Team
Head of the Center
Marko Orel is an organizational sociologist and associate professor at the Prague University of Economics and Business, where he directs the Extended Realities Research Lab (ERRL) and leads the Centre for Workplace Research (CWER). His research bridges organizational studies with immersive technologies, investigating how virtual and augmented reality reshape workplace dynamics, team interactions, and organizational processes. Combining his expertise in workplace sociology with experimental methodologies, he explores human behavior and decision-making in virtual environments, while developing innovative approaches to studying organizational phenomena through extended reality. His interdisciplinary work spans organizational sociology, human-computer interaction, and workplace studies, contributing to both theoretical understanding and practical applications of immersive technologies in organizational research and training.
Phone: +420 775 167 774
E-mail: marko.orel@vse.cz
Website: https://kpo.vse.cz/english/about-us/department/staff/marko-orel/
Scholarly Team
Ivana is an organizational scholar with a background in sociology and political science. She is intrigued by the workplaces moving towards equality, participation, deliberation practices, and subsequent changes in our understanding of work in the 21st century. Apart from conducting qualitative and ethnographic research, she supports the strategic development and outreach of CWER.
Veronika Šlapáková Losová, Ph.D.
Veronika is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer at the Prague University of Economics and Business, focusing on digital innovation, user behavior, and network theories. Her research explores the impact of digital innovations on work processes and the workplace through the ecosystem perspective. She teaches courses on innovation and entrepreneurship, guiding students in exploring innovative management practices.
Karolina is a Polish Design Anthropologist. She holds a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her academic research focuses on socio-political challenges and conflicts within tourism development in New Caledonia, a French overseas territory in the South Pacific. Additionally, she investigates the growth strategies of family-owned businesses. Karolina joins the CWER team for the Horizon-funded REMAKING project, where she contributes by applying ethnographic methods to examine remote working in the context of enforced migration triggered by the war in Ukraine.
Doctoral Fellows
Benjamin Đug is a finance professional and PhD researcher focused on how immersive technologies shape work. He is Third Party Management Lead at Wise (Budapest) and holds an MSc in Finance from Central European University, with prior experience at Citi in London.He is currently a PhD student at the Prague University of Economics and Business, where he studies the adoption and impact of Virtual Reality (VR) in professional environments examining how immersive collaboration tools affect productivity, communication, and wellbeing in hybrid teams.
Cyrus Brochu brings over 15 years of real estate investment experience, primarily gained on the buy side with one of Canada’s largest pension funds. He has deep expertise across financial, analytical, and risk management disciplines and a comprehensive understanding of global real estate markets. Throughout his career, he has played a key role in underwriting, structuring, and executing investments, while overseeing asset and portfolio management across diversified equity, debt, and fund strategies. He is currently a doctoral student supervised by Marko Orel, researching housing and office market links, with a particular focus on the effects of dwelling size on remote work prevalence and office availability. His broader research interests also include coworking models, especially the distinctions between digital nomad spaces and more organization-oriented forms such as corpoworking.
Senior Consulting Scholars
Zuzana’s research focuses on the symbolic and socio-historical aspects of consumer behavior. Her research covers a broad spectrum of topics related to consumer culture, including consumption of space or work-related services such as collaborative workspaces. Zuzana oversees qualitative research processes within the center and works on mutual scholarly, project-related outputs.
Martin is a full professor of entrepreneurship and serves as a head of the entrepreneurship department at the Prague University of Economics and Business. He co-founded and developed several private schools (high school, elementary school, and preschool) in Czechia and strived to impact the local schooling ecosystem positively. Martin has been actively involved in several national and international projects, where he mainly led research-based WPs. In the past, he published multiple publications in leading academic journals such as the European Journal of Innovation Management and the International Journal for Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research. His role at the centre is to oversee both research and admin processes. Apart from his active support of CWER’s mission, Martin acts as a university’s vice-rector for research.
Alumni
Luca Antonazzo is a sociologist researching work and organizations. He is interested in studying how macro-trends such as digitalization and technological innovation, the green transition, and global market competition impact the labor markets, reshaping businesses and jobs, and bringing about new skills needs and new perspectives on human capital. His most recent work reflects on the societal implications of Industry 4.0, particularly in understanding the opportunities and challenges that this poses to workers and businesses. He is also interested in understanding social resilience, the factors that enhance it, and how social systems adapt and respond to change.
Ignacio Sánchez is a visiting researcher in the field of business management, coming to CWER from Rovira i Virgili University in Spain. He obtained a PhD at the same university, seeking his specialization in marketing. Ignacio’s research interests are focused on place management and the study of coworking spaces from the perspective of sharing culture. He is also interested in understanding the creation of place atmospheres in these environments and how they shape community management practices, brand communication agendas, new social narratives, and discourses of the shared workplace. Ignacio’s stay at CWER between May 2022 – 2023 is managed under the Margarita Salas Programme, co-financed by the Spanish government and the University of Rovira i Virgili.
Manuel is interested in cross-cultural management in corporate and flexible workplaces such as coworking spaces and applying relevant models and concepts for practitioners. In addition to this, he has been actively researching talent management in coworking spaces, including mechanisms for compelling attraction and retention of talented members. Manuel currently works for Deloitte Germany as a senior workplace consultant.
Masoud Shadnam is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China. He received his PhD in Management and Organization Studies from Simon Fraser University in Canada and subsequently held positions at NEOMA Business School in France and MacEwan University in Canada. His research focuses on moral and cultural aspects of workplaces from a descriptive perspective drawing primarily on insights from the disciplines of sociology and social theory. His articles have appeared in several journals, including Academy of Management Review, Organization, Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Cross Cultural & Strategic Management, Journal of Leadership Studies, and International Review of Sociology.
Vika Zhurbas is a workplace specialist and has been extensively involved in the coworking industry since 2012. She grew from an administrator of a coworking space in Kyiv to a person opening and consulting different coworking spaces worldwide. In 2020 Vika founded Ukrainian Coworking Association, where she acts as president. She launched and organized the first Coworking Ukraine Conference in Kyiv in September 2021. As an industry researcher, Vika specializes in exploring the evolution of coworking spaces and their paths through the years. She focuses on the community impact on the coworking space users’. As a CWER’s external scholar, she works on investigating the war-bound disruption of Ukraine’s coworking environment, a research that is partially financed by COST Action CA18214.