Audio/Video - recorded presentations

The Business School maintains a library of guest lectures and research seminars held at the School.

Items are ordered by subject:

• Business Management
• Economics and Finance

Alternatively, you can search the library by keyword via our online Broadcast database.

Business Management

Phil Jones, President and Chief Operating Officer of CE Electric UK, shares his personal reflections on how multi-nationals operate and how they grow. Watch the video>>

Global thought-leader on effective business operation John Blackwell of JBA, offers an insight into creating an improved working environment and reducing costs in the process. Recorded 22 October 2009 at Durham University Business School Corporate Forum. Watch video>>

Dinah Bennett (formerly DUBS, now Director of ICE - International Consultants for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise) joins Wayne Turmel from Management Issues to discuss "the new normal" - what the business environment might look like when we finally emerge from the recession. (7 Apr 09) Listen now.

Colin Ashurst (formerly DUBS, now Newcastle Business School): Customer Relationship Management for the smaller business and Grassroots CRM

Phil Case (PricewaterhouseCoopers): Corporate Social Responsibility (29 May 2008)
The sustainability agenda; growth of a “stakeholder world”; Key sustainability issues; business case for action on sustainability; Corporate responses; Customer responses (results of a recent PwC retail survey)

Thomas Power (Ecademy): Social networking for more business (19 April 2008)
Presentation to the Agora Big Weekend 2008.

Brendan Hyland: Matching business models to the global international market (18 April 2008)
Brendan is an entrepreneur and business angel who assists and invests in early stage technology companies with global ambitions. After completing an MBA at the Durham University Business School, in 1998 Brendan founded Kymata, an optoelectronics company, raised £100m in funding and assimilated an international shareholder base that included Kleiner Perkins, IBM, BT, JP Morgan and Royal Bank of Scotland. He established operations in Scotland, the Netherlands, the US and Canada before the business was sold to Alcatel in 2001. Brendan presently works with high technology companies in Europe and North America. He is Chairman and CEO of WFS Ltd, the world leader in underwater RF communications and sensing products, Chairman of the Scottish Optoelectronics Association and a member of the Scottish Funding Council’s Technology Transfer advisory board.

Dave Snowden (Competitive Edge): Understanding and influencing networks (19 April 2008)
Networks emerge as a result of multiple interactions over time, their growth and nature can be influenced but cannot be designed. Technology both increases, and decreases the nature of human interactions, it needs to be understood as a capability among other capabilities. What are the principles behind networks? Can they be known and utilised to create new business opportunities? How can we increase our ability to spot opportunities and threats before our competitors? How do we engage employees and customers in new forms of market research appropriate for a networked age?

Graham Dietz (Durham University Business School): The psychology contract, work-place trust and the link between HRM and organisational performance (March 2008)

Dinah Bennett from the University's Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning talks about Social Capital and the importance of social relationships to today's entrepreneurs (audio only) (March 2008).

Mark Fitzmaurice (Dale Carnegie): High Impact Leadership Through Communication (24 January 2008)
Mark Fitzmaurice, an experienced trainer and a Director of Dale Carnegie in the UK, presents an interactive seminar session, exploring the ways in which effective communication can bring about improved leadership through changes in attitude and behaviour.

James Cherkoff: Is Traditional Marketing Dead (22 November 2007)
With blogs, social networks and other networked media exploding, are the days of traditional command-and-control marketing over? If so, what techniques will take their place and what insights do we have into them today? James looks at the different approaches that are emerging in the marketplace including open source marketing and co-creation.

Geoff Moore, Professor of Business Ethics, recently joined Wayne Turmel on The Working Week podcast for a wide-ranging discussion about business sustainability, social responsibility and the role business schools are playing in these issues. (20 November 2007)

Professor Dan Zakay (Tel Aviv University): The Psychology Of Waiting: A Time Perception Perspective (3 October 2007)
Waiting is a common behaviour which affects consumers’ behaviour while shopping or waiting for receiving a service. In our western “Temponomics” society, people usually have negative attitudes towards waiting. Many factors have an impact on waiting behaviour, including motivational, social and cognitive ones. This presentation focuses on the cognitive process of time perception and on the ways it affects waiting behaviour under both real and virtual waiting conditions. A notion of “time-engineering”, which is a procedure for moderating negative outcomes of waiting, is presented, and its potential utilization in the context of marketing is demonstrated.

Dr Neil Conway (Birkbeck University, London): The Diary Study Method and its Application to Researching Psychological Contracts (14 August 2007)
The presentation is in two parts. First, a brief overview of the diary method. Second, an application of this method to psychological contracts. The psychological contract has been viewed as an explanatory framework for understanding the employment relationship and is regarded by certain researchers as key to understanding employee attitudes and behaviour. Neil presents a new approach to researching psychological contracts, through the use of daily diaries, and addresses a number of fundamental research questions regarding the nature of the psychological contract. Results show that transgressions of psychological contracts, both positive and negative, happen regularly in the workplace, can occur in relation to virtually any aspect of work, that the line manager is seen as the organization’s principle agent of the psychological contract, and that the psychological contract is an important concept in understanding everyday fluctuations in daily mood.

Dr Markus Reihlen (University of Cologne): Professional Service Firms, Knowledge-Based Competition, and the Heterarchical Organization Form (25 June 2007)
The rise of knowledge-based competition, notably in professional service industries, has caused a crisis of the modern organization. Professional service organizations (e.g., advertising agencies, software development firms, consulting or R&D firms) operate in competitive environments driven by an imperative of flexibility and learning. Yet traditional organizational forms, typified by hierarchy and bureaucratic structure, have been identified as a major barrier of continuous innovation and strategic adaptation. This research suggests that an alternative organizational form, heterarchy, may be useful to better understand and organize firms, networks, or communities as non-hierarchical and self-organizing systems.

Professor Tammy Allen (University of South Florida): Finding a Balance: Workplace Practices, Work-Family Conflict, and Employee Health (22 June 2007)
Sweeping changes in the composition of families and the workforce such as more dual-career couples and working mothers with young children, along with a 24/7 global workforce, have increased the necessity of examining links between work roles and family roles. Accordingly, work-family conflict and its outcomes have been a topic of considerable research interest during the past several decades. This paper discusses a program of research that includes studies regarding employee health outcomes associated with work-family conflict, couple crossover effects (the transmission of stress and strain from one partner to the other), and workplace practices such as flexibility that are purported to aid employees in balancing their work and family lives.

Economics and Finance

Glenn Harrison (Univeristy of Central Florica): Behavioural Econometrics (27 May 2008)
We make the case that psychologists should make wider use of structural econometric methods. These methods involve the development of maximum likelihood estimates of models, where the likelihood function is tailored to the structural model. In recent years these models have been developed for a wide range of behavioural models of choice under uncertainty. We explain the components of this methodology, and illustrate with applications to major models from psychology. The goal is to build, and traverse, a constructive bridge between the modelling insights of psychology and the statistical tools of economists.

Didier Sornette: Endogenous versus Exogenous Origins of Crises (12 October 2007)
Analysis of precursory and aftershock properties of shocks and ruptures in finance, material rupture, earthquakes, amazon.com sales, etc: we find ubiquitous power laws similar to the Omori law in seismology that allow us to distinguish between external shocks and endogenous self-organization.

Didier Sornette is one of the leading experts (if not the expert) on extreme phenomena in finance. His book Why Stock Markets Crash is one of the reference books on the subject. He is a Geophysicist and his publications cover extreme events topics in seismology, innovation and finance.

Paul Ormerod: Cascades of failure and extinction in evolving complex systems (12 October 2007)
Systems in a wide range of disciplines – e.g. economics, biology, engineering – increase their fitness as they become more connected.  But we also observe an increase in the frequency of extreme events, shocks which percolate on a near-global scale.  This paper set out a simple general theoretical model which explains these two phenomena.

Paul Ormerod is a leading economist in the application of complexity theory. He is the author of several bestsellers, including The Death of Economics, Butterfly Economics and the recent Why Most Things Fail that have popularised complexity theory in economics.

Three presentations at a Financial Modelling conference held in July 2007 are available to view online:

• Professor Peter Phillips, Financial exuberance and mildly explosive processes
  
• Professor Richard Baillie, Semi parametric estimation of long memory: the Holy Grail or a poisoned chalice?
• Professor Karim Abadir, Macro and financial markets: the memory of an elephant? 
• Professor Yacine Aït-Sahalia, Testing for jumps in a discretely observed process

Gilles Chemla (Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London): Taxes and Corporate Dynamics: The Product Market Effect (19 May 2007)
This paper examines corporate investment decisions by firms facing a perfectly competitive product market in the presence of corporate and personal taxes and an equity underwriting cost. We develop a simple recursive, stationary, and competitive model of optimal investment with risk-neutral shareholders. We show that corporate investment decisions are based on a valuation rule that discounts expected cash flows according to their covariance with the return on the portfolio of all projects adopted by firms in the same product market. That is, an “industry contrarian" effect favours projects with cash flows that are negatively correlated with the return on rivals' investments. Perfect product market competition partially completes a set of incomplete financial markets. We examine implications for traditional capital budgeting criteria, such as the weighted average cost of capital and adjusted present value methods, and hedging.

Four presentations given at the Social Codes & Ecologies Symposium in November 2007 are available:

• Professor Christophe Boone (University of Antwerp): The rise and fall of modernistic music in the interbellum in Belgium
• Dr Giacomo Negro (Durham University): Sophomore slump: an analysis of evaluation decline in the market for recorded music
• Dr Kocak Osgecan (Sabanci University): Enthusiastic about enthusiasts
• Dr Grea Hsu (UC Davis): Hybrids in Hollywood: a study of genre mixing in the US film industry

View Economics and Finance-related videos

View Business Management-related videos