Douglas A. Schuler

Douglas Schuler is professor of business and public policy. His main research interests are corporate political activity, public policy, corporate social responsibility and non-profit organizations. He also does research about organizational collaborations about food insecurity in and around Houston. Schuler has published many research articles in top-tier academic outlets, including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Business and Politics, Business Ethics Quarterly, Business & Society, California Management Review, Journal of Management, PLoS-ONE, and Strategic Management Journal. A member of the Rice Business faculty since 1992, he has taught many courses, most recently Business-Government Relations, Globalization of Business, and Social Entrepreneurship. Schuler has received several teaching and service awards at Rice, including the 1997 JGS Award for Teaching Excellence, 1997 Rice Graduate Students Association Teaching Award, the 2006 Rice Graduate Students Association Faculty/Staff Service Award, and the 2018 Teaching Award for Inquiry-Based Learning.

Schuler studied at the University of California, Berkeley (B.S., Business Administration) and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., Strategic Management, School of Management). At Rice, he serves as a Senator in the Faculty Senate, on the Executive Committee for Rice 360 Institute for Global Health Technologies, and on the Advisory Committee for the Center for Civic Leadership.

PODCAST FEATURING PROFESSOR DOUG SCHULER

The Cantankerous Community Meal

A discussion featuring Professor Doug Schuler examining the challenges in social sector collaborations to address food insecurity.

Teaching Interests: 

• Business and public policy
• Corporate political strategy
• Corporate social responsibility
• Social entrepreneurship

Research Interests: 

Doug Schuler primarily studies the political activities of companies (CPA). Among many questions, his articles explore the primary drivers of CPA, focusing upon both external and internal factors. His work also investigates the payoffs of political investments.

He also examines facets of corporate social responsibility (CSR). His work describes the linkages between a firm’s CSR and consumer purchases – the CSR linkage to financial performance. Other work examines CSR as practiced through voluntary organizations, such as industry self-regulatory governance mechanisms.

Recently, Schuler has studied corporate socio-political activism, such as when companies and/or their executives speak publicly or take actions towards controversial social or political issues (e.g., gun rights and restrictions, voting rights and restrictions).

He has written about non-governmental and non-profit organizations, especially critical about the business models they adopt to serve their clients. With colleagues, he is investigating such organizations in the context of food desert interventions in Houston.

In past years, with colleagues in engineering, Schuler studied the introduction of technologies into low-resource emerging markets settings. He was part of an effort to create a shipping container-based system for sterilizing medical instruments for health facilities that sit outside of a power grid such as in rural areas of developing countries.