Message from the outgoing Chair of the British Academy of Management, Professor Katy Mason FBAM, FAcSS
It has been my real privilege to serve as Chair of the British Academy of Management over the last four years. We have been through so much with the Covid-19 pandemic, which has been a testing time for our global community, and for our families and loved ones. Yet BAM has come through in a strong financial position and with a sustainable business model that we can refine and adapt as we continue to move through challenging economic times. My special thanks to Neil Pyper, our outgoing Treasurer, for his careful stewardship.
Despite these challenges, our community has gone from strength to strength and our achievements over the past four years have been nothing less than astonishing. We have accomplished so much. We have introduced the BAM Framework to help our members understand the career landscape and navigate our growing programme of training opportunities. The BAM Framework has also helped us generate many new activities and programmes, in research, education and engagement, right across the trajectory of early, mid and senior careers. For example, we introduced the Becoming an Education-Focused Professor programme, the Becoming a Research-oriented Professor programme, the New Professor workshop, and this year, the Development Programme for Directors of Engagement – and much more. In 2018 we hosted around 50 training and community events; in 2022 we hosted 101, a figure that is set to continue to grow. Our flagship Conference has also flourished and evolved, this year passing the 1000 delegate mark for the first time. And we have done all this with a firm eye on developing a collegiate and generous culture of sharing, supporting and flourishing. These activities demonstrate the vibrancy and supportive nature of our community, with members continuing to build their relationships and strengthen their networks around the world, throughout the year. My special thanks go to Lisa Anderson, Mark Loon, Kate Black, Ashley Roberts, Nicholas O’Regan, Helen Shipton, Emma Parry and David Sarpong for their work here.
During my time as Chair, we have continued to build our purposeful partnerships with others. We are a founding member and signatory of the International Federation of Scholarly Academies of Management (IFSAM) – a global group of learned societies seeking to promote plurality and share our ambitions and practices to deliver value and progress for society. We continue to work closely with our sister organisations to offer collaborative research grants and capacity building events, including with our sister societies in Australia/NZ, Ireland and Italy: ANZAM, IAM and SIMA. This coming year, for the first time, we are running an Early Career methods summer school with SIMA and we are holding exciting conversation with other sister societies to offer further opportunities to our members. We continue to work closely with the Academy of Social Sciences and the British Academy, and have strengthened our longstanding relationship with Chartered ABS, which has enabled us to respond to critical policy opportunities with a strong voice. My special thanks to Nic Beech for his work here. An important shared project with Chartered ABS and the ESRC produced a Shared Vision of a Business & Management Ecosystem. We also continue to work with ESRC on a number of issues and I’d like to thank Mel Knetsch CBAM for her support.
An important part of our partnering work has been to secure research funding opportunities for our members. Increasingly, career development and academic promotion criteria require applicants to secure research funding before they can progress – yet the opportunities for business and management scholars are notoriously limited. To our own three research grant schemes we have added 4 partnered ones, and created a sustainable and professional administration capability.
In 2021 we established a BAM Peer Review College (PRC) to enhance research in our field by building both reviewing skill and capacity. Thanks to Yehuda Baruch for leading this important project.
Against this backdrop, our Special Interest Groups are flourishing. We have done a great deal of work to organise support for the leadership of SIGs and this work continues. Those who step-up and lead our SIGs are often researchers and academics taking on their first leadership role. SIGs are the beating heart of what we do at BAM – they are our grassroots – and SIG leaders are often the future leaders of our HEIs and of our Academy. We want to do more to support them in their journey. We want to be responsible for our own destiny, our own environment in which we work, and working with SIG leaders to create caring, flourishing communities of practice is, in my view, central to what BAM is. Particular thanks must go to Maureen Meadows, Colin Pilbeam, Savvas Papagiannidis and Russ Glennon.
I am immensely proud of what our journals have achieved during my period as Chair. Our Vice Chairs for Research & Publications have worked tirelessly to recruit and support our editors at BJM and IJMR, and agree publishing contracts with our publishers. We now have a larger and more diverse leadership of our journals than we have ever had, and it has been my privilege to work with Emma Bell, Nelarine Cornelius, Stephanie Decker and Pawan Budhwar. Our Editors all have a place on our Council too – and I want to thank them all for their contributions, not only to our journals, but to our wider community too.
As our association grows, we work hard to ensure that we are performing our values, and Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Respect (EDIR) ‘best practice’ has been an important driver not just of what we do, but also of how we do things. In 2019 we appointed our first Vice Chair of EDIR, who has worked hard to put best practice in place across BAM’s portfolio of activities. Together with Chartered ABS we published the practical All Welcome! guide to organising events, and this year, our 2022 research report on Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Respect in UK Business and Management Schools and the supporting academic paper: “That's bang out of order, mate!”: Gendered and racialized micro‐practices of disadvantage and privilege in UK business schools, in Gender, Work & Organization. We are also working on a mental health project to understand how our academics are faring in their everyday working lives – and I look forward to the publication of this report under the leadership of new Chair in 2023. Martyna Śliwa, my most sincere thanks to you for your leadership in all this.
During my period as Chair, I have been delighted to see the BAM Fellows College go from strength to strength, and to see how the relationship we now enjoy with our Fellows continues to strengthen our community. My special thanks to Peter McKiernan, Howard Thomas and Sue Vinnicombe for their leadership and care of the College.
None of this would happen without the care and attention of our CEO – Madeleine Barrows, and her amazing team of Justina Senkus, Lewis Johnson, Emma Missen, Sharon Miller, Stuart Hull, Eliza Robey, Róisín Durning Broderick, and now Ambra Risca. Everyone who works with our team knows the real value they deliver to our members, their dedication and hard work that enables our community to be what it is. I am humbled by their ability to put our members’ best interests at the heart of everything they do. Similarly, our learned society is nothing without its members, its Council and all the time, care, commitment and ingenuity Council members muster to make BAM what it is. To all of you, I give my most heartfelt thanks.
As I step down at the end of my term as Chair, I do so in a moment of Climate Emergency – we are in the age of the Anthropocene. If we do not act now, the concerns of our higher education leaders about student numbers and strikes will soon become irrelevant as people perish on our dying planet. There is hope. Global HEI-related social movements such as PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education) and RRBM (Responsible Research in Business and Management) are making a real difference to how we perform our roles and how we educate the managers of the future: how we do purposeful research that has the capacity to bring about real-world change, a genuine circular economy, and a green energy future. During my last strategy day, our President, Nic Beech, and I talked with our (then) new Executive about our concerns for Sustainable Futures; I am delighted to say that there was unanimous agreement that we need to act in this space – as we have done with EDIR. Sustainable Futures will now be a clear area of attention for BAM. One that I will dedicate myself to progressing, along with our new Chair, Emma Parry, and with our first ever Vice Chair for Sustainability, Jan Bebbington.
I have had the privilege of working with Emma Parry, as a member of our Executive over the past year, and very much look forward continuing our work as I take over from our departing President – Nic Beech.
As many of you will know, at the BAM 2022 Conference in Manchester, hundreds of our members gave a standing ovation to Nic , as recognition of his enormous contribution to our community and of his compassionate leadership of BAM. This ovation said more than I could ever say. Nic has worked tirelessly for BAM over the past decade and more to make BAM what it is today. The amazing achievements I listed above, over the past four years and before, are truly his. His care, compassion, dedication and energy epitomise what BAM has come to represent. As the late Robin Wensley once said to me of Nic, just after I’d met Nic for the first time, ‘he’s a very interesting person that seems to make interesting things happen’. Robin clearly recognised a kindred spirit. More than a decade on, hand on heart I can say, Robin was right. My most sincere thanks Nic, for all you have done. I just hope I can stand, without wobbling, in the very large shoes that you leave me to fill as BAM’s new President.
Wishing everyone a wonderful Winter Holiday, and a very Happy New Year.