Elizabeth B Howard

Elizabeth B Howard is an Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.

A geographer, after professional posts in town planning, I began research work on retailing at the University of Newcastle and came to Oxford in 1986, as a founder member of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management being set up at Templeton College. The college had just changed its name from the Oxford Centre for Management Studies and was developing several research institutes. It was an exciting time to be involved in retail research: we were involved in the first experiments in what we now call internet retailing, in examining the social and environmental impact of the huge locational changes in stores and shopping centres, the development of international markets and much more.

The Institute, under director Ross Davies, and particularly with the work of Jonathan Reynolds (now Deputy Dean of the Saïd Business School) did a great deal of work on the impact of communications technology on marketing and retailing – including what we now call internet retailing. One of my earliest publications concerned worldwide developments in the latter (before the internet of course) and showed how European developments were potentially greater than elsewhere. Well, change was slower than I thought it would be in the 1980s, but look where it is now [in 2023].

My work then focused on public policies and the impact of out of town retail development. There was great concern about what was happening to urban structures. In this country and then internationally we were seeing a great surge in physical store and mall development. Some of my work revealed the inequalities exacerbated by the locational shifts which were happening: less advantaged groups faced reduced access to better facilities. One related initiative I particularly remember was the creation of the Oxford Retail Group which brought together property and retail companies to promote public discussion of retail planning issues – and to inform government policy. Like so much Templeton work, we were always trying to bridge academia and practice. Something I especially enjoyed was helping establish and then running the Oxford Retail Asia Pacific Conferences – in China, Japan, Thailand and Malaysia – encouraging academic work in those countries on the social and economic issues.

Templeton was of course the home of executive education, until the development of the Saïd Business School and the transfer of executive education there and then the merger of Templeton and Green colleges. I became more and more interested in it in two ways. First, it was part of that bridging of the academic and practitioner worlds, to get our research ‘out there’, to help in the development of managers, and to develop collaborative projects. Secondly, I became very interested in the areas of experiential learning and of the differences between academic and practitioner research. At Templeton there were many exciting projects with managers from all sorts of companies working on issues of concern to them where faculty tutored and coached the participants. Somewhere along the way as the MBA degree began, I also set up the project learning element of that course.

I directed or tutored on many different executive education courses. One of the most rewarding was ‘Consulting and Coaching for Change’. I helped in its design and was the first director as we started it in 2003 in partnership with HEC, the French Grande Ecole. The programme is still running, now with the name Executive MSc in Change Leadership. The generally very senior participants on this programme come together from around the world for deep consideration of the human dimensions of change in organizations, what social science has to offer and the often-significant personal challenges involved in their work. Graduates of this programme have formed a network for continued learning and exchange and allow me to be a member. They are meeting in September 2023 again for an intensive few days of work together and I am looking forward to a dinner in GTC with some of them.

Elizabeth’s publications include The Changing Face of Retailing in the Asia Pacific, European Retailers’ Approaches to Asian Markets, Business and the Natural Environment (editor, with P Bansal), Shopping Centre Management: Conflict or Collaboration, Evaluating the Success of Regional Out-of-Town Shopping Centres and a series of contributions to OXIRM’s publications such as Retailing in Emerging Markets, Retail Strategy: the View from the Bridge, and its study for the UK government of Retail Productivity.

Contact: elizabeth.howard@gtc.ox.ac.uk