Dr Rory Padfield and Dr Alexandra Dales recorded on 30/03/23

Dr Rory Padfield is an interdisciplinary social scientist and a lecturer in Sustainability and Business. In his research he engages with the broad themes of supply chains and natural resource governance, sustainable consumption and production, and corporate sustainability across and between different scales of business and organisations. Rory is especially interested in organisational supply chains that originate or have impacts in countries in the Global South. Drawing on political ecology perspectives to pursue critical questions around ethics, social and environmental responsibility, and local-global political economy.

Rory has investigated the adoption of international sustainability standards amongst small and medium sized food manufactures in Malaysia and Indonesia, sustainability impacts of water commercialization on Malaysian utilities companies, and examined the sustainability and traceability of palm oil in a UK university supply chains.

Rory’s unique academic background – spanning Geography and Environmental Engineering – facilitates a commitment to inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to the study of the sustainability of business and organisations. His knowledge and experience of development in the Global South is grounded in six years working in Southeast Asia and extensive fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa, including ten months spent in Zambia for his doctoral research.

Dr Alexandra Dales is an economic geographer and senior lecturer at York Business School (YBS), York St John University. Her early research centred on examining food and general merchandise global production networks, national retail markets, and sourcing and supply networks in the UK and elsewhere from an economic geographical perspective.

Dr Dales’s is a Principle Investigator for an XR Stories Funded Project 'Sustainability Stories: Investigating the UK creative industry and the communication of sustainability'. The project brings together academic expertise in market economies and firms (York St John University), and sustainability (University of Leeds), and is exploring how SMEs involved in film, multimedia arts, advertising and immersive and interactive digital technologies can communicate sustainability transformations through creative storytelling in order to engage policy makers, consumers and market actors.

Alexandra specialises in qualitative research methods, in-depth secondary data collection and thematic analyses. She has been particularly successful at developing industry contacts and securing participant interviews within previous research projects in both UK and Southeast Asian contexts. As a result of her research, she has become highly skilled at interviewing diverse participants.

https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/see/staff/2693/dr-rory-padfield

https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/our-staff/staff-profiles/alexandra-dales.php

https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/research/institute-for-social-justice/research-themes/ecological-justice/sustainability-stories/

The Creating Critical Sustainability Stories - A toolkit I can’t actually find a copy online but, I have a copy. So if you would like one email me and I’ll send you it.

Check out Climate Under Pressure here: http://climateunderpressure.com/

Check out Donut economics: https://doughnuteconomics.org/

Hall and Soskice, 2001: https://scholar.harvard.edu/hall/publications/varieties-capitalism-institutional-foundations-comparative-advantage