Members of the department have studied initiatives such as performance management, wellbeing, quality and knowledge management.

For example, Pete Thomas and Kay Greasley are currently engaged in exploring the workload and wellbeing of primary school teachers and have also studied the effects of the growing use of metrics in HRM; Bogdan Costea and Kostas Amiridis have looked at issues of rating and the ‘policing’ of staff in performance management systems, and together with Peter Watt are also looking at ‘intense’ corporate work cultures today and historically.

Emrah Karakilic has worked with colleagues at Nottingham Trent on a project which develops a greater understanding of the occupational factors that contribute to the mental health crisis and recommends effective interventions to safeguard the safety of workers both physically and mentally. Huw Fearnall-Williams has been involved in projects with colleagues to study how lack of enforcement of employment protection affects those in the informal economy. They look at this in the context of workers at hand car washes.

Dermot O’Reilly and Uzair Shah have worked with Muhammad Shakeel Aslam to develop research into knowledge-sharing practices in international consultancy alliances. Michael West has researched team innovation and team cultures extensively, particularly in health services.

Research within the department is sensitive to how managerial and employment practices can have differential effects on groups and individuals.

For example, Peter Watt has been studying ideal images of workers in the new economy across the categories of graduates, interns and dropouts to understand how they affect both managers and employees.

Research by Rachael Barrow looks at the transition to work for those from the growing number of people who have been home-schooled, and Beth Suttill looks at the effects of youth unemployment.

The Department makes substantial contributions to the critical exploration of such developments in both the public (e.g. National Health Service; education) and private sectors (e.g. professional service firms such as in architecture and law) as part of an analysis of the changing world of work and employment.

For example, James Faulconbridge has examined several factors relating to professional services firms, including financialisation, performance and the use of AI;

Stavroula Leka’s work has particularly looked at organisational cultures and values, perceptions of psychosocial risk, and work-related stress. She looks at how these relate to decent work and developing healthy work, healthy organisations and healthy societies.

Stavroula is also the Director of the University’s Centre for Organisational Health and Wellbeing.

Kay Greasley, Pete Thomas and Karen Dale have been looking at the working experiences of fitness instructors within the changing conditions of the service sector.

The work of Martin Quinn explores what happens when the public and private sectors meet and the effects this can have on work and employment, as well as inequalities, in regional economies.

A cross-national and global approach is also taken:

For example, Yu Fu is researching into the social integration of Chinese internal migrants and Emrah Karakilic is involved in an ongoing project on psychological wellbeing and safety for workers in a global context.

Theo Vurdubakis is working alongside Raoni Rajão in unpicking the use of digital satellite images in relation to practices on the ground in struggles over the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. The GIS provides remote information which can be used in actions against deforestation, but are subject to complex interpretations and deployments by different agencies and individuals in practice.

Alison Stowell’s research predominantly focuses on social and organisational responses to the challenges of waste, especially to e-waste (e.g. computers, laptops, mobile telephones, etc). This particularly connects with understanding unsustainable practices, the circular economy and exploring different stakeholder values in the complex areas of (over)consumption, recycling and waste reduction. She has been centrally involved in the Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives and Opening the Bin projects.

Martin Quinn, with other colleagues, has argued that we need different forms of ‘imaginative solutions’, including different conceptions of time and aesthetics, to disrupt the anthropocentric forms of reason that are prevalent in the Anthropocene, whilst Emrah Karakilic is studying why people, despite being aware of climate change, do not integrate this knowledge into their daily lives or translate it into social action.

Hameed Chughtai has explored the concept of ‘good society’ and how digital technologies shape contemporary society.

Sylvia D’souza and Lucas Introna have looked at the neglected area of how embodied ‘intuition’ influences ethical decision-making in practice. This research goes on to explore how embodied ethical intuition might differ in specific cultural contexts such as India.

Martin Brigham has been looking at the complexities and justifications involved in Corporate Social Responsibility decision-making, along with Paraskevi Vicky Kiosse and David Otley.

Divya Jyoti researches how ‘ethical codes’ are enacted in practice in production networks in the fashion industry, especially in relation to the outsourcing of the employment relationship. She also works with bodies that seek to change practices, such as Justice in Fashion, and Transformers Foundation.

James Faulconbridge works with Martin Spring and Atif Sarwar to research how professionals adapt to artificial intelligence. Emrah Karakilic has also been exploring why humans remain central to knowledge work in the age of robots.

The work of Elisavet Christou crosses disciplines, bringing design thinking to organisational and technological issues, including the development of the Evaluation Visualisation Design Tool (EViD), as well as working with Violet Owen and Pinar Ceyhan on The Little Book of Creative Evaluation, which looks at how organisations can use approaches that employ creative methods, tools and thinking aimed at producing evaluations that foster collaboration, mutual learning, inclusivity and engagement.

Joe Deville has been involved in research projects examining autonomous systems' role in a growing diversity of civilian, industrial and military applications. His particular interest has been in the use of methods of algorithmic prediction in credit tracking and scoring of people as they engage with financial systems online. This is an area of technological management that can particularly affect marginalised groups, a theme which also runs through Yvonne Latham’s work, which includes looking at the complexities of how technologies have been deployed to connect disabled people in remote communities, sometimes reinforcing having the unintended effect of reinforcing their marginalisation, as well as how telecare systems can help in supporting older adults’ independence at home. Hameed Chughtai uses decolonial approaches to study how marginalised populations engage with, adapt, and use information technologies in their practices.

Lucas Introna, along with Lotta Hultin, Markus Balázs Göransson, and Magnus Mähring, looked at the experience of Syrian refugees in Lebanese tented settlements to see how precarious individuals use everyday practices such as creating homely characteristics and hospitality to others to develop a sense of dignity, belonging, voice, and hope.

Martin Quinn, along with Marta Gasparin of Copenhagen Business School, has explored the use of the craft/creative industries as drivers of economic development in several countries worldwide, most notably including Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the UK. Martin has also worked with the Industrial Strategy Council on levelling up and regional development.

Karen Dale has worked with Leanne Cutcher of Sydney University in exploring the tensions between the demands of globalised financial regulations and the needs of an indigenous credit union to bring financial accessibility to marginalised and remote communities. She has also worked with Lucie Cortambert of Lyon University to examine the possibilities of positive forms of organising in the relations between volunteers and homeless people.

Mo Cheded has been involved with work on how society excludes and marginalises individuals with disabilities through marketplace representations – for example, although Mattel brought out a Becky doll in a wheelchair, the doll was later dropped from production because of perceived problems in adapting accessories or the doll’s house – and the need to reimagine the capabilities of disabled people through new representations.

Understanding leadership better is a consistently important theme. Leadership discourses, practices, and relations crucially influence contemporary organisations and societies. Research on leadership in the department is informed by diverse perspectives, particularly contributing to the growing interest in ‘Critical Leadership Studies’. This approach explores how leadership dynamics are socially constructed, frequently rationalised, sometimes resisted, and occasionally transformed.

For example, David Collinson is the Founding Co-Editor (with Keith Grint) of the peer-reviewed, international journal Leadership, and has written extensively on leadership, including bringing together his longstanding research on resistance to develop the idea of ‘leadership resistance’, to better understand the leadership of oppositional practices.

Dermot O’Reilly has co-authored Developing Public Service Leaders: Elite Orchestration, Change Agency, Leaderism, and Neoliberalization, with Mike Wallace, Michael Reed, Michael Tomlinson, Jonathan Morris, and Rosemary Deem. This book looks at leaders in the public sector, across Australia, Canada, England within the UK, New Zealand, and the USA, based upon a major qualitative project funded by the ESRC to research interventions into leadership development.

Anthony Hesketh has explored with Jo Sellwood-Taylor and Sharon Mullen what qualities are needed to be on a Board of Directors, particularly in the context of the impetus to diversify Boards; whilst Michael West has written about ‘compassionate leadership’.

Questions about the role of management education in a profoundly global and interdependent world are of ongoing concern to the department, both in terms of our research and our own practices.

Mahnaz Abbariki, along with Richard Snell and Mark Easterby-Smith, has looked at the effects of tacit knowledge on collective learning routines, whilst Pavel Bogolyubov has looked at the development of the concept of the ‘learning organisation’ through the work of John Burgoyne.

Uzair Shah, Dermot O’Reilly and Bejan Analoui have published about the role and perceptions of educators in relation to responsible management education.

Martin Brigham and Peter Watt are currently exploring the relationship between Quaker values and action learning, while Huw Fearnall-Williams is researching how management educators can respond to artificial intelligence large language models (such as ChatGPT and Bing AI) in terms of re-evaluating our teaching and assessment practices; and Yu Fu and Neil Ralph are looking at how implicit bias, especially around ethnicity, can affect assessment practices.