My Biography

I am an organisation studies scholar working at the interface of business and society. Before being appointed lecturer in strategic management at WIT in 2005 I held lectureships in International Business at DIT (now TUD) and in CIT (now MTU) and UCC earlier in my career. I have extensive experience in lecturing executive, postgraduate and senior undergraduate students in strategy, management and organisation studies in Ireland and abroad, with visiting positions in Heidelberg and Prague. At WIT I deliver the MBA capstone module in Strategic Management and the DBA module on Critical Thinking. My research focuses on economic and social research into the labour market and the experience of unemployment. Before entering academia, I worked as a stockbroker and held several management consulting roles.

Research

I currently pursue two specialist research interests- the experiences of unemployment and ontologies of accounting. My work on the experience of unemployment has demonstrable excellence markers in terms of publications (two books and six journal papers), competitive research funding including being principal investigator on a €3.5m H2020 project and policy impacts (cited in a carried parliament private members motion). My more recent strain of research searching for an ontology of accounting is an emerging activity. All of this work is nested in strong collaborative relations with other colleagues in the AIB Centre for Finance and Business Research and across institutions in the Moral Foundations of Economy & Society Research Centre with colleagues in UCC, and in my considerable international network of collaborators.

 

Completed doctoral projects

2020 Completed PhD  | Dr Anthony Burke | Accounting in Organisations

2020 Completed DBA | Dr Paul McEnaney  | Organisational Performance Measurement

2018 Completed PhD  | Dr Noel Connors | Glimpsing an alternative organisation 

2018 Completed DBA | Dr Louise O’Nolan | The social life of a strategy document

2015 Completed PhD  | Dr Aisling Tuite | An organisational genealogy of banking in Ireland

2014 Completed DBA | Dr Frank McCarthy |Resilience + performance

2014 Completed DBA | Dr. Michael O’Cinneide |Organisational learning during regulatory change

2014 Completed PhD  | Dr Padraig McCarthy  | The organisation of insolvency   

Ongoing doctoral projects

Emma Maguire- The social life of a Law

Katie Scallon- An Ethnography of Board Meetings

Adrienne Hawley- Seeing the Labour Market

Antoinette Jordan- The Social Life of Datafication

Paul Slanley- ICT Professionals Organisation of Risk

Celine Craddock- Auditing, speaking up and Parrhesia

Teaching

I take a 'practice' approach to teaching and learning, which means that I emphasise experiential learning, learning through doing, storytelling, critical methodologies, field trips, walks, live case studies, problem-based learning, placement, and the involvement of practitioners in programme design and delivery. I focus on offering a rich classroom experience, and so aspire to affect an improvised journey through material sometimes with technology such as powerpoint, infographics, videos, novels, movies, case-studies and readings, but more often than not using discursive means. A particular feature of my teaching is a focus on place and terrain, so thinking critically about what makes studying a subject in WIT, the South East, Ireland and Europe different.

Each teaching year since I joined WIT has been very different, working from Level 7 to Level 10, pre-experience, entrepreneurship, executive to mature learners, daytime, evening, weekend, semesterised, blended and block. The continuity of my MBA teaching aside, each year I have taken on a very different set of teaching assignments- my approach is always to start where students are, their needs and abilities, the aspiration of the course document and module description, the course director and the programme team, and work flexibly to be the lecturer they need.

Public Scholarship

From my research expertise on the labour market, I have developed a regional profile as a public academic on matters of economics, political economy (www.senser.ie) and a national profile as an expert on labour market activation (www.wuerc.ie).

Each year, with colleagues I produce the SE Economic Monitor, a short publication that translates national data sets into an accessible snapshot of the economy for the public and political audiences. On foot of that work I have delivered invited presentations to Oireachtas committees, the Dáil AV room (an in-camera policy briefing for Parliamentarians), our work is extensively cited in policy documents and I have directly briefed Government Ministers and their Department heads. The work is extensively carried by regional and national news outlets.

A core aspect of my study of the labour market is practical, real-world impact. I have a long-standing collaboration with Dr Tom Boland (now at UCC) and with a research team in WIT undertaking ethnographic research on the experience of unemployment. This evidence-based research work has informed policy changes in Ireland, and contributed to international debates on activation and labour market profiling techniques.