Yifan Zhong is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Management and Organisations of UWA Business School and a Fellow of Centre for Business Data Analytics. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow of Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash Business School. Yifan is an external affiliate of the Emerging Markets Research group at the University of Sydney Business School. Before joining UWA Business School, Yifan worked as a Lecturer in the Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Strategy and International Business Discipline at Curtin University after receiving his PhD from Monash University. His work has been published in Energy Economics, Journal of Cleaner Production, Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of International Business Policy and Safety Science, among others. Yifan currently serves as an associate editor for Chinese Management Studies and Humanities & Social Science Communication (Nature Portfolio).

Supervision in UWA

PhD: M. H. Riandi (since 2024); C. Li (since 2024); M. Rathnayaka (since 2025)

MPhil: M. Wang (since 2025)

Honours: S. Siby (2024, ongoing); C. Adriansz (since 2025)

Yifan's research interests focus on the dynamic interplay between organisations and institutions. His investigations focus on the impact of government policies and organisations' strategic responses to changing institutional environments, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Yifan also explores the transformative effects of emerging technologies on organisational structures and economic disparities. His current projects involve energy transitions, sustainable practices, and the application of LLMs and NLP in organisations.

Emerging technologies tend to significantly enhance productivity, which will in turn reshape the structure of organisations, economies, and societies. It is critical to create and obtain competitive advantages via policies, capabilities and strategies. However, this surge in productivity could also lead to a widening of income inequality, as indicated by an increased Gini coefficient. I want to balance the pursuit of efficiency and the imperative of fairness given the upcoming changes.