Skip to main content
School of Business and Management

Organisational Processes and Practices Research Group (OPPRG)

The Organisational Processes and Practices Research Group (OPPRG) includes a number of scholars engaging in research within the broad field of Organisation Studies. This simultaneously represents an opportunity and a challenge, both of which are due to the interdisciplinary nature of Organisation Studies which as a field derives from sociology, psychology and economics and continues to widen its’ disciplinary range.

The OPPRG focuses on processes and practices of organisation, organising and organisations. We recognise that organisation is a complex phenomenon comprehensible in multiple ways from self-organising auto-poetic systems and complexity theory through to the study of interactions amongst people and things. Within this, we focus specifically on researching ‘business’ organisations including the public, private and third sectors. All of which are combinations of human agency and the agentic properties of objects. And we focus on processes and practices through which such organisations have: (a) been organised; (b) are organising.

Whereas some organisational scholars ask ‘what is an organisation?’ our main focus is on the combination of processes (human and non-human) and practices (mostly human) that produce and regenerate business organisations.

In this context, OPPRG currently focuses on processes and practices from a knowledge management, technology, human relations and resources point of view, on the following:

  • Interactions amongst and between organisations (institutions, communities, networks, platforms, etc.) and people (workers, managers, professionals, etc.)
  • Interactions between organisations, institutions and society at large (cooperation, competition, conflict, resilience, etc.)
  • Interactions between organisations and individuals as they make sense of their roles, working practices and career progression, leadership learning and development.

Contact: Dr Giuliano Maielli (g.maielli@qmul.ac.uk).

Professor Steve Fox

  • Management and organisational learning
  • How managers, managements, and organizations learn, change and develop especially middle to senior managers and HRM managers
  • How professionals, professions and other occupations learn, change and develop
  • How groups, teams, communities, networks, collectives, mobs, crowds and movements learn, organise, develop
  • Interdisciplinary organisational and educational practices

Professor Gerard Hanlon

Professor Gerard Hanlon’s PhD was in sociology and based on the study of work and organization. His ongoing interests revolve around researching the organising processes of the division of labour. He has studied organisation in its broadest form to analyse how the division of labour is organised within and beyond the single organisation and mapped how the organisation of the division of labour impacts society. In so doing, he has looked at how management theorises work and employees, how work is organised in specific organizations e.g. professional service firms, and how global production impacts upon value creation, value capture, and economic development. 

Dr Giuliano Maielli

Giuliano Maielli’s research spans across the fields of Business History and Organisation Studies. His work focuses upon the processes/practices entanglement at the level of organisations through the analytical lenses of “design hierarchies”, with a particular interest in path-dependence and path-creation as socio-organisational phenomena. Giuliano has published peer-reviewed academic papers on these topics, while his current research revolves around platform innovation dynamics, the internet of things and industry 4.0. 

Dr Manuela Perrotta

Dr Manuela Perrotta has carried out extensive research at the intersection of Sociology of Organisations, Sociology of Science and Technology and Medical Sociology. Manuela has significant experience in empirical research, particularly qualitative methodologies. She is the co-founder of the Queen Mary Ethnographer Network (QM-Ethno-net). Her main research interests concern the relation between the emergence of new technologies and the co-production of knowledge in health organisations. Manuela is currently the PI for two Wellcome Trust research and public engagement projects (2016/2021), which focus on the emergence of biomedical imaging in IVF, changing professional practices and patient perspectives.

Dr Andromachi Athanasopoulou

Andromachi Athanasopoulou’s research focuses on leadership/leadership development (gender, CEO careers and executive coaching) as well as business ethics & corporate social responsibility. She has received several academic awards and is co-PI on grants in leadership research. She has published an Oxford University Press book and several academic articles at leading peer-reviewed journals including Human Resource Management, Leadership Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business Research and Business & Society. Andromachi’s research has been presented at the World Economic Forum and is regularly mentioned in global media (CNN, FT, BBC etc). She is an editorial review board member at the Academy of Management Learning & Education and the Journal of Change Management.

Emeritus Professor Maxine Robertson

Professor Maxine Robertson's primary research focus is on the management of, and inter-relationship with (self) identity of experts across a range of sectors including, health, biomedical sciences, IT, investment banking and the law.  She has also conducted extensive research on the problems of innovation diffusion in healthcare and is currently supervising a doctoral project considering the role of trust in the management of successful clinical trials drawing on a practice perspective. She has published extensively in high quality peer reviewed journals across all of these research areas. 

Maxine Robertson

Professor Liam Campling 

Professor Liam Campling is a political economist researching the theory, politics and industrial organisation of the business enterprise and global value chains; international trade policy, its negotiation and relationship to global production; and the political economy of development and environment change.His contribution to OPPRG captures the relationship between labour practices at regional level, processes of trade and distribution within global value chains and international regulatory frameworks. This academic work has laid a powerful basis for public engagement and is the foundation for Impact Case Studies and cooperation with international institutions. 

Liam Campling

Dr Rowland Curtis

Rowland Curtis' research is located within the fields of organization studies and critical management studies. His work is concerned with interrelations between power, knowledge, subjectivity and critique in organization, and the implications of poststructural thought for empirical research practice. His doctoral research was concerned with the UK research assessment exercises and their relationship to changes in academic work, and has published on Foucault, discourse and realism in organization studies, among other topics. He is a member of the editorial collective of the open-access journal ephemera: theory and politics in organization.

Szilvia Mosonyi

In her research, Szilvia investigates macro and micro level practices in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Through this setting, she aims to answer questions around the processes of contemporary professionalization and relational aspects of identity work in tensional occupations. Principal in her investigation is professional service firms and consultant-client relationships. Szilvia is a member of the Centre for Professional Service Firms and ETHOS, the Centre for Responsible Enterprise at Cass Business School. She is committed to impactful research and she actively participates in practitioner-driven research projects, such as research on culture change in the banking sector launched in the UK Parliament, and on the effectiveness of responsible investment engagements for the UN-backed Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI). Currently, Szilvia is managing a research project on the institutional history of PRI.

Szilvia Mosonyi

Dr Elena Doldor

Dr Elena Doldor is a Reader in Organisational Behaviour at Queen Mary University of London, School of Business and Management. Before joining Queen Mary, she worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Cranfield School of Management, where she obtained her PhD. Elena has an MSc in Organizational Psychology from Pierre Mendes University, France, and was a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Northwestern University, USA. Elena's research examines the careers and leadership experiences of women and ethnic minorities in organizations. Her empirical work generally draws on naturalistic organisational data to investigate and theorize the psycho-social and organisational processes accounting for the lack of diversity in leadership.

 

Professor Pietro Panzarasa 

Pietro Panzarasa is Professor of Networks and Innovation. He is also Visiting Professor of Organisation Theory, Science of Science and Social Networks at IMT, School of Advanced Studies Lucca (Italy). Before joining QMUL, he held visiting positions at Columbia University (New York) and Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh), and was a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton (UK). He holds a PhD in Business Administration and Management from Bocconi University (Italy). Pietro’s research is concerned with the structural foundations of social capital within networked communities. He draws on network science, computational social science and big data analytics to study the performance implications of social structure in complex large-scale networks.

 

Sergio Barile 

Sergio Barile, PhD, is Full Professor of Management at Sapienza University of Rome where he leads the Department of Management and the PhD program on “Management, Banking and Commodities Science”. His research fields are: decision making, strategic management, management of innovation and knowledge management. In particular, rooting in the cybernetics and complexity perspective, he is developing an original framework -the Viable System Approach (VSA)- to understanding the decisional processes in complex social systems: the concepts of “information variety”, “consonance” and “resonance” are among the main seminal theoretical contributes of the VSA. He is author of several international scientific publications and principal investigator of many public and private funded projects. He is founder of ASVSA -Association for research on Viable Systems and founder of the scientific journal “Rivista di Studi Manageriali”.

Sergio Barile

Marcelo Enrique Conti

Marcelo Enrique Conti, PhD, is Associate Professor of Environmental Management at Sapienza University of Rome.  His primary research focus is on the management of the ecosystems’ complexity and their monitoring aspects (information & requisite variety). His ongoing interests revolve around researching the baseline contamination processes at a global level. Moreover, Marcelo is currently the PI for a top Sapienza grant (2018-2021) titled: Emerging landscapes: new jobs, new skills, new technologies and new organizational challenges in the industry 4.0 revolution. He has also been working extensively in the field of the management of industrial emissions, resilience, normative issues and the European environmental constitution. He is Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Environment and Health, board member, and outstanding reviewer of high-quality peer-reviewed journals in the field.

 Marcelo Enrique Conti

Cristina Simone

Cristina Simone, PhD, is Associate Professor of Management at Sapienza University of Rome. Cristina Simone’s research spans across the fields of Management, Innovation and Organisation Studies. Moving from a complexity-based approach, her work focuses upon the distributed technologies and their economic and organisational dimensions; the co-evolution of technological innovation and norms as a decoupling-recoupling process; the architecture of capabilities – both at the individual and organizational level - to face the emerging socio-economic landscapes. She is author of several international and national scientific publications and director of the book series “Management Organisation and Technology” (ManOTec) (Nuova Cultura ed., Rome). She is referee for outstanding international journals and she has been nominated “independent scientific expert referee” for the scientific evaluation of the Italian research (REPRISE) by the Italian Ministry of University and Research.

Cristina Simone
The dual digital and biotechnological revolution is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. In particular, the hybridization between digital technologies (AI, IoTIIoT, 3D printing, cloud-based design etc.) and biological is shaping a landscape with increasingly fuzzy boundaries. Not only industrial boundaries, knowledge boundaries across organizations and ecosystems, and the distinction between services and manufacturing are getting fuzzier than ever. Also the human nature is experiencing its own boundaries becoming fuzzier and fuzzier: from the augmented human (Human+) hypothesis to the post-human hypothesis, what will be the leap in the human condition? And in this context, how can historical reflections contribute to shaping future visions?
Part of the R&D Management ConferenceInnovation in an Era of Disruptions Wednesday 07 - Friday 09 July 2021.

Within the broad research areas of the OPPRG, as scholars we focus on and are keen to supervise PhD students interested in more specific issues, for example:

  • Everyday naturally occurring interactions and learning in organisations; the practices of management and leadership; the world of management development; practical actions and practical reasoning; situated learning, knowing-doing; the affordances of technologies in the spatial, temporal and material environments of working life; communities and networks of practice, situated management and learning; strategic capacities and actions; practices of diversity management; management education; the micro-politics of change.
  • Innovation, platforms, path dependence/creation, business history of innovation.
  • Technologies in the workplace.
  • Global value chains, national resources industries and redistribution.

PhD members

  • Ducan Reynolds

Duncan Reynolds is currently completing his PhD within the field of organisation studies. His work explores the role of trust(ing) in clinical trials, taking a practice-based approach. Trust is conventionally seen as vital in the effective running of high-quality healthcare services, and his research aims to shine light on how trusting works in practice. Duncan is a qualitative researcher with experience undertaking ethnography and a range of different interview types. Outside of academia Duncan is a passionate triathlete, competing at Ironman distance.

Back to top