BAM launches its new Strategy 2024-2028

As we successfully complete the period covered by our BAM 2020-2024 Strategy, the BAM Executive – led by Chair Professor Emma Parry - has been working with our Council, Fellows and SIG Chairs to develop a new Strategy, to take us beyond our 40th Anniversary, which will fall in 2026. Between us all, we have taken great care to think about the challenges our broad and international community faces as we identified the new places to focus our energies.

Building on what we have achieved, and maintaining that momentum, we now set out a vision to build sustainable futures for BAM, our community, people and our planet. A future that is diverse, inclusive and respectful, and which seeks opportunities for all. A future that is powerful and influential in representing our community to the wider world so it can access and appreciate the valuable knowledge we create. A future that is sustainable.

We have set out our Strategy as five New Strategic Priorities, to:

1. Facilitate the impact of business and management research on practice and policy
2. Support the sector in addressing the challenges brought by artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation
3. Promote wellbeing and positive mental health in business and management academics and doctoral researchers
4. Support the development of good equality, diversity, inclusivity and respect (EDIR) practice across the sector
5. Ensure sustainability is central to all BAM’s activities.

In addition, we have developed five Supporting Priorities to underpin and enable this work. We will:

• double BAM’s membership by 2028
• strengthen existing partnerships, and create new partnerships with both national and international bodies
• engage Council, Fellows, Companions and our SIG leadership as key elements of the BAM community in line with our strategic priorities
• review the activities of BAM to ensure their long-term future sustainability
• develop more effective ways of engaging with our internal and external communities.

Professor Katy Mason, President of BAM and Chair from 2019-2022, commented:

During 2019 we developed a new strategy for BAM, which we launched at the very beginning of 2020. It shared our vision of the valuable and powerful community that we can be and was designed to guide our growth and development through to 2024. The world took a famously unexpected turn that year, but I’m delighted to report that we rode out the pandemic wave, and worked hard, together, to weave a silver lining along the way, so that we have achieved nearly everything we set out to do.

Firmly establishing our core values, supporting our existing delivery of our mission, and keeping our community together in unprecedentedly challenging times – we have developed our governance, commissioned and published innovative research of value, developed leadership support within our community, extended our international networks and partnerships, and introduced an expanded capacity building programme using our BAM Framework, so that we can offer more than ever before.

BAM members now have access to a large array of free, online and easily accessible workshops and other events, to a growing range of tailored development programmes and opportunities, to active international scholarly networks, to a modern and flexible Conference, and to journals that continue to publish impactful research of the highest scholarly rigour. All of this has been made possible by the dedication and enthusiasm of many individuals within our community. To you all, I would like to say a huge thank you. Our community is a real inspiration.

BAM2024-2028 builds on those foundations, to ensure our global community continues to go from strength to strength.

Professor Emma Parry, Chair of BAM, said,

I am delighted to share our new five-year strategy with you all. We are a vibrant and energetic, international community, and I want us to stay that way. So we have focused on creating a vision that is achievable yet ambitious, and which is firmly grounded in our core values and our mission to enable the business and management scholarly community to make a positive contribution to the world.

BAM is already a space for every academic in our field to grow and flourish. Now we seek to increase the impact of our sector on practice and policy and to support it in addressing the challenges that it is facing in relation to aspects such as faculty wellbeing and the growth of artificial intelligence.

This is an ambitious strategy that must be built on sound foundations, so we have carefully integrated supporting priorities that will enable us to maintain what we have created so far and achieve the sustainable future that we aspire to.

I would like to offer sincere thanks to all who have helped shape this new BAM 2024-2028 Strategy and I look forward to delivering it with you all.

BAM: The leading community of business and management scholars