material.shader.name = "" in Unity 5.5

Hello all,

Previously I was using material.shader.name to find the name of shaders assigned to objects retrieved from an asset bundle, and since upgrading to Unity 5.5 (from Unity 5.4) the name of the shader has been returning an empty string where previously it returned the full name of the shader.

Has anyone else hit this behaviour, know the cause of the change, or even better: know the solution?

Kindest regards, and thank you for your assistance!