What are your current research areas?
I鈥檝e always had a fascination with how organisations discuss their strategies 鈥� the things that they say and how plausible that is, because it鈥檚 often quite noble. I found it particularly intriguing to look at this area because it brings up the purpose of organising, especially around social good. So I鈥檝e been looking at the relationships between how organisations talk about their social responsibilities and how they implement those.
In terms of more specific themes to my research, one strand is around legitimacy signals. I鈥檝e done work with colleagues here in 黑料吃瓜网 and in the US about how sustainability standards connect with a firm鈥檚 performance on sustainability. Looking at that is really interesting, because it鈥檚 not linear.
I鈥檝e been thinking about how business schools, too, signal their legitimacy and their commitment to values around social justice and climate change.
How and when did you first get involved with ICHEM?
An important part of ICHEM is its relationship with our DBA in Higher Education Management. I was brought in from the start of my PhD to teach on the DBA, which was about 14 years ago.
For the past six years I鈥檝e also been supervising DBA students, and then I took over as a Co-Director with Professor J眉rgen Enders about a year ago. As he moved into retirement over summer 2025, I became the Director. I鈥檝e been handed the keys to the castle, as it were!
Tell us about some of the recent research coming out of the Centre.
We have so much going on! has recently co-edited a book on inclusive pedagogy, which is really interesting. has been publishing some really thought-provoking work in management journals, developing a deeper understanding of the implications of digitisation, especially AI, on learning.
One of my DBA students, Michael Salmon, has been writing about this relatively new genre of policy work that happens in universities and the professionalisation around it. Another DBA student of mine, Doaa Gharzeddine, has published research with on the UN鈥檚 Sustainable Development Goals and what they mean in universities. There鈥檚 such variety in the research that the DBAs produce.
Where do you see the Centre's future direction?
ICHEM has such a strong legacy. How do we preserve its rich heritage and what it stands for, for the hundreds of people who are actively part of the Centre? While we鈥檙e driving a path forward, we need to continue to enrich and connect ICHEM with the university ecosystem internationally.
We already have the ICHEM seminar series, which has been running for decades and acts as a networking and knowledge sharing hub. We are also starting to host writing retreats for researchers in higher education, and right now we鈥檙e beginning to plan our next ICHEM conference for summer 2027.
Hopefully we鈥檒l be drawing and building upon the extraordinary work that has gone before, which is this strong sense of a centre that鈥檚 there to ask the most important questions that universities face around the world.
We鈥檙e in a much less certain environment than we were when I first joined the Centre in 2012 [but its role has never been more important as] a platform to have these discussions and debates, given the political nature of the world. We also need to think about how that polarisation contains implications for how we conceive ourselves as part of this interconnected HE system.
How is the rapid advance of tech such as AI affecting higher education?
From the work we鈥檝e carried out so far, it appears to be true that learning technologies are often designed for users and students directly, more so than for delivery of education in a university classroom. This could mean that over time it will be the users who come to demand certain technologies more than it is the universities who decide [on] and curate those technologies. So there鈥檚 this balance between how students want to learn and what university educators want to do with the technologies [universities are] already using. Students come into university already technologically oriented.
Before now, we would say that the university would decide whether they had Moodle or a different platform, for example, but it feels that there鈥檒l be more movement in technologies in use, and we could see more flexibility in future 鈥� in this way giving students more power and universities relatively less say.
The ecosystem for education based on EdTech is kind of disturbing who鈥檚 in control of how education is delivered and what learning even is. It鈥檚 shaking the foundations for sure, and we won鈥檛 know what that means for decades to come.