Professor Gregory Jackson

Gregory does research on corporate governance, corporate responsibility, and employment relations from the comparative institutional perspective. Among his many published articles, his 2008 article (with Richard Deeg) was awarded the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) Decade Award. He has obtained large several grants and research fellowships from the German Science Foundation, the Einstein Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the EU FP7 and Horizon 2020 programmes.

Gregory approaches teaching by emphasizing critical thinking and application of theoretical concepts to understand contemporary business and management phenomenon. His courses focus on comparative management, human resource mangement, employment relations, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, and business ethics.

Gregory graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992 with a BA in Sociology and German Literature. He was awarded his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University in 2002.

Gregory has held positions at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany and the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) in Tokyo, Japan. From 2004-2008, he was Senior Lecturer and later Reader in Comparative Management at King’s College London, where he also served as Director for MSc in International Management. From 2008-2010, he served as Professor of Business and Society at the University of Bath. Since 2010, Gregory is Professor of Human Resource Management and Labor Politics at the Free University Berlin.

In addition, Gregory has held a number of visiting appointments at EHESS in Paris, the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University in Tokyo, the Social Science Center Berlin (WZB), and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Research expertise

• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Employment Relations, Human Resource Management
• Comparative Management, International Management
• Germany, Japan, USA

Gregory’s research looks at the institutional factors shaping the corporation in an internationally comparative perspective. This work falls largely within three major themes.

A first theme concerns corporate governance and its impact on inequality. Together with Katsuyuki Kubo at Waseda University, his current project investigates the impact of ownership and corporate boards on the distribution of value-added between shareholders and employees.

A second theme concerns corporate responsibility and irresponsibility. Together with Julia Bartosch at Free University Berlin, a series of papers explore the institutional determinants of CSR practices among large corporations in OECD countries, and whether such adoption influences the nature of corporate scandals and wrongdoing. As part of the Berlin University Alliance project "Laws of Social Cohesion," a current project also explores the impact of non-financial disclosure requirements on CSR and irresponsible business practices with a focus on issues of gender diversity, executive compensation, and the environment.

A third theme concerns the development of comparative institutional theory and understanding the politics of institutional change. Several projects appliy fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) to better analyze the configurational nature of institutional interdependencies. Other projects focus on the continuity and change of politics and political discourse related to neo-liberalism or the business case for social responsibility (with Nora Lohmeyer at Radboud University, Netherlands).

Gregory is currently supervising:

• Kyong Yong Francis Yoon: Skills and the Changing Labor Market of South Korea.
• Philipp A. Thompson: The Financialization of Nonfinancial Firms.
• Lisa Basten: Project Work in Germany. Creative Futures or Highly Qualified Precariat?

(Completed since 2010)

• Johann Fortwengel (2011-2014). Practice Transfer across Institutional Distance: Deal with Path Dependence During the Transfer of Apprenticeship Training from Germany to the U.S.
• Dennis Klink (2010-2015). The Effectiveness of CSR Standards in Global Supply Chains: Institutional Limits to Business Self-Regulation in the Banana Industry.
• Tim Müllenborn (2010-2015). Der Einfluss von Arbeitnehmern im Aufsichtsrat auf die Vorstandsvergütung: Eine institutionelle Perspektive.
• Nikolas Rathert (2011-2015). Why and How Firms Address Stakeholder Issues: Institutional and Organizational Determinants of Corporate Social Responsibility Adoption.
• Nora Lohmeyer (2012-2016). Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion des‚ Business Case for CSR. Zur Entwicklung und Stabilisierung instrumenteller Motive im deutschen Diskurs unternehmerischer Verantwortung.
• Julia Bartosch (2014-2018). Essays on the Governance of Corporate Responsibility and Irresponsibility.
• Angela Leggett (2014-2019). Corporate Monitoring by Chinese environmental NGOs and Firm Responses: Exploring Convergent and Divergent Behaviors in Emerging Institutional Terrain – A Comparative Case Study of Three Industry Fields.
• Giulia Zennaro (2014-2019). The Emergence of Private Art Museums in China: Legitimizing a New Organizational Form in the Shanghai West Bund Cultural Corridor.
• Henni Appell (2010-2020). Persistence or Change? Tracing the Path of Trade Union Europeanization.
• Tobias Theel (2018-2020). Organizing Creative Collaborations in the Popular Music Industry.
• Lukas Vogelgsang (2018-2020). Organizing Emergence: Essays on the Governance of Collaborative Creative Processes in Pharmaceutical Development.
• Ran Cheng (2014-2021). Bringing the Firm Back to the Minimum Wage Study: Wage Effect of Minimum Wage in China from an Institutional and Organizational Perspective.

Gregory has been active as Chief Editor of the Socio-Economic Review. The 2020 SSCI ranked the journal as 6th of 150 journals in Sociology, 11th of 180 journals in Political Science, and 35th of 371 journals in Economics, putting SER within the top 4-10% of journals in these disciplines.