Neal M. Ashkanasy OAM, PhD is an Emeritus Professor of Management at the UQ Business School at the University of Queensland in Australia. He came to academe in after an 18-year career in water resources engineering. He received his PhD in social/organizational psychology from the same university. His research is in leadership, organizational culture, ethics, and emotions in organizations, and his work has been published in leading journals including the Academy of Management Journal and Review, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and the Journal of Applied Psychology. He is Associate Editor for Emotion Review and Series Co-Editor of Research on Emotion in Organizations. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Review and Academy of Management Learning and Education. Prof. Ashkanasy is a Fellow of the Academy for the Social Sciences in the UK (AcSS) and Australia (ASSA); the Association for Psychological Science (APS); the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP); Southern Management Association (SMA), and the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences (QAAS). In 2017, he was awarded a Medal in the Order of Australia.
Dr. Tao Bai is a lecturer in International Business. His research interests include multinational firm strategy, non-market strategy including political activity and social activity, and the intersection between, with the focus on emerging market multinationals as a field of research and practice. He has published articles at Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business, Research Policy, Long Range Planning, Management International Review, and Journal of Business Research, and in top Chinese academic and practical journals.
Caroline Knight is a Senior Lecturer in Management at The Univeristy of Queensland Business School. Prior to this, Caroline was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Transformative Work Design at the Future of Work Institute, Curtin Univeristy, Perth, Western Australia. Caroline collaborates with research and industry partners internationally to conduct rigorous research which explores how we can design work which is optimally healthy for individuals and organisations. Her key reserach interests include work design, remote and hybrid work, work redesign interventions, and wellbeing. she is also inetrested in exploring different quantitative methods and applying them in her work. Caroline's reserach has been published in top peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Organizational Behaviour, Human Relations, the Journal of Vocational Behavior, Work & Stress, and the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.
Thomas Maak is the inaugural Professorial Chair in Ethics at the University of Queensland Business School. A business ethicist by training, he previously served as Director Centre for Workplace Leadership and Professor of Leadership at the University of Melbourne. Thomas is global authority in the field of responsible leadership, business ethics, and the micro-foundations of CSR. His research links the individual, group, and organizational levels, combining ethical theory, political philosophy, relational thinking and stakeholder theory. His research interests include ethical decision-making, political CSR, and organizational neuroscience. His work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Academy of Managment Learning & Education, Journal of Management Studies, Human Resource Management, Organizational Researdh Methods, and the Journal of Business Ethics.
Thomas has extensive experience in leadership development and has worked for several years with PricewaterhouseCoopers on their award-winning senior executive program ‘Ulysses’. He has also worked with other leading companies, including BMW, Volkswagen, Shell, UBS, Dong Energy, and Novo Nordisk. Through his work with leading social entrepreneurs in South Asia and South America, including Gram Vikas, Hagar, and Fundacion Paraguaya, he is also interested in social innovation and the advancement of human dignity in a fractured world. Before coming to Australia, Thomas started his academic career at the University of St. Gallen, home to the world’s best MSc in Management, and is a graduate from the INSEAD International Director’s Program. From 2004-2008 he held an appointment as Senior Research Fellow at INSEAD, France, and co-directed a research stream within the PwC-INSEAD initiative on high-performing organizations, before being appointed Full Professor at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, one of the top-ranked MBA schools in the world, and a leader in corporate executive education. In 2014 he was a visiting professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Thomas is the immediate past president of ISBEE, the International Society of Business, Economics, and Ethics and has chaired the 2022 World Congress in Bilbao, Spain.
Karolina Mikołajewska-Zając is a Research Fellow in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the UQ Business School. Her research revolves around patterns of societal crises and their influence on entrepreneurship and the dynamics and systemic effects of digital platforms' growth. Karolina's work uses ecological epistemologies, emphasizing relationality, process, and systemic connection.
Karolina obtained her PhD in Management and Organization Studies from Kozminski University in Warsaw, Poland. During her PhD, she held a 2-year visiting position at the University of California at Berkeley, where she conducted fieldwork tracing the organizational trajectory and ecosystemic effects of digital platforms focused on hospitality (Couchsurfing and Airbnb). Her research has been published in Organization Studies, European Journal of Social Theory, Internet Histories, and The Handbook of the Sharing Economy, among others. Karolina is a member of the editorial collective at ephemera. theory & politics in organization and a member of the steering committee at the International Sociological Association's Thematic Group 10 Digital Sociology.
From the politics of climate change to defending democracy, Professor Daniel Nyberg is seeking to understand how corporations, governments, and citizens negotiate different priorities when facing key challenges of our time.
This qualitative researcher takes an interdisciplinary approach to his work across two main areas:
climate change, where he interrogates the links between climate change and corporate capitalism, and
defending democracy, where he seeks to untangle the relationships between industry and government.
“These are some of the biggest threats facing humankind,” he affirms.
“How could you not be interested?”
Climate Change
Professor Nyberg’s interest in climate change came from a growing sense of urgency. As public interest in green products grew, corporations were beginning to address climate change internally, through the design and delivery of green products and services. At the same time, the climate emergency led to attempts to contain or regulate polluting industries, for example through carbon offsets and other measures.
“It’s important to understand what corporations are doing in order to mitigate and/or minimise the effects of climate change,” Professor Nyberg explains.
“We also need to have knowledge about what they’re doing so we can regulate their activities.”
Working alongside Professor Christopher Wright from the University of Sydney's Business School, and Dr Vanessa Bowden from the University of Newcastle's School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, this ground-breaking research has been published in a number of leading international journals. The three colleagues collaborated on the book, Organising Responses to Climate Change: The Politics of Mitigation, Adaptation and Suffering (2022, Cambridge University Press), building on the success of Professor Nyberg and Professor Wright's book, Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction (2015, Cambridge University Press), which attracted wide attention across both the social and natural sciences.
Defending Democracy
Building on this work, Professor Nyberg has developed a strong interest in corporate political activity, both in how public policy is interpreted and implemented in practice, as well as in how corporations seek to influence public policy. This shift from the narrow focus on corporate outcomes to the broader understanding of democratic processes, is particularly relevant in the fraught debates around climate policy.
“I’m currently exploring how corporations influence democracy,” he states.
“The clearest example is the Labor Government’s super profit tax proposal of 2010, which the mining industry vehemently opposed. Even though it spent $22 million doing so, calculations by the Australian Financial Review suggest it saved $10 billion by agreeing to a truce with then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard. So, you can see it’s often much easier and cheaper for corporations to deal with public policies than it is for them to deal with their processes.”
Richard teaches courses on leadership, strategic decision-making, and strategic human resource management in the graduate, MBA, Executive Education, and online education programs at The Business School, University of Queensland. Richard's research interests include leadership, strategic decision-making, and organization studies using practice and process perspectives. His interest in these fields stems from his previous 23-year career as a commissioned officer in the US Army Special Operations Forces. Richard routinely consults and coaches a number of leaders and organizations in leadership, strategy, and organization improvement.
Richard previously practiced as a chef, predominantly managing foodservice operations in the prestige club, heritage facility and hotel sectors, before joining UQ in 2005. He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in hospitality and tourism management and professional development. His expertise and scholarship in teaching and learning are recognized by awards and advisory appointments at state, national and international level. His research projects, often funded by competitive local, national and international awarding bodies, explore tourism, hospitality and culinary workforce policy and planning especially in relation to youth and MH&W, skills development, identifying ‘foodies’ consumer behaviours and designing and evaluating education programs. He holds an Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship, to develop a tourism workforce crisis resilience and recovery strategy in partnership with Queensland Tourism Industry Council.
Paul is a leading scholar in strategy and qualitative research. His research reflects his passion to identify the relevance of theory in practice, and how practice can inform theory. He has been part of and leading several research teams, in the context of entrepreneurship, health, reinsurance, telecommunication and the petrochemical industry.
His research is at the forefront of theory development, in particular strategy-as-practice and advances qualitative research methodology. His work appeared in a number of top-tier journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science and Organisation Studies amongst others.
Paul’s work has made an impact to practice and academe. Based on a global ethnography of reinsurance trading, his book ‘Making a market for acts of God’ has been highly influential leading to contributions in the Financial Times, The Economist, ABC News - The Business and Actuaries Digital amongst others. He has been invited to contribute to webinars and several professional development workshops for instance on process research methods and on career advice for doctoral students and early career researchers. Recently, one of his published manuscripts received the Emerald Citation Award recognising the impact of his work. His work has also received several prestigious distinctions including best paper awards from the leading professional associations in business and management, the Academy of Management and the European Group of Organisation Studies.
His experience and drive to explore the relation of theory and practice is reflected in his approach to teaching. Currently, Paul delivers and oversees the strategy course in the Master of Business. Paul also delivers a popular strategy capstone course into the Medical Leadership Program.
Paul actively supervises Master thesis and doctoral students, whose work has received several awards, including the prestigious Carolyn Dexter award (awarded by the Academy of Management).
Paul has been very engaged shaping the academic profession of strategy scholarship. Currently, serves as Chair of the Strategizing, Activities and Practices (SAP) interest group in the term 2017-2018. SAP is a rapidly growing interest group within the Academy of Management, a global association. To foster debates in the academic community, Paul has organised numerous workshops and convened streams at several national and international conferences.
Paul serves as Senior Editor at Organization Studies, a leading journal included in the Financial Times 45 list. He is also an invited member of the editorial board serving Long Range Planning, a leading strategy journal, and Organizational Research Methods, the leading journal advancing innovation in research methods.
