Dr. Jane Glover from the WE-LEAD research Centre and Dr. Anne Touboulic from the University of Nottingham have been awarded a small grant by the The Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) Research and Knowledge Exchange Fund (RAKE) to explore how researchers and practitioners can work together to develop knowledge, to address how small business owners make sense of their emotional experiences when they are required to change their business practices.

Emotional responses have been found to have a major impact in enabling or obstructing change, yet this is often overlooked in practice and in small firms. The study will focus on small firms operating in the food supply chain, characterised by a dominance of change practices initiated by multinational corporations, regulators and policy in order to build more sustainable food supply chains.  Improving our understanding of emotional responses to external changes will enable a better understanding of how to deliver the transformations required to produce safe and sustainable food.  The work experiment with different forms of research methods and engagement to collect and disseminate research data in order to evaluate their effectiveness.  These methods include participatory workshops, graphic design visualisation, dramaturgy and reflective storytelling.   The project will run from June 2019 – May 2020.