2 April 2026 · Research
A snapshot of the field
Every year DCUK's Head of Research meets supervisors across our twelve themes to map the most productive questions still open in business and management scholarship. This year, seven areas stood out for the combination of theoretical gap, methodological opportunity, and real-world urgency.
1. Platform governance and power asymmetries
Platforms have rewritten markets, but management theory is still catching up. How do organisations negotiate with platforms they depend on? What does strategic autonomy look like when infrastructure is rented?
2. Organisational wellbeing at scale
Wellbeing research has moved beyond individual resilience. The frontier is systemic — how structures, workloads, and leadership practices produce wellbeing (or don't) across entire organisations.
3. Circular-economy business models
Moving from linear to circular value creation requires new operational logic, new accounting frames, and new stakeholder relationships. Empirical case work here is still thin.
4. Human–AI teaming
Not AI replacing humans, not humans using AI — the research question is how mixed teams make decisions, allocate authority, and build shared situational awareness.
5. Meaningful work in precarious conditions
Gig, contract, and portfolio work are here to stay. What does "good work" look like outside traditional employment? How do organisations create meaning with people they don't employ?
6. Decolonising the curriculum and the research method
Management scholarship increasingly questions whose knowledge counts. Doctoral researchers are producing rich work on research methods, reading lists, and the politics of citation.
7. Supply chain resilience as strategy
Post-pandemic, supply chain is a CEO-level concern. The theoretical question is how firms balance efficiency, resilience, and sustainability when those values pull in different directions.
How DCUK supports these questions
Each of these areas maps onto one or more of our twelve research themes. If your practice or curiosity sits at one of these intersections, our supervisors are actively looking for researchers to explore them — and the proposal conversation is a good place to start.