As nations in the developed world strive to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to counteract the effects of climate change, transitioning from more carbon intensive cities to greener modes of housing and transportation will become paramount challenges for governments throughout the 21st century. The United States, who produces about 11 percent of CO2 while accounting for just two percent of the world’s population, presents a particular challenge. Infrastructure costs in the United States are astronomically higher than in comparable developed nations in Europe or Asia. Further, housing construction—especially dense urban housing and its accompanying low carbon profile—is nearly impossible to build in almost all major American metro areas due to restrictive land use policies, an abundance of veto points exploited by engage local interest groups and America’s strong federalist institutions that give deference to local governments when deciding land use policy. This project seeks to understand how interest groups in the United States capture local housing and land use policymaking and why a similar phenomenon hasn’t evolved in many European Union nations. Studying local interest groups in a comparative setting will better illuminate how weaknesses in political institutions engender this behavior and lead to differing outcomes between the two regions. Identifying these institutional deficiencies will also aid reforms in the United States crucial for modernizing that democracy and aiding the global fight against climate change. This project will also deepen understanding of how interest groups form and evolve, what motivates the transition from individual financial motivation to the formation of an interest group and how these groups capture local political institutions.

In this project I explore the effect of diversity-related societal events on workplace cooperation. Throughout the recent decade a number of large-scale cultural and political events have continued to draw attention to threats like racism, sexism, and discrimination. Prominent examples of such events are the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, or Islamic terrorism in Europe. Despite the prominence of these events in public discourse, we don’t know the consequences of this mega-threats for the cooperation and interaction between co-workers in organizations. In this project, I deploy a novel interdisciplinary approach, in which I combine insights from the emerging “macro” literature in sociology and management and their effect on organizations and the large existing “micro” literature in psychology on diverse work teams and behavioral strategy in order to develop and test novel hypotheses about how diversity related large-scale events that occur in organizations´ larger social context affect the cooperation in diverse teams and the decision-making in organizations. I will focus on four related research questions: 1) How did the #BlackLivesMatter movement affect the cooperation between black and white co-workers? 2) How did the #MeToo movement affect the cooperation between male and female co-workers? 3) How did Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe affect the cooperation between Islamic and Non-Islamic co-workers? and 4)How can managers and business leaders manage issues arising from mega-threats? In order to test my prediction I will collect a novel large scale database including information on diversity related mega-threats from Twitter and media reports and combine it with data on the cooperation in organizations. The ambitious goal of this interdisciplinary project is to open a research stream which strives to develop an understanding on how macro societal events affect our micro behavior with other co-workers in organzations.

This proposal proposal intends to systematically pioneer the cross-cultural mobile user experience issues and provide valuable guidelines for designing cultural adaptability into the context-awareness of smart phones. The objectives of this proposal are to: 1) Identify the user experience problems that exists in mobile context-awareness system in Europe and China, and uncover the key factors producing the problems; 2) Examine the influence of context-awareness factors and culture difference on mobile context-aware cross-cultural applications (MOCCA); 3) Apply the findings to improving the design of mobile context-awareness systems and demonstrate specific user experiences for European and Chinese users of smart phones with cultural adaptability. In WP 1, 2 and 3, we will use a combination of qualitative methods (contextual inquiry) and quantitative methods (experiment and psychophysiological measures) to support our objective of identifying and measuring cross-cultural user experiences of the smart phone and the applications. In WP 4 we will apply a user-centered design method to ensure that our cross-cultural UX measures and design guidelines for context-awareness features in smart phones are in fact usable. The experienced researcher will improve and explore alternative approaches to measuring user experience, under supervision provided by the host university, and in close collaboration with the university providing the secondment, Chinese universities, and a European (Danish) high tech company. The research will be published in leading journals in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and disseminated in Europe and China. The host university provides intellectual and physical infrastructure specifically aimed to bring the experienced researcher to the next level of a professor position in the field of business-oriented Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on extending and bridging user experience research between Europe and China.

Business as political actor –evolving practice, emerging norms and shifting expectations for a pivotal determinant of public trust in both business and democracy (BIZPOL) BIZPOL deploys a mix of innovative, multi-disciplinary approaches to substantially advance scholarly thinking, as well as the practical policy debate on corporate political activity (CPA). CPA comprises all non-market activities by companies when they engage with governments and policy-making more broadly to advance their interests. As such, CPA is forcefully becoming central to some of the most vexing societal challenges of our times and evolving into an important area of research in a variety of fields. Business is increasingly recognised as a crucial political actor to address issue such as climate change or corruption. Yet, at the same time, there is a growing public perception in many countries that corporate interests have disproportionate influence over policy-making. This suspicion, real or not, has dramatic consequences for public trust in both democracy and markets. With BIZPOL I aim to make significant contributions to the growing body of scholarship in this area through four interrelated work streams: • what should CPA look like? An exploration of plausible normative expectations for responsible CPA drawing on normative theories of democracy; • what does CPA look like? A comparative diagnostic exercise to assess the transparency and patterns of current CPA practices in major European companies with new metrics and new data; • how is CPA “produced”? A qualitative, in-depth exploration of where and how expectations and decisions about responsible exercise of CPA are constructed and negotiated, inside companies, as well as in the broader stakeholder community; and, • where is CPA heading? A survey and desk-research supported interrogation of the future evolution of CPA and the potential of research and education to critically and constructively accompany this trajectory.