Dr Jenny Fairbrass - Staff Profile

Jenny holds a BA (Hons) in political theory and government and Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching (PGCE) from the University of Wales, and an MA in politics and government from London Metropolitan University. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Essex, is entitled Business Interests: Strategic Engagement with the European Union Policy Process.

Jenny has extensive commercial and industrial experience, having spent three years training with a London-based firm of chartered accountants, Grant Thornton. She was part of a team responsible for auditing a range of organisations in the private and voluntary sectors, ranging from small and medium-size firms (SMEs) to larger national and international firms such as Camden Graphics, Curries Motors, the Pearson Group and European Ferries.

Before joining Bradford's School of Management, Jenny was a senior researcher at the internationally recognised and ESRC-core-funded Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, at the University of East Anglia, where she remains an honorary research fellow.

Jenny has been a reviewer for peer-assessed journals such as Global Environmental Politics and Political Studies. She has also been a peer-reviewer for Economic and Social Research Council research projects and has served on UK Government advisory groups.

She has a good standard of French and some basic knowledge of Spanish.

During a substantial teaching/lecturing career, Jenny has taught a wide variety of courses ranging from the academic to the vocational and professional. Most recently she tutored for the Open University, teaching and examining a masters module in research methodology and epistemology/ontology, and taught undergraduate and postgraduate students, including PhD candidates, at the UEA.

Previously, Jenny taught and examined a range of business and management modules, including corporate strategy, European business environment, European policy, and research methods. She was programme manager for the BA in business studies at Croydon Business School/Sussex University.

Jenny is a member of University Association for Contemporary European Studies, the European Union Studies Association and the Federal Trust.

Jenny's current research interests focus on sustainable development policy and the relationships between government, quasi-governmental (e.g. the Regional Development Agencies in the English regions) and non-governmental actors (e.g. firms and environmental groups) in the policy-making process in the UK and the EU. She is also working on the issues surrounding the concept of corporate social responsibility.

Jenny's doctoral research, which began in 1993, was a comparative study of UK and French-based firms in the telecommunications, insurance and energy sectors and their relations with trade associations and policy makers at the national and EU levels of governance. A combination of strategic management decision making tools and political science theory was employed in order to examine the interest representation activities of the firms and trade associations.

Jenny has been involved in two major ESRC-core-funded research projects while working at CSERGE at the UEA. The first (1991-2001) examined the Europeanisation of UK environmental policy. The most recent (2001-2004) concerns the impact of UK devolution on environmental and sustainable development governance.