Fiona Wilson is an assistant professor of strategy, social entrepreneurship, and sustainability at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics.

What role do companies play in advancing sustainability?
The social and environmental problems facing our world are increasing, not decreasing. It is becoming rapidly apparent to many that government and non-profits will not, alone, be able to help address these issues, and that we need fundamentally different approaches.

The business world has tremendous power and influence: for example, business corporations make up 52 of the world’s 100 largest “economies”; just one company alone, Walmart, has annual sales that are greater than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 85 percent of the world’s countries...

The Department of Hospitality Management will host the “Dash” Gourmet Dinner Friday, March 22, and Saturday, March 23, which will feature an evening of fine cuisine showcasing culinary seasonings inspired by a diverse array of aromatic herbs and spices.  

Hosted by Advanced Food and Beverage class students at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics, the Dash will be held at the Stillings Dining Hall, 20 Ballard Drive. The evening begins at 5 p.m. with a cocktail hour, followed by dinner at 6 p.m. 

Students have six weeks to plan, prepare, and execute the six-course dinner. Throughout the process, students are responsible for every aspect of the dinner and take on real-world management roles.   

Tickets for Dash are $60 per person and may be purchased online at http://paulcollege.unh.edu/gourmet-dinner-tickets...

A research center dedicated to ending violence against women is building on its successes.

 Nine faculty and staff members are gathered around a conference table in Huddleston Hall. Each has carved out a space amidst the papers, bagels, laptops, bananas, and coffee for a four-hour retreat. Today’s goal? To plan the future of their research center, Prevention Innovations. The tenor of the room is hopeful, excited. The future is filled with possibility. That’s partly because the past has been such an unmitigated success for this collection of scholars.

Established at UNH in the fall of 2006, Prevention Innovations has, in its relatively short life, established its faculty as national leaders in research and practices for ending violence against women. Though the center has a half-dozen projects going at any one time, one of its most widely...

On Monday, Feb. 18, weekday bus service between Rochester and UNH began with the Wildcat Transit’s new Route 125/Rochester Express. Seven runs will be offered daily, Monday through Friday.  The ride between Rochester and UNH takes about 35 minutes. The one-way fare is $1.50; passengers with valid UNH student or employee IDs ride free.  

A celebration of the Route 125/Rochester Express’s inaugural run was held Monday when the bus arrived at the bus shelter on Main Street near Thompson Hall.

In her office in Kingsbury Hall, Erin Bell is explaining her research. “When you go to a doctor, they don’t just look at you. They do blood work; they run tests. Bridge instrumentation and testing is almost like an EKG of a bridge. You gather data, and looking at that data you can tell if something needs to be done prior to a collapse.” 

Bell delivers this explanation with infectious enthusiasm. An associate professor in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences (CEPS), Bell was chosen in 2007 as only the second-ever UNH civil engineering faculty member to receive a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award. Since then, she’s been hard at work on her project, “Integrating Structural Health Monitoring, Intelligent Transportation Systems and Model Updating Into a Bridge Condition Assessment...

U.S. lodging executives were more optimistic about general business conditions in January than the prior month, according to the UNH Lodging Executives Sentiment Index (LESI) for the current month ending January 2013. The index increased from 53.8 in December 2012 to 61.7 in January 2013.  

“This increase results from lodging executives’ positive opinions of the present general business conditions for their properties, as well as their positive sentiment for how they view general business conditions 12 months in the future. Expectations about room reservations during the same 12-month period also moved upward,” said Nelson Barber, associate professor of hospitality management, who manages the index. 

Twenty-seven percent of lodging executives indicated current business conditions were good, an improvement from 15 percent last period, while 67 percent indicated conditions were normal, down from 69 percent during the same period. Seven percent of the...

Abusive bosses who target employees with ridicule, public criticism, and the silent treatment not only have a detrimental effect on the employees they bully, but they negatively impact the work environment for the co-workers of those employees who suffer from “second-hand” or vicarious abusive supervision, according to new research from UNH. 

In the first ever study to investigate vicarious supervisory abuse, Paul Harvey, associate professor of organizational behavior at UNH, and his research colleagues Kenneth Harris and Raina Harris from Indiana University Southeast and Melissa Cast from New Mexico State University find that vicarious supervisory abuse is associated with job frustration, abuse of other coworkers, and a lack of perceived organizational support beyond the effects of the abusive supervisor. 

The research is presented in the Journal of Social Psychology in the article “An Investigation of Abusive Supervision, Vicarious Abuse Supervision, and...