ADDRESSING RESEARCH’S
CREATING MORE TRANSPARENCY IN CARBON OFFSETTING COUNTRY: New Zealand SCHOOL: Graduate School of Management, University of Auckland Business School When shopping for something you know is bad for the environment, for example flights, you can ease your guilt by shopping from websites which promise to offset the carbon emissions with your purchase. But do you ever check if these companies have gone through with their promise? It is hard for the companies themselves to track exactly where the money they are investing is being spent. The suggestion, from University of Auckland Professor of Accounting Charl de Villiers and University of South Australia academics Sanjaya Kuruppu and Dinithi Dissanayake, is that companies should harness blockchain technology and the internet of things to track their offsetting objectives. They make their case in a paper, entitled ‘A (New) Role for Business – Promoting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals Through the Internet of Things and Blockchain Technology.’ In an example of the business opportunities outlined in the paper, internet-connected technologies, such as temperature sensors, can capture, record and transmit data to a blockchain platform which could then report this data back to organisations. For example, an airline might have their carbon offsetting money invested in solar panels, the data from which could be transferred back to the airline so they can track and report on the effectiveness of their carbon offsetting. Using the internet of things (IoT) and blockchain in this manner could create greater accountability and trust in carbon offsetting initiatives. Customers can then, potentially, see exactly where any extra fees accrued for offsetting has been spent. ‘Capturing, managing, and reporting on sustainability information is very problematic for organisations, so one way of addressing this is to give them tools, which will make it easier to record minute data in real time from different parts of their production processes or supply chains through IoT devices,’ said University of South Australia academic, Sanjaya Kuruppu, one of the researchers behind the paper’s conceptual framework. / Ellen Buchan (EB)
REPLICATION CRISIS COUNTRY: Sweden SCHOOL: Lund University School of Economics and Management
Research can be improved by carrying out more replication studies, according to Burak Tunca, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM) in one of five recommendations made on LUSEM website. ‘Many people take peer review as a guarantee of good research, but peer reviewers mainly convey theoretical arguments and rarely demand to examine the data behind the study. This surprised me even when I was a doctoral student: who is checking whether my calculations are wrong? The answer turned out to be “no one”. We researchers know that a number of studies do not replicate, but the public seldom hears about that as a “failed” study is not deemed to be newsworthy,’ Tunca said. Tunca and his co-authors tried – and were unable – to replicate the findings of two published consumption studies that received widespread media attention. One showed that women who owned clothes and bags by luxury brands believed these products sent a signal that their partners are devoted to them (covered, for example, in The Atlantic under the headline, ‘Women and Luxury Products: How a New Study Brings Up Old Anxieties’ in 2013). The other showed that people feel the consumption of ‘super-sized’ portions – of hamburgers or coffee, for example – signals high status (covered in Scientific American under the headline, ‘The Perils of Paying for Status’ in 2012. ‘We did not succeed in replicating them and producing the same strong connections,’ said Tunca. This doesn’t mean that the original studies are incorrect, as the LUSEM Lecturer explained: ‘We simply say that more research is needed. That is all.’ The other recommendations to improve research given are: pre-registering hypotheses and methods; showing data; improving the peer-review system; and letting bachelor’s and master’s students get involved in replication studies. ‘Scientific research is the best thing we have to drive our society forward, but we need to become better to be sure that such research is reliable. Openness in research… is an available marketing niche that could give Lund University, or any other university, a competitive advantage,’ Tunca concluded. / Tim Banerjee Dhoul (TBD)
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