The University of Hertfordshire has been ranked 1st in the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey 2019 for overall research student satisfaction for Business and Economics research degree programmes. Source: 2019 Postgraduate Research Student Experience Survey.

Managing complex change is a multi-disciplinary research group at the Hertfordshire Business School, which is interested in how organisations change, or why they stay the same, and how we might manage organisations and what they produce sustainably.

Members of the group take a practical, theoretical and critical interest in managing the complexities of change, and more generally in the emergence of novelty. Researchers aim to deepen understanding of the effects of novelty and change, and the consequences for society, for organisations and their stakeholders, and for ordinary citizens, and policy makers.

Key themes
Our key research themes are as follows:

• Leading and managing in practice in different sectors – focusing on the practice of leadership and management in complex environments, and the extent to which it is possible to predict and plan the futures we desire.
• Innovation, particularly the adoption, use, diffusion, evaluation and use of information technology and its social consequences.
• Entrepreneurship – the possibilities and limits of planning to be entrepreneurial in start-up, micro, small firms and large, in the private and not-for-profit sectors. To develop an understanding of entrepreneurial learning and skills development in individuals, teams, organisations and clusters.
• The emergence of new knowledge and ways of learning alongside the persistence of more traditional perspectives – the role of networks, online collaboration as well as forms of resistance to the new.
• Developing management models to aid organisations, particularly cash-starved organisations like the NHS, to manage their resources more efficiently and effectively.
• Developing business models to encourage organisations and citizens to be more sustainable, recycle and refurbish.