ProfessorDonncha Kavanagh

My research interests have centred on novelty and the unusual in the marketplace and organisations. Novelty (which encompasses related concepts such as innovation, creativity and change) has been my primary interest over many years, probably because of my business experience in projects, which are always about creating new things. My doctoral thesis, which was in the area of industrial marketing, studied change in the context of multi-national, multi-firm temporary networks. In this research I used actor-network theory as my orientation and method since it is explicitly concerned with how things come to be. I have continued with this approach in my later work and in my own supervision (for instance, one of my PhD students completed his doctoral study of marketing and strategic action in emerging high-technology markets). My interest in the unusual goes back to early publications with my colleague Neil Buttimer, where we inquired into a possible link between market exchange and extreme or deviant behaviour. In other words, we asked if markets are mad. This cultivated a long-standing interest in the unusual, the deviant, the eccentric and the experimental. In consumer behaviour, my interest in the extreme has generated publications on `stigmatic consumption' and humour in advertising. I am also interested in unusual forms and aspects of organizing, be it the heterarchy of the pre-modern Celts, scapegoating, the subaltern or the collegial model of the university. Currently, I am studying an anarchic model of organizing that James March (of March and Simon fame) fostered while he was Dean of the School of Social Sciences in the University of California at Irvine during the 1960s. This research is part of a wider project which examines the university as an unusual mode of organizing that is perhaps uniquely suited to the organization of knowledge work. My interest in novelty and the unusual meld in an ongoing project that focuses on play in organizations. Play is an overlooked concept in management and marketing research, given its predilection for presenting work as serious, and research into work as even more serious again. One output from this research is a book with Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling, titled `Organization in Play', published by Peter Lang. Most recently, I have been studying cryptocurrencies and the blockchain and the impact of these technologies on states and organising practices. I am also collaborating with Martin Brigham of Lancaster University on a study of Quaker practices and their contribution to management.