Welcome

The Centre for International Research in Consumers, Locations and Environments is a cross-faculty, pan University research centre initially created at Leeds Metropolitan University.

CIRCLE was created in 2003 as a virtual group of researchers within Hospitality & Retailing subject group, Leeds Business School and Innovation North. Today it is based across 80 universities in the world.

It hosts an annual conference at differing venues throughout Europe amongst its 80 partner institutions and contains 24 higher degree students from throughout Europe with 11 completions of PhD / MPhil in the period 2005/10.

CIRCLE is under the direction of Prof Claudio Vignali who is the President Emeritus. Each year a president is elected from the scientific committee to develop the conference details.

CIRCLE disseminates research results to both practitioner and academic audiences, is the home for the International Journal of Management Cases and provides staff experts who speak on retail and consumer issues to both business and consumer media.

Overall Aims

To bring together and provide a forum for practicing managers, academics and researchers throughout all university faculties together with a network of external partnerships.

Objectives

To cross university boundaries and lever the resulting synergies of its knowledge base

Expand the PhD student base utilizing support of visiting fellows and build supervisory capacity.

The development of higher degree programmes and their delivery.

Explore skills gaps and implement master class programmes.

Development of a research focus around CIRCLE topics.