Ahmed Doha and Jinsun Bae receive SSHRC Explore grants

As a service within the Office of the Vice-President (Research and International), the Carleton Office for Research Initiatives and Services administers the SSHRC Explore program to support researchers as they develop competitive applications for future SSHRC funding.

The origins of breakthroughs – knowledge discoveries that result in disproportionate impact on research and practice – are of significant interest to Business and Management (B&M) researchers, economists, and policymakers. Ahmed is reframing how we study the knowledge trajectories that lead to breakthroughs by applying computational linguistic methods to the vast word-level content of millions of research publications. He will model B&M knowledge as a three-dimensional (3D) embedding vector space, organizing the ontological features in B&M literature along dimensions that correspond to published knowledge in the fields of economics, sociology, and psychology, respectively. By computing a trajectory vector space for each breakthrough in the study sample and overlaying the trajectories on the 3D map, he will reveal feature-, researcher-, and institution-level characteristics of trajectories that are likely to lead to breakthrough discoveries. His findings will help researchers, universities, publishers, funding agencies, and policymakers make decisions that maximize their return on research investment.

International companies have pursued cost efficiency by outsourcing labor- and resource-intensive production processes to external suppliers in developing countries. This globalized production scheme has been criticized for promoting a “race to the bottom” in labor and environmental standards among suppliers, and problems in these areas are likely to grow worse due to climate change. Jinsun is identifying how companies have responded to labor and environmental problems in global supply chains and determining what else needs to be done. Her systematic review of research about the globalization of production will draw from the literature of multiple social science disciplines and advance the field in two ways: first, it will consider not only those studies that focus on corporate response to labor or environmental problems, but also those that demonstrate how these problems co-exist and influence each other. Second, it will overcome the lead firm bias by seeking out studies that document how suppliers respond to labor and environmental problems in global supply chains. Jinsun’s analysis will help discover emerging themes and relationships in these areas and thereby inform future research about this timely issue.