About us
What we do
The Future of Higher Education Research Centre (FHERC) as a high-level research and knowledge sharing centre at Budapest Business School (BBS) is commited to discover the challenges and opportunities related to the future of higher education (HE) and deliver this knowledge to the academic community, the economic and business sector, all higher education actors, future students and to the whole society.
With this broad involvement of stakeholders in cooperation with domestic and international partners our research projects conducted with innovative methodologies may have a positive impact on the cooperations between higher education institutions (HEI) and the labor market.
We are proud of engaging our students and colleagues to explore the problems of the HE sector and to raise questions, and deliver answers and recommendations together. Our Research Centre is in line with the reorganised scientific and research activities of BBS and further fosters the university’s sustanability and enterprise friendly strategy.
The director of FHERC is Zsuzsanna Géring (PhD) and the scientific director is Gábor Király (PhD). Nicholas Chandler (PhD), researcher and professor at BBS, Sára Csillag (PhD) senior researcher, Katalin Fehér (PhD) senior research fellow, Péter Miskolczi, Márton Rakovics, Réka Tamássy and Eszter Szendrei-Pál junior researchers are the support staff of the research centre. Our team is working on exploring the future of HE, its challenges and opportunities. Researchers, professors and students are also involved in our work.
Our team
Zsuzsanna Géring, PhD – director
Zsuzsanna Géring is an economist-sociologist, senior research fellow at the Budapest Business School. She gained her received her Master’s degree in 2002, and her PhD in 2015. Her PhD dissertation is on discursive strategies that Hungarian companies use to define and justify their social role and responsibility. Her main research relates to CSR, organizational communication, the future of business higher education and roles and responsibilities of higher education institutions and ethical codes of conduct of leading international business schools. She was leading the Higher Education Research Group at BBS between 2015 and 2017. She is an expert in mixed methods research designs with a special interest in textual analysis such as content and discourse analysis. She is a board member of ISA RC07 Futures Research Committee.
Top 3 publications:
- Király Gábor, Géring Zsuzsanna (2020). Having Nothing But Questions?: The Social Discourse on Higher Education Institutions’ Legitimation. JOURNAL OF FUTURE STUDIES https://jfsdigital.org/11953-2/
- Király Gábor, Géring Zsuzsanna (2019). Editorial: Introduction to ‘Futures of Higher Education’ special issue. FUTURES 111, pp. 123-129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.03.004
- Zsuzsanna Géring, Gábor Király, Sára Csillag, Gergely Kovács, Alexandra Köves, Tamás Gáspár (2018) Vision(s) of the University. Applying Participatory Backcasting to Study the Future of Higher Education. JOURNAL OF FUTURE STUDIES 22:(4) pp. 61-82. DOI:10.6531/JFS.201806.22(4).0005
Gábor Király, PhD – scientific director
Gábor Király is a sociologist, senior lecturer and vice dean for research affairs at the Budapest Business School. He received his Master’s degree in sociology at Eötvös Loránd University and at Maastricht University (Netherlands). His PhD dissertation was about issues of public participation in science and technology. In recent years, he has contributed to several participatory research and he is active in fields such as the future of higher education, academic integrity, sustainability and organizational change. In addition, he contributes to the editing process of several domestic and international academic journals as reviewer and/or as guest editor. He is an expert in participatory research methods, organisational research and research methodology.
Top 3 publications:
- Gábor Király, Alexandra Köves, Bálint Balázs (2017) Contradictions between political leadership and systems thinking. JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION 170:(1) pp. 134-143.
- Gábor Király, Péter Miskolczi (2019). Dynamics of participation: System dynamics and participation-An empirical review. Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 36(2), 199-210.
- Gábor Király, Zsuzsanna Géring (2019). Editorial: Introduction to ‘Futures of Higher Education’ special issue. Futures. 111, 123-129.
Nicholas Chandler, PhD – project leader
Nick Chandler is an Associate Professor of the Institute of Management and Human Resources at the Budapest Business School, where he has worked since 1997. He received a PhD in Management from the University of Pannonia. He has lectured a range of courses, such as Strategic Management, Business Economics and Human Resource Management, and is guest lecturer at the University of Lille, France. His research interests comprise the complexity of organisational cultures, family businesses and the culture of cheating. He is currently involved in three research projects involving organisational culture, ethics in higher education and the culture of family businesses. He is a reviewer for several journals such as Personnel Review and Evidence-based HRM and for conferences such as the British Academy of Management and EURAM. He is also a Research Fellow of the Institute for Social and European Studies (ISES) and, most recently, was a track chair for the EURAM 2017 conference.
Top 3 publications:
- Nick Chandler, Balázs Heidrich, Richárd Kása (2017) Everything changes? A repeated cross-sectional study of organisational culture in the public sector. JOURNAL OF EVIDENCE-BASED HRM- A Global Forum for Empirical Scholarship, (3) Special Issue
- Gergely Kováts, Balázs Heidrich, Nick Chandler (2017) The pendulum strikes back? An analysis of the evolution of Hungarian higher education governance and organisational structures since the 1980s, EUROPEAN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL 16:(3) pp. 1-20.
- Balázs Heidrich, Richárd Kása, Wesley Shu, Nick Chandler (2015) Worlds Apart But Not Alone: How Wiki Technologies Influence Productivity And Decision-Making In Student Groups, DECISION SCIENCES JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE EDUCATION 13:(2) pp. 221-246.
Sára Csillag, PhD – senior researcher
Sára Csillag is the Vice-rector for Research and Head of the Management Department at Budapest Business School. She is a senior lecturer. She received her Master’s degree and PhD at Corvinus University of Budapest. Her doctoral dissertation ‘Human resource management as a moral maze’ was granted the European Doctoral Association in Management and Business Administration (EDAMBA) third prize. Her main research interests include ethical human resource management, business ethics, responsible management, action research, and disability issues in the workplace.
Top 3 publications:
- Csillag Sára, Csizmadia Péter, Hidegh Anna Laura, Szászvári Karina (2019): What makes small beautiful? Learning and development in small firms, HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT INTERNATIONAL 22: 5 pp. 453-476., 24 p. (2019), DOI: 10.1080/13678868.2019.1641351
- Géring Zsuzsanna, Zsuzsanna Győri, Sara Csillag, Krisztina Szegedi (2019): Codes of Ethics in Higher Education. Methodolical insights from a culture development project. ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES, 2019, 26(1) pp. 59-90 (2019)
- Sára Csillag, Zsuzsanna Győri, Réka Matolay (2018) Two Worlds Apart? Corporate Social Responsibility and Employment of People with Disabilities, In Ralph Tench, Brian Jones, William Sun (eds.) The Critical State of Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe. London: Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 57-81.
Beatrix Fűzi, PhD – senior researcher
Beatrix Fűzi is an engineer, teacher and a researcher at the Budapest Business School. Her doctoral dissertation deals with the measuring and improving of the quality of teachers’ work. She gained her doctoral degree in 2012 at the Eötvös Loránd University. She taught pedagogical courses in teacher education and practice of mentoring teachers in post gradual teacher trainings between 2004-2018. She practices and improves a special method for mentoring teachers for ten years and she studies its effects on teachers’ work and on students’ performance. She joined to the research team of methods in higher education in 2017. In the centre of her professional interest are the methodological challenges of the higher education and the application of mentoring on different fields.
Katalin Fehér, PhD – senior research fellow
Katalin Fehér Ph.D. with habilitation is a new media researcher and an expert of digital trends. She is a senior research fellow at the Cyber Economy Research Centre and at the Future of Higher Education at Budapest Business School University of Applied Sciences. She is also a member of editorial board of KOME international journal and a visiting professor at the Masaryk University. She has gained her international experience in the U.S., South-East Asia, UK, the Nordic countries and Far East. Her current research field as a Fulbright Research Fellow is social-cultural impact of the artificial intelligence with special regard to transforming media services.
Top 3 publications:
- Katalin Feher (2019) Digital identity and the online self: Footprint strategies – An exploratory and comparative research study. Journal of Information Science. SAGE. First Published October 17.
- Katalin Feher (2019) The Zoom Interference Model of New Media. A Metaphor-Based Dynamic Approach in the Jungle of Concepts. Mediatization Studies, Vol. 3. 7-20.
- Feher, Katalin (2018) Issues and Consultation Platform in Contemporary Smart or ANI Environments. Fourteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, Society. New York, St. John’s University, Paper 6.
Márton Rakovics – junior researcher
Márton Rakovics, sociologist, survey-statistician, assistant lecturer at the Department of Statistics, Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, PhD student at Doctoral School of Sociology, Corvinus University Budapest. His doctoral research is about dynamic simulation modelling of social networks. He is currently focusing on the possible applications of machine learning and data mining methods in sociology, and biomarker analysis for blood doping detection in endurance sports.
Réka Tamássy – Junior Researcher
Réka Tamássy is a doctoral student at CUB Doctoral School of Sociology. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in communication and media studies. In her doctoral research she focuses on minority discourses in Hungarian political communication. Her research interests include media sociology, media representation of minorities, and minority discourses, which she examines primarily through content and discourse analysis.
Eszter Szendrei-Pál – Junior Researcher
Eszter Szendrei-Pál is an economist, PhD Student at Doctoral School of Entrepreneurship and Business, Budapest Business School. Her doctoral research is about the skills of entrepreneurs and the possibilities of teaching them during university programs. She joined the centre in 2019. She participated in Horizon Scanning project and creating a corpus.
Partnerships and memberships:
GEMS – Global Essay Mills Survey
MMIRA – Mixed Methods International Research Association
Center for International Higher Education Studies (CEHEC)
RC07 Futures Research – International Sociological Association