ESRC CASE PhD Studentship: Operationalising & Branding Compassion: Consumer Experiences and ‘Spaces of Compassion’ in UK Healthcare

Closing date: 4pm Wednesday 22^nd October 2025

Within the UK’s healthcare environment and across its wellness industries, “compassion” has become an important buzzword featured heavily in policy documents, professional training, advertising, consumer experience, patient satisfaction measures, and broader public discourse. Compassion is now thoroughly branded, audited, and operationalised not simply as a fact of good care provision but as a marketable resource and yardstick for service delivery.

Applications are invited for a 3-year full-time ESRC NWSSDTP CASE PhD studentship for a qualitative consumer research project that centres on “The integration (and marketisation) of ‘Spaces of Compassion’ with healthcare”, commencing January 2026. The studentship is open to Home and International (including EU and EEA) candidates. It covers tuition fees and includes a maintenance allowance. The stipend rate of the maintenance for the 2025/26 academic year is £20,780. The studentship also includes additional support for research expenses.

This collaborative project is between the Department of Marketing & Centre for Consumption Insights at Lancaster University Management School and the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust’s (UHMBT) Chaplaincy Department. The qualitative project focuses on the local integration of “compassionate spaces” with hospital services against a broader backdrop of service environments centred on compassion becoming constructed, branded, and marketed to the public. Using creative ethnographic methods and interdisciplinary concepts and ideas, the project will aim to understand the political and ideological dimensions that compassionate spaces occupy and the ongoing entanglements of multiple, and sometimes competing, identities, values, and practices within clinical environments and broader commercial for-profit environments.

The project is situated within the broad remits of consumer culture studies, marketing, consumer research, and the sociology of health. As a collaborative project between academics and a live Chaplaincy environment, the researcher will work towards understanding how compassion is essential for effective healthcare delivery, providing a unique opportunity to contribute to both the academic literature and the NHS’s service provision.

The research has its theoretical base in the broad tradition of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) and will also allow the successful candidate to pursue their own intellectual ideas within the scope of the general project. The successful candidate will be co-supervised by Professor James Cronin and a second supervisor at Lancaster University alongside support from the Lead Chaplain at UHMBT. The student will be primarily based at Lancaster University, but can expect to spend some time at the NHS primary care facilities in the Lancaster and Morecambe Bay region. Travel for field work, and to attend training events and international conferences will be expected.

Eligibility & Overview

The candidate will have a social science or business background and should have attained (or expect to attain by the end of the 2024-25 academic year) a Merit or Distinction Master’s degree in marketing, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, human geography, or a related discipline, with a clear emphasis on consumer behaviour, critical marketing, political economy, space & space, or health & illness. The candidate should have a strong background in qualitative research and preferably in conducting ethnographic fieldwork. The candidate should also be confident in pursuing theory-guided research and working closely with concepts, frameworks, and ideas from the social sciences.

We are looking for someone who is comfortable not just with partaking in fieldwork but is also passionate about academic literature and the prospect of critiquing, expanding, and developing exciting conceptual explanations in consumption and health studies. There will be a significant impact evaluation component to the project, but also an expectation to read widely, to advance theoretical understanding, and to introduce original theory. The candidate, while based in a Marketing Department, will work within an interdisciplinary research environment – the Centre for Consumption Insights.

How to apply

More general information on Lancaster University’s PhD Programme in Marketing is available at www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/our-departments/marketing/phd. Details of the ESRC NWSSDTP scholarship can be found here. Applicants can also email the academic supervisor Professor James Cronin (j.cronin@lancaster.ac.uk) for further queries.

Applications should be submitted through the Marketing Department application portal

(“Apply for 2026 entry” tab). Applicants should provide a Personal Statement demonstrating their interest in, and suitability for, this research project and mention that they are applying specifically for the "CASE LUMS-Cronin project". Applicants should also include:

• CV (detailing previous research experience)
• Academic transcripts
• 1-2 samples of writing that are relevant to this PhD and/or consumer culture, space & place, health etc. (such as a dissertation or essay from your Master’s degree)
• 2 academic references

+ A completed NWSSDTP Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form (see below)

After submitting your Personal Statement, CV, transcripts, samples of writing and references through the application portal, please complete and email a copy of the NWSSDTP Equal Opportunities form to lum-phd@lancaster.ac.uk

The NWSSDTP is committed to Equality and Diversity, and we actively encourage applications from groups who are underrepresented within academia due to, but not limited to, age, race, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, geography, sexuality, and social class.

Interviews for shortlisted candidates are provisionally scheduled for Tuesday 11^th November 2025.