., 2020). Grounded in a customer-centric approach, her doctoral project focuses on how to effectively design customer journeys to enhance customer experience, in a retail context. More specifically, this research uses a multi-level approach and seeks to address the following two key research questions: (RQ1) To what extent and when does omnichannel (in)consistency between online/offline touchpoints positively influence customer experience at the journey-level? (RQ2) What is the role of consistency between and within the offering related stimuli (i.e., Design-Ambient-Social-Trialability (DAST) retail cues) that reside within firm-controlled touchpoints in influencing customer experience?

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After a Master’s degree in European studies, I worked for 7 years for the Public Service of Wallonia in the Directorate for Economic policies. I started a new page in my career in September 2020 as a research and teaching assistant at LSM and LOURIM. My research interests are in the field of innovation and more specifically social innovation. I want to focus my thesis on the scaling up process of social innovation, looking at the different types of scaling up processes as well as the spatial anchorage and the role of design methodologies in such processes. This thematic and focuses will be subject to change through the iteration process that require a thesis project. I am starting this journey with enthusiasm and motivation.

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His research focuses on the humanization of management, from a CMS perspective. More specifically, he is working on a synthesis of the different definitions of humanization in the management sciences. His objective is to understand how practices aiming to humanize the company are currently materializing.

After starting up a business to supply healthy and local food online, I made the leap to consultancy and regional economic development where I have been working for over 5 years. I am currently taking a new step in my career as a researcher at LouRIM, specifically at the chair of Circular and Regenerative Economy. Circular Economy is an umbrella concept that is gaining momentum both in the public and the private sphere. The main objective of my research is to promote the implementation of circular economy strategies in the private sector.

My research is about customer experience in interaction with artificial intelligence (AI). Nowadays, more and more interactions between consumers and firms are based on artificial intelligence (eg. chatbot, virtual assistant, service robot). These AI-based interfaces transform the consumer behaviors and the relationships with the organizations, firms and brands. Therefore, this research aims to better understand the customer experience during these interactions, from an experiential perspective, which focus on the affective and social dimensions of the customer experience. The main questions of this research are: what are the affective and social responses during the interactions with AI-based interfaces? What are the characteristics of the AI (ex: artificial empathy), the context (eg. emotional state) and individuals (ex: vulnerable consumer) that influence these responses? What are the consequences of these interactions for the firm outcomes (eg. engagement) and for the consumers (eg. well-being)? By answering these questions, this research aims to bring theoretical contributions to the field of customer experience, service research and human-AI interactions, as well as to provide managerial recommendations to firms and organizations.

Laurent Lahaye studies sustainable entrepreneurship. The objective of his PhD thesis is to better understand how sustainable entrepreneurs manage their hybridity and the fragile equilibrium between their social and environmental missions and their commercial activities. The social and environmental missions are the primary objective of sustainable entrepreneurs and their organizations. Business activities enable them to achieve their mission. Their hybrid nature is not guaranteed. Some sustainable entrepreneurs may prioritize economic objectives at the risk of losing their raison d'être. Others may lock in their mission at the risk of undermining the financial health of their organization. Laurent conducted his field research on ecotourism organizations in Benin. Thanks to multiple rounds of interviews, secondary data and observations, he analyzed the evolution of those sustainable enterprises and the discourse of 6 sustainable entrepreneurs. The analysis performed with Frank Janssen unveils the black box of hybridity in sustainable entrepreneurship.

Her research is in social entrepreneurship, focusing on innovative entrepreneurial ecosystems and, ultimately, the business support organizations. More recently, her work has focused on understanding How social impact incubators help social startups to overcome and manage their hybridity-related tensions to achieve social and financial goals. In particular, she studies the impact of these support programs on the social impact creation of the incubated startups.

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The world is facing global economic, social, and environmental challenges. To tackle these challenges, different programs, frameworks, and initiatives (such as UNGC, GRI, ISO, B Corp Certification, etc.) are developed to engage and guide enterprises in the pursuit of sustainable development but they focus on the formal sector, ignoring the informal sector. In addition, in sustainability research, economic, social, and environmental practices of formal firms, either large or small, have been largely explored with little attention given to informal businesses. However, sustainability cannot be achieved if the informal sector, which represents an important part of the global economy (accounting for almost 51,9% of the global employed population), is neglected. Therefore, the informal sector has a role to play in achieving sustainable development and this research investigates the links between informal businesses and sustainability, particularly from the perspective of informal businesses. The purpose of this study is to understand how sustainability practices are understood, defined, and implemented in informal businesses and why. To address this question, we will identify and analyze informal businesses sustainability practices to characterized informal entrepreneurs who engage in these practices; we will describe and analyze the processes developed by informal businesses to implement sustainability practices; we will analyze the specificities of sustainability practices implemented in informal businesses to understand the challenges, drivers and motivations behind informal entrepreneurs' sustainability engagement, in order to suggest strategies to improve their contribution to the achievement of sustainable development.

Leslie Nothomb is a PhD student at the Faculty of Motor Sciences and the Louvain Research Institue in Management and Organizations (louRIM) at the UCLouvain. Passionate about sports and more particularly about women’s football, Leslie has begun a PhD thesis in sport management about the professionalization of women’s sports.

Many sensors are used to capture the human body movements and can be involved in many activities in various application domains. The captured raw data often consist of physical data measured in a three-dimensional space (e.g., x, y, z, t) along with other data (e.g., speed, acceleration, pressure, jerk), thus posing several challenges in terms of data fusion and interpretation. When all these data need to be fused to feed a high-level model of the human body, there is a need to unify these coordinates systems. Instead of converting data from one coordinates system to another, thus losing some information, the thesis will investigate how computing in the same system by manipulating mathematical objects (scalars, vectors, pseudo-vectors, and bi-vectors) may unify the capture of these data as well as their fusion in order not to lose any information. The results inform the development of a system for 3D gesture recognition.

En tant que chercheuse pour la chaire labor-H, je participe aux recherches des différents axes qui la composent. Ces cherches de nature collaborative sont ainsi guidées par les évolutions du métier de manager ainsi qu’une réflexion sur les pratiques RH et de management humain, et sur les nouvelles formes d’organisation du travail.

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Her research is in environmental and social accounting, with a focus on how new accounting norms, new sustainable accounting models (as multi-capitals models) impact organisation.
In that vein, she has studied multi-capitals models (more specifically Comprehensive Accounting model in Respect of Ecology), the Non-financial Reporting Directive, SBTi and SBTN or relations between ISSB and EFRAG. More recently, her work has focused on understanding how accountants will react to new regulations, norms, models.

Currently pursuing a PhD in Management Sciences, I am working on the societal impact of technologies and on ways to use technologies to encourage a more sustainable and responsible consumption. The increasing awareness around environmental issues has led to a rising interest in the negative impact of our consumption on the environment. It has also been highlighted that different technologies present along the purchase journey of consumers, such as recommender systems, influence consumption. I am currently studying how recommender systems could be modified to encourage a more sustainable and responsible consumption. I use machine learning and data mining techniques to identify and recommend more sustainable products to online shoppers. Finally, I also study whether consumers would be willing to adopt a pro-environmental behaviour by choosing sustainable recommended products. Some e-commerce technologies might be interesting, not only for consumers and companies, but also for our society.

Nowadays, creating a positive experience is a key source of competitive advantage. Besides, gesture interaction technology appears as a promising way to provide individuals a global richer experience than with classical user interfaces. In order to study the impact of this type of technology on the consumer experience, this multidisciplinary research project mixes different methods. For the exploratory aspects, we go through qualitative approaches by crossing interview data and observations. Regarding the quantitative approaches, we favor data collections in controlled laboratory environments and structural equation modeling for the analyses.

My name is Min Shuai and my research focuses on creative crowdsourcing management in a multi-stakeholder environment. we have analyzed how mindsets affect the way project holders manage a crowdsourcing project. We then will discuss how varying crowdsourcing management strategies differently shape participants’ experience and their perceived brand ethicality. In order to achieve engaging long-term crowdsourcing management, we will finally identify all involved stakeholders in the crowdsourcing management process and investigate how to manage stakeholder involvement.

My thesis focuses on improving the recognition of 3D gestures (gestures performed with some part(s) of the body) captured with vision- and radar-based sensors, with the end-goal of providing better and more intuitive ways to interact with systems such as TVs and computers. This is a very interesting subject, as 3D gesture recognition has the potential to impact many facets of our lives. Possible applications include looking-up patient data in the operating room without any physical contact, thu.s limiting the risks of contamination, or flipping through the pages of a recipe e-book while cooking without having to talk or touch a screen. However, there are still many challenges left before the generalization of 3D gesture recognition, which I try to address in my thesis. These challenges include identifying gestures among parasitic movements, accurately recognizing gestures in as little time as possible, and finding the most appropriate gestures for specific actions.

His research focuses on recommendation systems, more precisely he studies the phenomenon of filter bubbles within the framework of ideological news articles recommendations. He tries to understand the impact of recommendation systems on those bubbles and tries to find innovative ways to reduce this bubble phenomenon. His purpose is to make users aware of this phenomenon and to study whether conscious users will diversify the content of the articles they read. For now, he is developing a metric to quantify the filter bubble phenomenon.

She is studying recommender systems and predictive models with a focus on ethical questions in this field. Recently, she has investigated the potential creation of filter bubbles by testing various algorithms on their intrinsic propensity of changing the diversity of recommended items. She will now more focus on fairness questions in IT. More precisely, her research aims at elaborating fairer algorithms, avoiding discrimination such as gender or racial discrimination, by recommending items to users.

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