The Pentland Centre is a cross-university centre, but it's got a lot of members from LUMS because of the interest in sustainability in business. We look after putting on seminars and creating opportunities for colleagues to work together and interact around ideas that engage them, whether that be reading groups or writing groups, people going for grants together. So it's a super job. I love this job because I get the chance to help people shine and do their best, and see the huge variety of work that people are doing and around sustainability and business issues under the umbrella of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business.

We have all sorts of really interesting streams of work going on that colleagues are collaborating on. So there's a really strong stream of research from Management Science, but also from the Department of Accounting and Finance, on forced labour detection. There's a lot of supply chain work there. So, how do you find incidences of forced labour in your supply chains, how do you protect against it, and how do companies say something about it? And in this context, there's a requirement in the UK and increasingly elsewhere in the world for companies to disclose their modern slavery performance. So that's a really strong area of research with colleagues who are underneath the umbrella of the Pentland Centre, looking at that topic.

At the same time we have quite a few members from Accounting and Finance who are interested in how the financial markets might be able to understand sustainability and incorporate it into bank lending decisions, into stock exchange listing requirements, into non-financial reporting requirements but also how investors might screen companies into good and bad categories and uncertain categories as well. Another part of our research is colleagues who are doing whole systems research. So there's work on plastics, and my work on seafood will fit in that category as well, but then we also have colleagues looking at food systems. And of course, food systems are absolutely critical to all our well-being and thinking about the carbon, the social consequences of food and food inequality, but also biodiversity impacts as well.

The Pentland Centre's plans for the next five years are quite varied. In the first instance, we want to keep building relationships with relevant researchers at Lancaster University to realise the ambition of sustainability in business. At the same time, the kind of problems that society is facing are not getting any easier and not going away, so the whole push to net zero is there, particularly within the UK, but also globally. I'm looking at nature and business intersections, and business and biodiversity is going to be another big theme. The third big theme is about materials, particularly plastics, but also novel chemical agents. So, if you like, that's where the subject areas are going, and it's where the policy is developing enormously as well. [Music]

I'm part of a science team, which is an interdisciplinary group of people, including ecologists, people who understand finance systems, and people like myself, who are organisational scientists, accounting people, people who understand corporate reporting.

So there's a big science team that works in partnership through something called SeaBOS, which is the Seafood Business for Ocean [Stewardship], which is a group of the ten largest seafood companies on the planet, who have got together collaboratively in a pretty competitive way to sort out some of their big issues. Those big issues include illegal fishing, forced labour in supply chains, antibiotic resistance in seafood production, plastics in the ocean, cand limate change. All of those core sustainability issues that come to the fore.

So, we work with them to help provide summaries of science so that the chief executives and their operational teams are able to do things. They then also make a lot of actions on the results of, well, partly because of what they want to do and partly because of our science. And we then research how they undertake those actions and how do they come to realise the benefits. So there's the science for SeaBOS, then there's the science of SeaBOS. And then the final element of that project is that our working hypothesis is if these ten really large and powerful companies change, then the whole system changes around them.

So we call them Keystone actors, and we are looking to see if we can engender through science input a change in the whole seafood system, because they buy and sell with everyone. They operate across the globe. They have hundreds of employees and some hundreds of subsidiaries between them.

For me, personally, I think my research is going to sort of have two elements to it. One of the big elements that I've been working on, particularly in partnership with the seafood companies, is forced labour and extended supply chains. And it's a really tricky question, because it's something which is illegal, which is hidden, and also involves often some criminality in terms of, you know, you don’t accidentally end up in forced labour. Somebody makes it happen for you.

So I think there's a bunch of my work that's going to be looking at how do you deal with things that are really nasty, because our traditional audit and accounting and due diligence processes can't very easily capture hidden and bad, bad, bad things.

I think the second half of my work will be trying to provide points of translation for colleagues.

So, I'm what you would call a social environmental accountant. Our whole field probably started in about 1990, and at that time, the mainstream of accounting and finance didn't find us at all relevant. And indeed, at that time, I don't think it was evident that we were going to become relevant. Whereas now, in 2020 and beyond, these kind of questions are central to business organisations. So that means that the last 30 years of experience in my field needs to be codified and re-imagined and brought into the mainstream, so people can start from here rather than start from 30 years back. So, quite a bit of my work is how do I construct stories and information that will help mainstream researchers pick up issues about biodiversity, climate change or forced labour, and move forward from them?

Benchmarking is a really interesting exercise. It's where somebody gathers a group of organisations together that have something in common and evaluates their reporting practice against some sort of standard criteria, and you get a best to worst list out of it. There is now an increasing number of benchmarks out there, and we know that they have an effect. What it does is it sort of creates an ordering as opposed to a direct measure of how people have done, so it's that ordering that then makes people look at those above them in their list and think "oh perhaps I could do better" and for those to look at those below them in the list and feel superior.

We should really start by defining what a benchmark is because there's many different ideas that people might have, but we're really looking at how companies are being evaluated by third parties. There's lots of different benchmarks out there. So we might think about, for example, credit rating or more recently, ESG ratings, but we're looking at how companies are evaluated on different aspects of their social, environmental performance or disclosure. There are two really interesting findings from the study on benchmarking. So if we start from inside the benchmark, what we uncovered inside that black box, which people rarely get to see, is just how messy it is. So the benchmark developer changed the weights, changed some of the items which you'd expect, because it was a practice-based piece of work where they're wanting to change what they're looking at year on year. The second thing, which is the external-facing work, is really exciting because what we managed to uncover is that people who were benchmarked changed what they did. They increased the amount of reporting. They made their reporting become more like the benchmark than it was before, but really interestingly, only some of them. So those who were interested in knowing what their peers did, those who already were quite transparent got much better. If you didn't care you didn't get better.

In this project on benchmarks and sustainability, we look at the inner workings of benchmarks to understand a little bit more as to how they work and what are some of the effects that they have. Not only does research show that they have an effect in terms of the audience, they actually impact how different stakeholders make decisions. So you can think about investors, you can think about consumers, but also at the same time companies react to them. So they have an effect on companies that are being benchmarked and so it becomes increasingly important for us to understand how they work and what they do. This work has impact in two distinctive areas. The first one helps us understand why reporting might lead to behaviour change within firms because we assume that is a case and there's lots of demands on companies to provide information about what they're doing, but if in providing that information nothing happens, then it's a bit of a pointless exercise. So, what we are able to ascertain from this work is something about those internal changes alongside the reporting changes.

The second thing which was an unexpected finding for us is that the whole benchmarking exercise ended up being an exercise in companies learning how to be responsible, how to articulate what they doing and how to provide information. Sometimes reporting isn't about external audiences. It's about companies learning how to be better at what they do as well. When we think about what type of impact this work might have it's important to know that this is a historical benchmark that no longer exists, but at the same time we're trying to see what types of lessons do existing benchmarks and future benchmarks want to take forward if they want to be successful in changing corporate behaviour and making companies more sustainable.