Board members

Chair

Bob Townley

Bob is a member of the Work, Management and Organisations group and a Senior Lecturer in the School for Business and Society at the University of York, UK. He have previously worked in a range of organisations (public and private) and in a freelance capacity. He is an experienced lecturer, researcher and evaluator, specialising in work, learning and skills, diversity, mental health, leadership and organisations. During his career he has completed over 50 funded research and evaluation studies and provided consultancy to a range of organisations, including the European Commission, Further Education Trust for Leadership, The British Red Cross and Welsh Government. He has also managed research and policy teams and commissioned research and evaluation projects, including in Further Education and the Creative Industries.

Bob has previously taught at London South Bank University and the University of Leicester, as well as facilitating workshops and delivering training to organisation managers and community groups.

Expertise and Interests

Work, employment, skills, wellbeing, small businesses/SMEs, leadership, discrimination, inclusion, and community development.

Affiliation

• University of York, UK

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Secretary and elections

Carolyn Hunter

Carolyn is an Organisational Theory & Behaviour Senior Lecturer at the University of York. Her research in critical management studies relates to everyday experiences of work, including: humour and happiness in fun corporate cultures; gender and the creative industries; and spatiality and temporarily of organisations. Her first academic interest is in the phenomena of humour and ‘play' at work, exploring how corporate cultures advocate values of fun, enjoyment and happiness, and how these discourses are mapped onto the space and materiality of the organisations. Drawing on de Certeau’s concept of strategies and tactics of the everyday and linking this to Lefebvre’s conception of space and time, her work investigates how employees interpreted the strategies of corporate discourses through everyday tactics, such as humour.

Carolyn’s second area of research involves gender, femininity and feminism in organisation studies, exploring abjectivity within publishing and the creative industries. She is also interested in how brands are constructed in the everyday around concepts such as girlhood. She is a co-investigator on an Academy of Finland grant on 'The Business of Childhood', where they explore how children's authors experience their day to day work around the themes of precariousness, enchantment and gender.

Expertise and Interests

Gender, abjectivity and feminist writing; the everyday in constructing brands in media; happiness, play and humour within fun corporate cultures; and space, time and materiality

Affiliation

• University of York, UK

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Meetings secretary

Steff Worst

Steff is a Senior Lecturer in the department of Leadership & Human Resource Development at Northumbria University. Her PhD explored lesbian and gay experiences of expectations on gender and sexuality at work. She is passionate in researching the day-to-day life of LGBT* people, particularly the potential of queer and non-normative identities to challenge and broaden embedded modes of thinking.

Expertise and Interests

Day-to-day life of LGBT* people, queer and non-normative identities

Affiliation

• Northumbria University, UK

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Expertise and Interests

Business Ethics, Organisational Democracy, Corporate Social Responsibility, Relational Governance, Philosophy of Ethics, Equality and Diversity, Leadership, Discourse Studies, Uncertainty and ambiguity, Management pedagogy, Discourse analysis, Myth and literary analysis

Affiliation

• University of Sheffield, UK

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Membership secretary

Gosia Ciesielska

Gosia specialises in organisational justice, coaching practice in support of diversity, talent management and HR Development. Majority of her work is carried out in highly professional settings like healthcare and tech sectors. Gosia looks specifically at how professional and managerial logics may differ in establishing what is ‘good’, fair’ or ‘valid’ and how to enhance collaboration between these groups. Her recent publications revolve around themes of restorative justice culture, supporting careers of women professionals, and managing organisational tensions during change and innovation processes. Gosia is specialising in qualitative research methods, especially interviewing, organisational ethnography and case studies.

She has worked with industry partners like NHS England & Innovation and International Basketball Federation (FIBA) as well as local authorities.

Expertise and Interests

Organisational justice, methodological innovations in coaching, diversity, HR development practices in the healthcare and tech sectors.

Affiliation

• University of Northumberland, UK

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Web officer

Sameh Katr

Sameh is an experienced leader with a strong background in design and business management. Over the course of 15 years, he has held a variety of top leadership roles in multinational organizations. He is passionate about leadership, business development and interpersonal relationships in organizations. Thus, his research interests are closely aligned with his deep commitment and belief in organizations and workplaces as relational spaces and friendships as the building block for healthy workplaces.

As a successful entrepreneur and thoughtful leader, Sameh has spent years actively contributing to efforts supporting student artists and entrepreneurs.

Expertise and Interests

Leadership, friendships in organizations, workplaces, emotions, startups, practice, organizational structures.

Affiliation

• Åbo Akademi University, Finland

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Web officer

Jerzy Kociatkiewicz

Jerzy is a Full Professor of Human Resource Management at Institut Mines-Télecom Business School. His research verges from examining everyday organizational experience through pondering medieval solutions to alienation to studying narrative inspirations for managerial and organizational aspirations. He has recently published in journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, Organization Studies, and Journal of Business Ethics. With Zygmunt Bauman, Irena Bauman, and Monika Kostera, he has written Management in a Liquid Modern World, a book that he is still very proud of.

Expertise and Interests

Organization theory, narrativity, experience of organizing, managing experience, organizational space, marketing management, strategic management, service innovation, actor network theory, organizational sociology.

Affiliation

• Institut Mines-Télécom Business School, France

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Social media officer

Christina Schwabenland

Christina spent over 25 years working in voluntary organisations, in a variety of management positions including chief executive and chair. She began to work on her PhD while she was CEO of the Elfrida Society, an organisation involved in service provision and policy development with people with learning difficulties.

Her PhD explored the founding stories of voluntary organisations, both in the UK and in India. She enjoyed this so much that she moved into university teaching in 2004.

Expertise and Interests

Voluntary organisations, sensemaking heuristics, diversity management, gender equality.

Affiliation

• University of Bedfordshire, UK

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Elections officer

Robert Earhart

Professor Earhart is an associate professor of management ethics and marketing in The American university of Paris. He offers core courses in Business Ethics, Marketing, Organization and NGO and Mission-Based Management. Earhart worked previously in fields of sustainability and CSR as well as in a wide variety of capacities in the private, NGO and political sectors, including policy and budget analysis, financial management and human resources consultancy, operations coordination, corporate training and client services.

Expertise and Interests

Business Ethics, marketing, mission-based management, policy and budget analysis, financial management and human resources consultancy, operations coordination, corporate training and client services.

Affiliation

• The American University of Paris, France

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Journal editor, Culture and Organization

Ilaria Boncori

Ilaria is a Professor in Organization Behaviour and Human Resources Management, currently serving as Deputy Dean Postgraduate Research Training. In this role, she is responsible for all doctoral training across departments, both within the university and through external collaborations and partnerships. From January 2022 to January 2026, she is leading the project 'Transitions and Transformations: the Black Researcher's Journey' funded by Research England – part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) - and the Office for Students.

Initially focused on international cross-cultural business and expatriates, her research interests now lie in social in/justice at the intersections between identity, race, the body, gender, sexuality and processes of organising, as recently investigated in studies focused on aspects such as transgender and gender non-conforming inclusion in organizations, parenting and miscarriage in organisations.

Expertise and Interests

Identity, race, the body, gender, sexuality, processes of organising, auto/ethnography and arts-based methods, writing differently, embodied experiences, affective processes.

Affiliation

• University of Essex, UK

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Journal editor, Culture and Organization

Kristin Williams

Kristin S. Williams, Ph.D. (she/her) is the Director of the FC Manning School of Business at Acadia University and an Associate Professor in Management. She holds a Visiting Scholar appointment at the University of Eastern Finland (Innovation Management). Kristin is also the Founder, Managing Director and Principal Researcher at Prudentia Institute: Youth Knowledge Exchange; home to the award-winning Student Research Lab. She is co-editor in chief at the journal of Culture and Organization and a member of the editorial advisory board at the Journal of Management History. She brings to various collaborative research projects a gender lens and a commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion. She is a critical management studies scholar and identifies as a polemical feminist engaged in critical historiography through activist writing and narrative methods. Much of her work has focused on uncovering neglected female figures in management and organizational studies and management history.

Expertise and Interests

Activist writing, autoethnography, collective biography, critical historiography, critical management studies, ethnographic fiction, feminism, ficto-feminism, fictocriticism, non-profit leadership, polemics, social innovation, social justice, sociology of knowledge, youth, youth participatory action research.

Affiliation

• Acadia University, Canada
• University of Eastern Finland, Finland

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