Research Fellow

The Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation (CCR) is home to social evaluations research at the University of Oxford. We explore how organisations manage social evaluations such as reputation, status, celebrity, legitimacy, stigma, and trust.
The Centre is multidisciplinary in its structure, welcoming scholars from different disciplines whose work intersects with our research focus. Each Research Fellow works directly with a senior member of Oxford's faculty, and the role is structured without any teaching obligation to allow a full focus on building a productive research portfolio and pipeline in leading journals. The Centre is currently home to 10 Postdoctoral Research Fellows. For more, visit https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/research/centres-and-initiatives/oxford-university-centre-corporate-reputation
This post provides an exciting opportunity to join this thriving research community. The Research Fellow will be based at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and will be supervised by Professors Daniel Armanios and Juliane Reinecke.
In order to reach our climate change goals, we will need to invest in ambitious and speculative "big science", such as fusion energy or carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Under the direction of Professors Daniel Armanios and Juliane Reinecke, the postholder will explore how we enhance the legitimacy of such speculative yet promising scientific initiatives. More specifically, the postholder will: i) complete papers on how big science projects, particular in fusion energy, help legitimate the technology in ways that balance its promise with its uncertainty; ii) investigate the processes by which the ways such initiatives get legitimation with stakeholders (i.e., government) balances accountability with flexibility as it progresses and evolves; iii) explore how through the legitimation process, stakeholders diverge or converge as to the timeline for when such breakthroughs ought to come to fruition.
We welcome candidates from a range of theoretical backgrounds, but we are particularly keen to hear from people with strong backgrounds in mixed methods (i.e., qualitative and quantitative), organizational sociology, project management and innovation. Also, an engineering background and/or demonstrated ability to acquire technical literacy in a speculative science such as fusion energy works would be important for this role. The research scope is broad, and applicants are encouraged to bring their own research ideas and projects into these roles, as well as to develop new projects with Oxford Saïd's faculty and the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation.