Expertise

Corporate social responsibility.
International business.
Emerging markets.

Overview

Dana Brown received her PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in June 2005. She received an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

She has lived for extended periods in Russia and Poland, and has travelled in many of the formerly Communist countries. In the time between her MPhil and PhD, she worked as a manager at Amazon.com and later as a director of the Trenton Academic Center at Rutgers University, which facilitates joint government-academic research initiatives.

Research interests

Dana Brown’s research interests focus on the way that national employment and social policies affect business strategies, particularly in developing and former communist countries.

Her doctoral dissertation examines the reasons why post-Communist governments in Central Eastern Europe implemented an array of employment and social policies in spite of assumptions that only one strategy – liberalisation and retrenchment of state social policies - would inspire needed investment and growth. Further work in this area will look at the way that these differences in social policies have affected business strategies across countries.

In related work, Brown is researching how buyers and leading brands in the clothing and apparel industry can respond to pressure to achieve higher labour standards among their suppliers. Her research focuses on the problems with ‘voluntary’ and ‘go it alone’ initiatives in this area and argues that businesses can achieve more by investing in countries where governments capably support labour standard improvements.