Professor Michael Roy
Professor of Economic Sociology and Social Policy
Department of Management and HRM
Michael Roy PhD MSc BSc (Hons) FHEA is Professor of Economic Sociology and Social Policy and leads the Social Economy Research Group. He has a joint faculty appointment between the Department of Management and the Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health.
His primary area of research concerns social enterprise and other ‘alternative’ economic forms. He has written extensively in major international journals on the health and wellbeing impacts of social enterprises; on policy ‘ecosystems’ supporting the social economy; and on innovative funding mechanisms such as Social Impact Bonds. He was awarded the Helen Potter Award of Special Recognition 2017, for the most original article in Review of Social Economy by the Association for Social Economics, which was founded in 1941 in the United States. In 2022 Professor Roy was elected as Chair of the Development Trust Association Scotland.
Professor Roy has been Principal Investigator on several prominent research projects including Innovation and Creativity in the Third Sector in response to COVID-19: A Rapid Realist Evidence Synthesis funded by the Scottish Government’s Office of the Chief Social Science Advisor (2022); Solidarity in a time of crisis: the role of mutual aid to the COVID-19 pandemic funded by the Scottish Government’s Chief Scientist Office (2020); and is presently a Co-Investigator on our major CommonHealth Assets project (2021 - onwards); and a project funded by the Australian Research council entitled Making Policy Reform Work – A Comparative Analysis of Social Procurement (2020-2022).
He is presently Editor-in-Chief of Social Enterprise Journal; Associate Editor of Journal of Social Entrepreneurship; serves on the Editorial Board of The Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research / Revue Canadienne de recherche sur les OSBL et l’économie sociale (ANSERJ, 2017-date); and previously served (until 2020) on the Editorial Board of Voluntas: the International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations.
Previously Professor Roy was Programme Leader for the MSc Social Business and Microfinance programme, and Module Leader for several modules, including Social Business and the Social Economy. In recent years he has been teaching Research Methods on the MSc Social Innovation programme, as well as teaching onto several modules on that programme, and regularly supervising Masters’ dissertations. He holds Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.
He is currently supervising several PhD projects: for Anna Spiesova (2021 onwards) for a project jointly funded with Glasgow City Council entitled Building a ‘Wellbeing Economy’: developing a capability-based approach to capturing the complexity of social justice on a healthy planet; for Michelle Gabriel (2020 - onwards) for her project provisionally entitled Frameworks for a Shared Future: A Multi-stakeholder Investigation into Social
Innovation for a Post-COVID America (Director of Studies); for Maeve Curtin (2019 – onwards) for a project funded by the Scottish Government entitled A history of co-production and co-operation? Looking back to the future of social enterprise in Scotland (Director of Studies); for Laurent Marti (2018 – onwards) for a project entitled Entrepreneurship in the digital creative industries: A relational process perspective (Director of Studies); and for Michael Kennedy (2017 – onwards) for his project Social Enterprise in Nova Scotia: Measuring Ecosystem Impacts and Implications of the Emergence of a Social Business Policy Framework (Director of Studies).
Professor Roy has supervised several students to successful completion including: Jack Rendall (completed 2020) for a project entitled Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) and Good Work: What matters? And to whom?; Noorseha Ayob (completed 2018) An investigation of Social Innovation in Malaysia where he was 2nd supervisor; and Francesca Calò (completed 2017) on The Contribution of Social Enterprise to Local Health and Social Care Systems, on which he acted as Director of Studies.
Development Trust Association Scotland: https://dtascot.org.uk/
Common Health Assets Programme: https://www.commonhealthassets.uk/