Seminar series - Work and Organisation
This seminar series, hosted by the Work and Organisation academic group at the University of Bristol Business School, showcases critical, conceptually rich and often methodologically innovative research on the world of work and organisational life. We foreground scholarship that challenges dominant managerial and policy orthodoxies, engages with questions of power, inequality and ethics, and experiments with creative ways of understanding how people organise. The series provides a space for dialogue between theory and practice, and we warmly encourage staff and research students to attend, participate and connect with our speakers.
Faculty and research students are all encouraged to attend the seminars, participate, and meet speakers following the instructions sent weekly by our Business School Research Team.
Below is the full schedule for this academic year. We hope that you enjoy.
Teaching block one
- 12/10/2026 - Professor Anke Schwittay, University of Sussex
Title: “Critical Creative Pedagogy Workshop"
- 03/11/2026 - Blandine Emilien, University of Bristol
Title: "Capturing Hope in the Past? Supporting Academic Legacy with Methodological Experimentation"
- 24/11/2026 - Assaf Bondy, University of Bristol
Title: "Strange Bedfellows: Right-wing Populist Parties, Trade Unions, and the Transformation of Class Politics"
Teaching block two
Past seminars
- 3/10/2024 - Elke Weik, University of Southern Denmark
Title: "AI vs. Bildung: Can we study management and organization joyfully?"
- 23/10/24 - Professor Janne Tienari, Hanken School of Economics, Finland
Title: "Moomin Management" (Bristol University Press book launch)
- 19/11/2024 - Professor Stephen Woods, University of Surrey
Title: "A critical Perspective on Cognitive Testing for Selection into Graduate and Higher Professional Occupations and Reflections on Future Alternatives"
- 5/12/2024 - Professor Brigid Carroll, University of Aukland, New Zealand
Title: "The Governmentality of Hope: Retheorizing Hope in Leadership"
- 18/02/2025 - Professor Natasha Iskander, New York University
Title: "Doing research in Authoritarian Settings"- Participatory workshop
- 25/02/2025 - Professor Dalia Gesualdi-Fecteau, Université de Québec à Montréal
Title: "What is Better Work and Worse Work: An Analytical Framework"
- 25/03/2025 - Professor Jenna Ward, University of Coventry
Title: "The Salience of Emotion in Understanding What, Why and with What Effects do Managers of Volunteers Do What They do."
- 1/04/2025 - Lecturer Karen Bilsland, University of Glasgow
Title: “Walking Interviews in Organizational Research”
- 17/04/2025 - Professor Rodrigo Nunes, University of Essex
Title: "The Question of Political Organisation (and How to Return to It)?”
- 6/05/2025 - Professor Jean Jenkins, Cardiff University
Title: "What Lies Behind a Grievance? Discipline, Exploitation and Control in the 21st Century Garment Factory”
- 13/05/2025 - Zoe Sanderson, University of Bristol
Title: “Developing Critical Perspectives in Work and Organisational Psychology Research”
- 7/10/2025 - Professor Melissa Gregg, Bristol Digital Futures Institute and University of Bristol Business School
Title: "What Grows in a Silicon Forest? Environmental Amnesia in High Tech Expansion"
- 14/10/2025 - Simon Pek, University of Victoria, Canada
Title: "Advancing employee voice through insights from democratic innovations"
- 21/10/2025 - Professor Jean Jenkins, Cardiff University, Wales
Title: “What Lies Behind a Grievance? Discipline, Exploitation and Control in the 21st Century Garment Factory”
- 11/11/2025 - Professor Carl Rhodes, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Title: "How do they get away with it? Billionaire morality in an age of economic injustice”
- 18/11/2025 - Jessica Miles, University of Bristol
Title: "The politics of everyday objects: Rethinking DEI through vital materialism"
- 25/11/2025 - Professor Irena Grugulis, University of Leeds
Title: "When Employers do Relational Work: Negotiations, Discounts and Gift Labour in the Creative Industries"
- 10/2/2026 - Professor Melissa Tyler, University of Essex
Title: "Rethinking Vulnerability: Breathing, Grieving and Appearing as Sites of/for Organizing”
- 17/2/2026 - Patricia McCarroll, University of Exeter
Title: "Once Upon a Time in Facilities Management: Tales from an Organizational Netherworld”
- 3/3/2026 - Professor Anke Schwittay, University of Sussex
Title: "A Critical-Creative Pedagogy for Reimagining Higher Education”
- 14/4/2026 - Nicholas Martindale, University of Bristol
Title: "The Son also Supervises – Gendered Transmission and Generative Mechanisms in the Intergenerational Reproduction of Managerial Status”
- 21/4/2026 - Aram Fakhraie, University of Bristol
Title: “Care of the Self in the Iranian EFL Context: In Search of Spirituality in a World Without Spirit”
- 5/5/2026 - Professor Stefania Barca, (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
Title: “Care work in the Just Transition”