Research
My research interests focus on management practice and learning, particularly through identity, narrative and autoethnography.
Identity
I have an ongoing interest in the concept of identity, particularly identity as narrative, and its value for investigating and understanding organisational life. My PhD used a narrative identity perspective to investigate how managers make personal sense of their organisational position ‘in-between’ multiple organisational and stakeholder demands and expectations. Currently my research is extending in two directions: firstly by exploring further ways in which narrative identity work might be theorised; and secondly through exploring some of the implications of such an approach for different aspects of management and organisational life. For example, in a recent book chapter I explore how an identity perspective of the manager role in an organisation not only suggests a very different approach to traditional forms of manager education and development, but extends and challenges the idea of ‘management as an identity project’ by questioning normative assumptions as to what that identity project should look like.
Public Management and Social Businesses
My PhD was conducted in a UK Housing Association (a social landlord). Such organisations, sometimes characterised as quasi-public or social businesses, are explicitly constituted as both independent commercial businesses and highly regulated providers of public and statutory services. They therefore offer a rich opportunity to study how organisations and organisational actors make sense of, negotiate and manage competing organisational logics, and how such paradoxical organisations might be discursively constructed. In particular I am concerned with how stories are used to account for and organise versions of paradoxical organisations, and the interplay between dominant or hegemonic narratives and their production, and the pluralism of stories and storying of individual members.
Autoethnography
As a qualitative researcher I am increasingly interested in how the role and experiences of the researcher herself might be generatively used and incorporated into research into organisational life.