International Research

Our faculty travel around the world to study the latest trends in global business. They incorporate their research in the classroom, giving you access to the latest information in your field.

Here are just a few examples of what they’re working on:

Accounting

Born in Chile and raised in Israel, it’s natural for Associate Professor Ariel Markelevich to think globally about accounting. His main interest is standardized financial reporting. He’s been studying the global use of extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and international financial reporting standards (IFRS).

“The focus on XBRL enables me to expose students to better and easier ways to get access to and consume financial accounting data.”

Markelevich is also a member of the Institute of Management Accountants XBRL Advisory Committee.

Innovation

As companies go global, we need to embrace change and find new ways to solve challenges. As one of our most widely published researchers, Bob DeFillippi, chair of the Strategy and International Business Department, studies how organizations like Xerox and Proctor and Gamble collaborate to create innovative solutions.

DeFillippi’s work has been praised internationally. His book, Knowledge At Work, which he co-authored with former Management Professor Michael Arthur, was selected as one of the most promising management books of 2006 by the European Academy of Management.

DeFillippi is also the director of the Center for Innovation and Change Leadership, which fosters creative collaborations with businesses, government, nonprofit organizations, and academia.

International Business

Assistant Professor of Strategy & International Business Sokol Celo has received multiple research awards at two international conferences.

He won the Temple University/Academy of International Business (AIB) Best Paper Award at the 2012 Academy of International Business (AIB) international conference for an article he co-authored with Ay Chacar of Florida International University.

Their winning article, "Country Relatedness and International Coherence," proposed an alternative approach in international business research “that relies on survivor data culled from the actions of individuals and firms to compute country relatedness,” as opposed to the conventional approach, which is “to consider and/or compute country distance as independent of individual firm actions.” The paper also introduced the concept of firm’s international coherence and investigated its effects on firm performance.

Celo was also one of four finalists for the International Management Division Fundação Dom Cabral Best Paper in Strategy/International Business Theory Award at the Academy of Management annual meeting. He was later selected for the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, which categorizes him into the top-10 percent of submitted papers.

Management and Innovation

Mark Lehrer’s work often looks abroad to examine novel or interesting practices in management and innovation. After earning his PhD at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, he worked for two years at the Social Science Center Berlin.

Privatization

Businesses—particularly utility services, such as water sanitation, and electricity—are becoming increasingly essential in developing countries. But how can corporations take up the place of governments and provide an increasing range of items to the poor on a financially viable basis?

Strategy and International Business Professor Carlos Rufin, a native of Barcelona, travels around the globe to find the answer.

He’s studied some of the most innovative electricity companies around the world, including Spain’s Endesa and Iberdrola, as well as AES from the US. He’s found that a financially and socially sustainable business model for supplying the urban poor includes two key components: helping poor communities increase their incomes, and helping them manage, or even reduce, their consumption of electricity.

Supply Chain Management

Kuo-Ting (Ken) Hung, chair and associate professor of Information Systems and Operations Management (ISOM), won the Best Theoretical/Empirical Research Paper Award for the 2011 Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) Conference.

He co-authored the paper with Chanchai Tangpong, associate professor of Management at the North Dakota State University. The authors identified cross-level fallacies as a major problem in behavioral research on operations and supply chain systems. To prevent such fallacies, they developed an innovative method to examine how the interaction of various factors influence behavioral decision-making in operations and supply chain systems.