Dr Patricia Gayá Wicks is Lecturer at the Department of Management, and a founding member of ARCIO (the Department of Management’s research centre for Action Research and Critical Inquiry in Organisations). Her work draws primarily on action research practices and on participatory worldviews to explore how individuals, organisations, and communities can take effective action in the face of overwhelming circumstances, most particularly as in the case of our current ecological and social crises.
Dr Ann Rippin is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Management and a founding member of ARCIO. Her research interests focus on aesthetics, gender and history in management. She is greatly interested in research methodology, particularly arts-based and narrative approaches, and on the application of French feminist theory to the field of research methodology. Like Sue, Ann is completing an Ed D in Narrative Inquiry at Graduate School of Education.
Dr Mark Hall’s research interests are focused around project management, public sector service delivery, and sustainability. Current areas of research include the influence of cultural theory in project environments, with a focus on risk management practices; performance measurement in the public sector and the impact on change and value; and sustainability, with a particular interest on the effects of policy on practice. He draws from his engineering background and related networks in his research.
Mary Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management. Her current research interests are eclectic. They include the application of cultural and literary theory to organisation studies, and in particular post-structural feminist theory such as the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. She is also interested in management history, focusing on the unregarded histories of women in organisation. Social and 'green' enterprise and entrepreneurs and issues around growth, mission/market tension and gender are further areas of research.
Dr Sue Porter is a Research Fellow at Norah Fry Research Centre and a founding member of ARCIO. She is a Fellow at the Department of Mangement in Bristol. Sue specialises in supporting groups and organizations learning and working together, and has a particular interest in facilitating meaningful participation by otherwise silenced groups and communities, and in the use of narrative to engage those who might otherwise be hard to engage in service design and review, and in decision making. She is completing an Ed D in Narrative Inquiry at the Graduate School of Education.
Peter ReasonProfessor Peter Reason is a world-leading, long-standing figure in the theory and practice of action research and participatory worldviews. His interests include the further development of these methodologies and their application to personal and organizational learning; radical shifts in epistemology and consciousness; professional and managerial practice as inquiry; and education as liberation. His major concern is with the devastating and unsustainable impact of human activities on the biosphere which he believes originates in our failure to recognize the participatory nature of our relationship with the planet and the cosmos.
