External seminars

8 August 2023

Dr Marco de Sisto, RMIT University, Melbourne

In this research seminar, Dr. Marco De Sisto will delve into the intriguing world of research with impact, presenting a thought-provoking (personal) journey from the perspectives of an early career and middle career academic. Attendees will gain valuable insights as Dr. De Sisto navigates the complex landscape of impact definition and interpretation, offering a fresh perspective on its significance in academic circles. The second part of the seminar will showcase a recent research project, where Dr. De Sisto successfully applies the concepts of impact, revealing the transformative potential of research in driving positive change. This engaging seminar promises to inspire, challenge, and broaden our understanding of research's long-term unknown journey and its lasting impact on the world.

8 August 2023

Lina-Doreen Rose, Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany

Despite growing interest in women's football, limited research exists on its fans and their fan experience. Thus, findings from women's football culture against the background of hegemonic masculinity are presented, demonstrating how the space counteracts this concept. An online survey for fans located in Australia and Germany was developed to explore perceived differences in the culture of women's football. Participation in online (social media, broadcast) and offline (in stadium, in-person events) communities was examined. Further findings identified relevant themes for women's football fans: (1) the authentic character of women's football; (2) the strong bond between teams, players and fans; (3) the stadium as a safe space; (4) the friendly atmosphere in the stadium; and (5) less commercialisation, mediatisation and professionalisation. Implications for women's football, its fans and fan culture are discussed.

21 September 2023

Dr Robin Burrow, University of Cardiff, UK

Robin will present emerging insights from his research into the realities of work in highly elite kitchens around the world. This talk will focus on fear, violence and misbehaviour, and how suffering is instrumentalized during processes of identity construction. Specifically, it will elaborate the dark ‘aesthetics of suffering’ – how suffering can be [in the context of elite kitchens] perceived as perversely appreciable, distinguishing and endured in culturally significant, identity implicative ways. The talk will show how identities are forged through (and read from) suffering bodies.

8 December 2023

Professor Karolina Parding, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden

In Sweden, the education sector and the healthcare sector have historically, and are still, to a large extent state run, with both being publicly funded and delivered: typical in a social democratic system. However, various reforms have led to private actors entering the arena as additional organisations that employ welfare sector professionals. In this chapter, we discuss the learning conditions of welfare sector professionals in relation to the various types of employers and employment settings that currently exist, both public and private. We use two different cases: first, the education sector, where we have seen the introduction and expansion of private employers for teachers, meaning teachers can be employed either by a private or public employer. Second, we examine the case of nurses working in the health care sector, which has seen the introduction and expansion of temporary agency staffing, meaning that nurses with different employers work side by side in the very same workplace. Based on a compilation of our own previous empirical research, we discuss ways in which the privatisation reforms amplify differentiation within professions, with a specific focus on conditions for learning.

10 November 2022 

Associate Professor Justine Grønbæk Pors is from the Copenhagen Business School. 

Organizational scholars are increasingly becoming interested in questions about the past and how the past vibrates in present-day organizing. This presentation aims to advance our understanding of non-linear time in organization and management studies by developing and demonstrating a hauntological analysis based on the work of Derrida and Barad. I show the value of hauntology for breaking up and disturbing the fixed temporal linearities of organizational discourses and for drawing new relations between pasts, presents, and futures, thus creating spaces for that which has been forestalled. My empirical example is current initiatives designed to increase the diversity in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics fields by motivating more girls and young women to become interested in these subjects. I conduct a diffractive reading of the initiatives and taxidermied animal specimens to show how the diversity initiatives remain entangled with conventional and conservative gender stereotypes despite their presenting themselves as disruptions of a past pervaded by constraining stereotypes. Thus, I discuss how to theorize non-linear time by demonstrating an analytical strategy apt to investigate the agencies of the pasts that are usually assumed over and done with as organizations claim to march towards new and better futures.

20 October 2022

Professor Peter Fleming is from the Management Department in the UTS Business School

Journal articles are now considered the 'gold standard' of academic research. However, the task of publishing them has become more arduous than ever. Competition is intense, especially in the US tenure system which has been liked to a kind of 'terror'. The review process is often demoralizing, which can span serveral years with no guarantee your paper will be accepted. Making matters worse, a veritable tsunami of metrics has infiltrated journal publishing. Some speak of the 'quantified scholar' in this regard. How can one endure all this and maintain their sanity? Peter offers a number of suggestions and call for more critical scrutiny about the reification of journal publishing in Business School and beyond.

8 September 2022

Dr Forough Zarea Fazlelahi is from the Queensland University of Technology Business School and the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research

Although past research has firmly established the positive effects of network status for resource acquisition and success in entrepreneurial endeavours, we still have a fragmented, limited understanding of the actual drivers of network status emergence. Prior research has mainly focused on the post-founding phase, pointing to the importance of current employment-based and firm-level affiliations in new ventures for their future status formation. In this paper, which focuses on new spinoff firms (i.e., firms started by ex-employees of incumbent parent firms), we mainly extend the attention to the pre-founding phase. Building on imprinting and signalling theories, we theorise that coming from a highly reputable parent firm has a long-term positive impact on a spinoff’s subsequent status by signalling a young spinoff firm’s quality to external parties. We advance previous research by further theorising that such imprinting is contingent on the level of knowledge-relatedness between the parent and spinoff as well as on whether there exists a strategic alliance between them post-founding. In addition, we argue a positive three-way interaction between a parent’s reputation, parent–spinoff knowledge-relatedness, and the parent–spinoff strategic alliance. Our analysis, based on a comprehensive longitudinal sample of 139 Australian mining spinoffs and 3,405 strategic alliances from 2001 to 2014, supports our hypotheses.

17 August 2022

Dr Andrea Pollio is from the University of Cape Town and Politecnico di Torino

How has Cape Town become one of the fintech capitals in Africa, producing innovation in financial hardware and software that from the city reaches informal and formal economies across the rest of the continent and beyond? To answer this question – without falling into the problematic trap of South African exceptionalism – this paper links the city's burgeoning fintech ecosystem to a long-standing project of the urban state, which has supported, de-risked and invested into the kinds of infrastructure that allow tech startups and tech companies to succeed, for more than two decades. Seen in this way, the current capital rush to fintech appears more ambivalent and complex than some critics would allow when they frame financial innovation in Africa as a neo-colonial project. While sympathetic to these critiques, we argue that diverse rationalities of statecraft should also be taken into consideration to understand the material and discursive logics upon which fintech experimentations hinge and grow.

28 April 2022

Associate Professor Jing Yu (Gracy) Yang is from the University of Sydney Business School

This paper examines in a corrupt environment, why and how executives’ cognitive difference in consideration of future (or immediate) consequences (CFC) affects their firms’ tradeoffs between bribery and innovation strategy. Linking the psychology literature on temporal orientation with the crowding-out effect due to resource constraints in small firms, we posit that firms led by present-oriented executives who consider a strategic action’s immediate consequences more than its future consequences, tend to partake more in bribery, which in turn crowds out the firms’ engagement in innovation strategy. This mediation relationship becomes more pronounced under a greater level of market competition. We found support for the hypotheses using a three-wave multi-informant survey of 236 new small firms in Iran, a developing country with a high level of corruption.

26 November 2021

Dr Isaac Lynne is from the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University

Social enterprises are revenue-generating for-purpose (as opposed to for-profit) businesses whose objective is to generate social value, such as employment of long-term unemployed or people with disabilities, or environmental clean-up. They are businesses in which net returns are put back into expanding the social value they create. Social enterprise is harnessed in high-income countries as part of social policy. Over the past 15 years, it has gained attention from international development agencies as an avenue for sustainable development that can (all at once) make non-profit organisations more self-reliant and financially sustainable, instigates stronger accountability through the compulsion to face ‘the market’ and strengthen inclusive value chains that lay foundations for economic development at the bottom of the pyramid.

Purporting that manifestations of social enterprises are conditioned, at least in part, by the cultural context in which they are enacted, there are reasons to be concerned with dominant renditions of social enterprise that first emerged in response to Western welfare problems and which are underpinned by ethnocentric epistemologies. While international development sees social enterprises, and in particular the ‘social entrepreneurs’ that drive their success, as offering ‘hope’ for sustainable development, this presentation adopts a more critical, but nonetheless appreciative perspective to strengthening the resilience of local communities and local economies. Research on a franchised network of drinking water kiosks operated by ‘Teuk Saat 1001’ in Cambodia will be presented that elaborates on contradictions regarding the human right to water and concerns with the pressures faced by market-based solutions, while also exploring community development impacts, entrepreneurial subjectivities and maintaining the notion of the water commons from a bottom-up perspective. The final part of the presentation draws on other work with a community development NGO called ‘Buddhism for Social Development Action’, showing how ‘social enterprising’ activity has the potential to enact the social in a change-making way.

27 October 2021

Dr Mingming Cheng is from the School of Management and Marketing at Curtin University

In addressing social problems, social media acts as a powerful communication form for users who not only use it as decentralised social network to disseminate their messages but also mobilise others to engage in collective action, through hashtag activism. However, our recent study examining the information diffusion network of #AirbnbDiscrimination and related activism on Twitter shows a different story. The model-based inferential network analysis shows a hub-and-spoke network that is loosely connected, indicating the existence of a dominant information diffusion network where ‘narrative power’ is concentrated. This seminar will present this ongoing research on social movement using advanced social media analytics and provide an opportunity for feedback and research collaboration.

29 September 2021

Professor Arne Carlsen is from the Department of Leadership and Organisational Behaviour at BI Norwegian Business School

The theorising of agency in organisations has progressed considerably during the latest years in terms of more fully recognising its relational and emergent nature. Yet, the concept is burdened with a heritage of instrumentality, a favouring of reflexive cognition over emotion, and a lack of problematising of what agency is for outside of concerns for self or organisational performance. Drawing from the pragmatism of Dewey, Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another, as well as selected writings on the awakening of a prosocial or pro-environmental agency, I seek to take issue with this void. Empirically, I sample from a range of ongoing studies and publication projects. My hope with this talk would not be to convince people of the value of some flawless argument. Rather, I will seek to engage participants in a discussion of what it would mean to locate an agency as primarily addressing how people receive and respond to the concerns of the human or ecological other. How does such agency emerge, and how can it be stimulated?

2 September 2021

Associate Professor Sunghoon Kim is from the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies at University of Sydney Business School

Technology has changed the way we work and how companies manage their employees. This study reviews 60 years of research on the relationship between technology and HRM. Based on 154 articles that appeared in a leading HR specific journal, we identify recurring and evolving patterns of research on technology across three time periods (separated by the advent of the personal computer in 1977 and by the popularisation of consumer internet services in 1997), three perspectives on technology (tool, proxy, and ensemble view of technology), and three thematic streams (the impact of technology on jobs and organisations, the utilisation of technology in HR activities, and the management of technology workers). Drawing on patterns of research that emerged in the past, we provide suggestions for future HR research on newly arriving technology.

8 June 2021

Dr Darren Baker is from the School of Business at University College Dublin

This study engages with critiques of the ‘confidence’ discourse in postfeminist organisational culture by exploring why, despite the shortcomings it presents to advancing gender equality, it has become so popular. Introducing a layered psychosocial approach, we chart how ‘confidence’ emerges as an important discourse in the career narratives of executive women in finance and accounting, and then go deeper to analyse its function as a psychic investment. Based on our analysis, we theorise the psychic investment of confidence as ‘sublime’ as it offers subjects a sensual return: relief at an unconscious level from the threatening realities of structural gender inequality. We argue that women – and others in marginalised social positionalities – to whom lack of confidence is often attributed as reasoning for the disparity in career outcomes – are far from simple dupes of neoliberal ideology. Instead, our study asserts that a ‘confidence trick’ fundamentally misidentifies confidence itself: a sleight of hand that discursively locates it as an individual capability and backgrounds its nature as an embodied reflection of a gendered structural reality. We show that through this trickery, the discourse taps into and derives a sublime grip from the psychic drives of the mind.

27 May 2021

Dr Mélodie Cartel is from the School of Management and Governance at UNSW Business School

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on status recategorisation by analysing the extreme case of reinforced concrete from 1885 to 1930. Status recategorisation refers to the change in a category’s status within a social hierarchy. It occurs when new—more appealing—associations form around a low-status category. We find that over the period studied, buildings encoded, emotionalised, and energised new associations around reinforced concrete, leading architects to assign the material a higher status. Drawing on these findings, we conceptualise an embodied mode of status recategorisation in which the ability of audiences to process new associations around a category is a function of bodily experience. We make two contributions to the category literature. First, we distinguish between discursive associations and associations encoded in the physical environment. Second, we show that emotions and emotional energy mediate audiences’ interpretations of new associations that are encoded in the physical environment. Negative emotional responses to new associations trigger status maintenance, while positive emotional responses and emotional energy trigger status change.

25 March 2021

Dr Mattia Anesa is from the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School

Corporations are constantly subject to paradoxical tensions and increasingly challenged with those involving business-society relations. The literature suggests that these tensions are better managed by embracing their inherent contradictions rather than attempting a resolution. Such a task requires reflexive capacities that the paradox literature is yet to delineate clearly. This study enhances the theoretical foundations of reflexivity for the paradox literature through an empirical study conducted with key stakeholders of the corporate tax field. 76 semi-structured interviews were conducted in Australia during a time of public outcry against corporate fiscal conduct. The fieldwork focused on key assumptions that prevented the adoption of an open stance vis-à-vis current paradoxical tensions as well as a (so far) unthinkable tax strategy. The study responds to calls for a closer look at reflexive conditions as well as how reflexivity could be facilitated, specifically with regards to paradoxes faced in organisational life.

25 February 2021

Professor Shankar Sankaran is from the School of the Built Environment at UTS Business School and Professor Nathalie Drouin is from the Department of Management and Technology Executive at ESG UQAM

The webinar is based on a two-year research study conducted by four professors (Nathalie Drouin from KHEOPS, Canada; Shankar Sankaran from UTS, Australia; Alfons van Marrewijk from Vrije University in the Netherlands; and Ralf Müller of BI Norwegian School in Oslo). The researchers analysed stories collected from 16 megaproject leaders from 10 countries compiled by 18 well-known international academics, including Dr Daphne Freeder, Professor Stewart Clegg, and Professor Shankar Sankaran from UTS.

Featured in the webinar are megaproject leaders Grahame Campbell from Sydney and Sean Sweeney from Auckland. Using a novel narrative analysis method using time, place (relationships), and space the seminar revealed insights into the human perspective of leadership in megaprojects that contributed to their success and present lessons learned from the personal stories of real-life megaproject leaders.

• Daphne Freeder – introduced the webinar
• Stewart Clegg – presented an overview of leadership and introduced Nathalie Drouin
• Nathalie Drouin — spoke about the book
• Alfons van Marrewijk and Ralf Müller – pre-recorded videos
• Grahame Campbell and Sean Sweeney – presented on their chapters or topics of their choosing within the context of megaprojects.
• Shankar Sankaran – facilitated the discussion and concluded proceedings

Partners: KHEOPS, UTS School of Built Environment Centre for Informatics Research and Innovation (CIRI) and UTS Business School

24 November 2020

Dr Sheree Gregory is from Human Resources and Management at Western Sydney University

Inclusive and diverse leadership is critical to innovation and Australia’s future. Yet, the underrepresentation of women and, from diverse cultural backgrounds, in senior leadership positions within higher education remains a major concern. Although plentiful research acknowledges the barriers to women’s advancement to leadership in higher education – referred to as the ‘Glass ceiling’ − the connection to succession planning is not well understood. This study extends our understanding of the strategies and challenges that university leaders use and overcome to navigate succession planning and advance gender equity and diversity. It considers the perspectives of senior management of universities and leaders of discipline-specific schools. How do universities approach succession planning? How do leaders appoint their successors in higher education? What, if anything, can succession practices tell us about advancing gender equity, inclusion, and diversity in higher education? This presentation discusses preliminary findings from a qualitative study and gender equity initiative funded by a University Vice Chancellor’s Gender Equality Committee, that was undertaken in 2018 and 2019. The findings have implications for higher education strategic frameworks and policies in the context of debates about inequalities.

3 November 2020

Professor Roy Suddaby is from the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria, the Carson College of Business at Washington State University, and the University of Liverpool Management School

We describe a theory of identity change that occurs through processes of revising the collective memory of a community. We analyse structural changes in how actors narrate the collective memory of a community struggling to make sense of the traumatic loss of their identity-defining industry. We introduce the term autobiographical memory to describe the process by which community actors, both individual and institutional, revised their identity in three phases. In the first phase, individual mnemonic narratives emphasise analepses or flash-back memories and demonstrate an effort to maintain continuity in identity with the past. In the second phase, each mnemonic narrative contains both analepses and prolepses or flash-forward memories. In the final phase, individual mnemonic narratives emphasise prolepses only, to construct continuity with a mythical metanarrative or metalepses. We challenge prevailing assumptions of memory as objective and identity as stable and enduring and propose an alternative theory of identity as a palimpsest, an ongoing project of revising a shared autobiographical memory.

29 September 2020

Associate Professor Chris F. Wright is from the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney Business School

This paper contributes to the nascent literature on ideas in industrial relations scholarship through an analysis of trade unions’ political legitimacy and their impact on policy change. Unions’ political legitimacy is generally assumed to have declined, particularly though not exclusively in liberal market economies, following the rise in neoliberal, unitarist ideology and the weakening of legal and institutional supports for collective worker representation and regulation. However, unions have been central actors in framing and influencing government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including in countries where governments and employers have been openly hostile to unions in the very recent past. This paper seeks to explain this puzzle through an analysis of the political struggles of unions in Australia and New Zealand between the early 2000s and 2020, drawing on 75 interviews with the union, employer, and government representatives in these countries. We draw upon sociology and organisational studies scholarship to explain how unions have utilised various legitimacy-oriented strategies to achieve tacit influence over public policy in an ideologically hostile political context.

10 September 2020

Professor Donald McNeill is from the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney

Urban scholars, including some prominent urban and cultural theorists, have for some time developed key works which revolve around innovation spaces, or else seek to understand how innovation is spatialised through forms such as science parks, co-working spaces, and laboratories. In this work, capital features as an important concept in explaining the political economy of urban innovation. However, this paper argues that the specific types of capital involved require further elaboration. It sets out three ways in which very specific forms of capital work to shape these spaces, in the process set out a research agenda for further developing the field. First, it examines the relationship between venture capital and urban development, and its relationship to start-up and spin-off business models. Second, it considers the relationship between the ‘business of science’ and real estate, and particularly the nexus between biomedical capital and urban development, with a focus on laboratories and science parks (such as Ong’s study of Singapore’s Biopolis). Third, it explores how real estate capital has embraced the tech sector and provides a theoretical framing to help explain the impact of WeWork’s business model and Amazon’s HQ2 search on cities.

29 June 2020

This workshop was organised by Dr Marco Berti

Organisational paradox theory is one of the most vital approaches to have emerged in the last two decades in management and organisation studies. Its focus of the inquiry is on the interdependent contradictions that characterise organisations (for instance, exploration/exploitation, collaboration/competition, change/continuity, etc.). This interactive seminar featured some of the most prominent paradox researchers based in Oceania. The workshop comprised both a round table discussion, a Q&A session and some interactive, facilitated breakdown sessions where all participants had an opportunity to discuss and connect.

Panel members (in alphabetical order):

• Rebecca Bednarek, Senior Lecturer in Strategic Management, Victoria University of Wellington
• Marco Berti, Senior Lecturer in Organisation, UTS Business School
• Stewart Clegg, Distinguished Professor in Organisation, UTS Business School
• Josh Keller, Associate Professor, UNSW Business School
• Eric Knight, Professor of Strategic Management, University of Sydney Business School

Discussion themes included:

• What are the advantages and the difficulties of employing paradox as a conceptual lens for organisational research?
• When is it appropriate to use the term ‘paradox’ in organisational research and how can we recognise paradoxes while researching organisations?
• What are the most promising avenues of future inquiry?

18 June 2020

Professor Richard Badham is from the Department of Management, Macquarie Business School

Organisations systematically (mis)lead change. They frequently fail to achieve what they aspire to and are in many ways perfectly designed to ensure that this situation persists. This paper introduces and adopts an ironic perspective on this gap and how to address it. It combines the pragmatic demands of ‘plugging the gap’ with the purposeful endeavour of finding meaning in ‘living with the gap’. Fed up with the academic and consultancy ‘bullshit’ around organisational change? Then come and listen to the latest serving!

The primary audience is academic researchers interested in translating organisation theory into a critical and reflective, yet also engaging and practical approach to managing and leading organisational change. The approach informs the forthcoming book for Edward Elgar on the Ironies of Organisational Change and is embodied in the newly developed Coursera online course: Leading Transformation. Manage Change.

4 June 2020

Associate Professor Jane Andrew and Dr Max Baker from the University Sydney Business School

This paper explores the role reporting plays in the production of neoliberal spaces. To do this, we provide a case study of staffing practices at one privately managed prison, Rosebury Private Prison (RPP). The paper considers how privatisation impacts the work undertaken by prison officers within the prison, both in terms of what prison officers do on a routine basis, and also the ways they experience their work. In particular, the research explores the use of ‘cross deployment’ as a staffing strategy adopted by private prison management. In effect, this practice meant that one officer could be counted in two spaces, thereby appearing to double staff numbers without a corresponding increase in costs. However, this translated into fewer correctional staff performing the same dangerous work. Despite the significantly increased risk for officers, ‘cross deployment’ was celebrated as an innovation of privatisation by both prison management and policymakers. The reported gains delivered via ‘cross deployment’ fed the view – at a policy level – that privatisation with its emphasis on contracts, costs, and performance, had been a success story.

22 May 2020

Associate Professor David Oliver is from the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, University of Sydney Business School

Although it is well-established that organisational identity may be a source of inertia in contexts of strategic change, less attention so far has been paid to the role played by emotions in the evolution of organisational identity in such contexts. Using a longitudinal qualitative study of a major philanthropic foundation, we investigate the complex interactions between two forms of anxiety in the top management team and external stakeholders, and how these processes enabled and constrained organisational identity change. The emergent model describes processes related to ‘identity anxiety’ and ‘survival anxiety’ and identifies the managerial practices that enable these forms of anxiety to impact organisational identity and strategic change more broadly.

30 April 2020

Professor Christopher Wright is from the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney Business School

To date, management scholars have been largely uninterested in the issue of climate change. This neglect not only opens up management scholarship to charges of ignoring perhaps the most critical challenge facing human society this century but also disregarding the needs of current and future students and practitioners who will need to confront the myriad changes to the social and economic organisation that climate change will inevitably bring. We argue that management research needs to be urgently ‘climate-proofed’ and unfettered from its assumptions of ‘business-as-usual’. By taking the doomsday projections from science seriously, we highlight the need for a radical shift in management scholarship to address the challenges of a climate-changed future. We begin our paper by highlighting the disparity between taken-for-granted assumptions within management scholarship and the increasingly urgent scientific projections of a climate crisis that threatens organised human society. Second, by drawing on emerging literature, we show how management research can provide useful frameworks for understanding and informing societal responses to the very different physical world we are now living in. Lastly, we outline why management researchers must engage with the climate crisis as an urgent concern, for both moral and instrumental reasons.

18 November 2019

Professor Keith Whitfield is from Cardiff University

Using matched employer-employee data from the United Kingdom (UK) Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, this study examines the associations between high-performance HR (HP-HR) practices, perceived job demands, managerial support, and employees’ health-related well-being. Building on a theory that challenges the assumption of beneficial effects of HP-HR practices for both organisations and employees, it explores whether such practices typically lead to heightened perceptions of work demands and work-related anxiety-depression amongst employees. It is additionally argued that such negative consequences can be ameliorated by creating a conducive work environment that fosters managerial support. Drawing on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, the study examines estimated moderated-mediation relationships, in a multi-level setting, relating the interaction of job demands and managerial support to perceived levels of health-related well-being in individuals. The findings suggest that positive relationships between employees and their line managers significantly lower the detrimental effects of job demands on perceived work-related anxiety-depression, thereby improving individuals’ health-related well-being at work.

1 November 2019

Professor Michael J. Piore is from MIT Economics

Donald Trump’s electoral victory in the United States and Brexit in Britain are symptomatic of the disarray of labour politics more generally and the failures over now more than 30 years of traditional parties to address the economic and social concerns of their working-class constituencies. Initially, that failure reflected the dominance of neo-liberal thinking and the so-called Washington census but increasingly in recent years, the policy debate has shifted dramatically. It is now dominated by what might be called the Silicon Valley consensus and its mantra ‘innovation and entrepreneurship in the Knowledge Economy’. This combines with the push toward globalisation to explain and justify the increasing inequality of income and employment opportunity as highly educated workers are rewarded by advanced technologies and the less skilled and less educated are forced to compete with the low wage labour of the developing world. But each of the elements of the Silicon Valley mantra is problematic and open to question. And we explore here the nature of those problems and their implications for public policy and scholarly research.

1 October 2019

Professor Helen Kennedy is from the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield

The ubiquitous collection and use of digital data is changing people’s lives, positively and negatively. Concern about the harms that might result from new uses of data has led to measures to influence their governance. In the UK, these include the government Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) and the independent Ada Lovelace Institute (Ada), and similar initiatives can be found elsewhere in the world. Understanding public views and how data affect people are at the heart of these initiatives, but knowledge about such matters is somewhat limited. This talk presents findings from several research projects which aimed to address this gap. Together, these projects explored non-experts’ perceptions of and feelings about the mining of their personal data and models for managing mined data.

Trust emerged as an important theme in the research. In the talk, I map out what I describe as the complex ecologies of trust that surfaced across the projects; the relationship between trust, perceptions of datafication and social inequalities; and trust in models for managing personal data. I reflect on how the findings of my research disrupt assumptions about what constitutes good, fair, and just data practices.

The research projects I discuss have deployed a range of methods, including interviews, focus groups, diary-keeping, a survey, and an innovative ‘citizen jury’. Experimenting with different methods for engaging and engaging with the public about issues relating to the use of personal data, automated and algorithmic systems, and trusted data futures is vital if we are to understand public views on data and how datafication affects people. For this reason, I conclude the talk by reflecting on methods.

The research I discuss in the paper has been funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

20 September 2019

Professor Bill Harley is from the Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne Business School

For many scholars, particularly those early in their careers, the process of publishing refereed journal articles is a mysterious and sometimes intimidating one. While there is no doubt that publishing in good journals can be challenging, an understanding of the process and the roles of editors and reviewers can make it much less so. In this presentation, Bill Harley will draw on his experience as an editor, editorial board member, reviewer, and author to discuss the process from submission to publication and provide some guidance on how to understand and navigate it.

4 September 2019

Dr Llewellyn Thomas is from the IESE Business School, University of Navarra

We investigate when and why CEOs of multi-business corporations decide to engage in a corporate split that transforms the company into multiple independent, smaller but more adaptive, public companies. Through an in-depth examination of the dynamic forces leading HP CEO Meg Whitman to decide to undertake such a transformational split in November 2014, we propose that evolving and interacting inter-business complementarity and intra-business complexity shaped this momentous decision. Our longitudinal qualitative and archival research advances the literature on the strategic leadership of divestitures by adopting an evolutionary lens that helps identify the drivers of inter-business complementarity and intra-business complexity. We discuss how our findings augment a dynamic perspective on questions of firm scope and size.

8 August 2019

Vani Naik is from Loughborough University

Universities have responsibilities for career guidance for their students and have careers services to help their students gain employment. For PhD students and early career researchers, such career services may include a focus on staying within academia as a career choice, despite the statistics showing that very few students will achieve such long-term employment. One such careers talk was offered by a British university as part of the Athena Swan charter, which promotes women in leadership within the UK Higher Education sector. As part of the charter, institutions, as well as departments, can apply for bronze, silver, or gold awards. Achieving such awards seemingly indicate that there are few barriers for women in achieving academic career success.

In this British university, to assist with its application for such an award, a talk was held with its remit stated as being that four women professors would ‘share personal and inspirational accounts of their career journeys since being a Doctoral Researcher themselves’. The presentations were held primarily for PhD students and the idea was to inspire (female) doctoral candidates that they too could reach professor level. This talk is arguably a vehicle for transmitting norms of academic success, as shaped by the universities themselves. There is therefore an opportunity to critically examine the official narratives of academic success, especially from a gendered lens.

The research questions guiding this qualitative analysis are: What aspects do these professors choose to talk about? How do they craft the story of their rise to professor status? What are their chosen discourses in this formal and public environment? And more importantly, what do they choose not to talk about? Analysis of this data takes a methodological blending of critical and thematic analysis. Taking a critical view, the common themes across all four professors are highlighted. These themes focus on what choice of topics these four professors selected. Close attention is paid to how their stories of career progression are framed. How promotion is discursively constructed is analysed, along with a specific focus on how much attention is paid to the role of gender in the narratives they used. Ultimately, this research concludes that these professors are complicit in sending out messages of cruel optimism to early career researchers.