I’ve always had a fascination with how organisations discuss their strategies – the things that they say and how plausible that is, because it’s often quite noble. I found it particularly intriguing to look at this area because it brings up the purpose of organising, especially around social good. So I’ve been looking at the relationships between how organisations talk about their social responsibilities and how they implement those.

In terms of more specific themes to my research, one strand is around legitimacy signals. I’ve done work with colleagues here in Bath and in the US about how sustainability standards connect with a firm’s performance on sustainability. Looking at that is really interesting, because it’s not linear.

I’ve been thinking about how business schools, too, signal their legitimacy and their commitment to values around social justice and climate change.

An important part of ICHEM is its relationship with our DBA in Higher Education Management. I was brought in from the start of my PhD to teach on the DBA, which was about 14 years ago.

For the past six years I’ve also been supervising DBA students, and then I took over as a Co-Director with Professor Jürgen Enders about a year ago. As he moved into retirement over summer 2025, I became the Director. I’ve been handed the keys to the castle, as it were!

We have so much going on! Professor Martyna Sliwa has recently co-edited a book on inclusive pedagogy, which is really interesting. Professor Dirk Lindebaum has been publishing some really thought-provoking work in management journals, developing a deeper understanding of the implications of digitisation, especially AI, on learning.

One of my DBA students, Michael Salmon, has been writing about this relatively new genre of policy work that happens in universities and the professionalisation around it. Another DBA student of mine, Doaa Gharzeddine, has published research with Professor Dan Davies on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and what they mean in universities. There’s such variety in the research that the DBAs produce.

ICHEM has such a strong legacy. How do we preserve its rich heritage and what it stands for, for the hundreds of people who are actively part of the Centre? While we’re driving a path forward, we need to continue to enrich and connect ICHEM with the university ecosystem internationally.

We already have the ICHEM seminar series, which has been running for decades and acts as a networking and knowledge sharing hub. We are also starting to host writing retreats for researchers in higher education, and right now we’re beginning to plan our next ICHEM conference for summer 2027.

Hopefully we’ll be drawing and building upon the extraordinary work that has gone before, which is this strong sense of a centre that’s there to ask the most important questions that universities face around the world.

We’re in a much less certain environment than we were when I first joined the Centre in 2012 [but its role has never been more important as] a platform to have these discussions and debates, given the political nature of the world. We also need to think about how that polarisation contains implications for how we conceive ourselves as part of this interconnected HE system.

From the work we’ve carried out so far, it appears to be true that learning technologies are often designed for users and students directly, more so than for delivery of education in a university classroom. This could mean that over time it will be the users who come to demand certain technologies more than it is the universities who decide [on] and curate those technologies. So there’s this balance between how students want to learn and what university educators want to do with the technologies [universities are] already using. Students come into university already technologically oriented.

Before now, we would say that the university would decide whether they had Moodle or a different platform, for example, but it feels that there’ll be more movement in technologies in use, and we could see more flexibility in future – in this way giving students more power and universities relatively less say.

The ecosystem for education based on EdTech is kind of disturbing who’s in control of how education is delivered and what learning even is. It’s shaking the foundations for sure, and we won’t know what that means for decades to come.