Bob Doherty

Professor of Marketing and Chair of Agrifood, University of York
Bob Doherty is Professor of Marketing at The York Management School, University of York and principal investigator on a large 4-year interdisciplinary research programme (£3.4m) on food resilience titled ‘IKnowFood’, funded by the Global Food Security Fund www.foodsecurity.ac.uk. In addition, he holds a number of institutional wide research positions including the University of York lead for the N8 AgriFood https://www.york.ac.uk/research/in-focus/agrifood/ and research theme leader for sustainable food in the York Environmental Sustainability Research Institute (YESI) https://www.york.ac.uk/yesi/about-us/leadership/. Furthermore, he is a member of both the university nominations and the Office for Fair Access committees.

Bob received his PhD titled ‘Resource Advantage Theory in Fair Trade Social Enterprises’ from Liverpool John Moores University. Bob spent six and a half years at Liverpool Business School (Liverpool John Moores University) as Senior Lecturer in Social Enterprise and Corporate Responsibility, where he led the Social Enterprise Research Group and associated postgraduate programmes. From 2010-2012 Bob was Head of the Business School at Liverpool Hope University. More recently Bob was Deputy Dean at the York Management School (2013-2015), then Acting Dean (2015-2016).

Bob specialises in research on hybrid organisations namely the marketing and management aspects of fair trade organisations and social enterprises. Recently his research interests have developed to look at resilience in food systems. Bob is a member of the organising committees for both the International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC) and the International Fair trade Symposium (FTIS) and has chaired and hosted both these conferences in recent times. For the past 8- years he has been editor of the Emerald publishers Social Enterprise Journal and is also editorial board member of the Corporate Responsibility and Environmental management Journal (Wiley Publishers). Bob is also a regular reviewer for the Journal of Business Ethics, International Journal of Management Reviews and Organization Studies. Prior to moving into academia Bob spent nearly five years as Head of Sales and Marketing at the Fairtrade social enterprise, Divine Chocolate Ltd.

Bob has also provided evidence for a House of Commons International Development Select Committee for Fairtrade and Development. In recent years Bob has been able to secure research grant income from an exciting range of stakeholders including; government departments such as Department for International Development, British Academy, the European Social Fund, third sector sources such as Comic Relief African Grants Committee, the Fairtrade Foundation and Royal Society of Arts and a number of private sector sources such as RBS/NatWest.