Andrew Hoffman will delve into the issues explored in his book "The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today's World":

Society and democracy are ever threatened by the fall of fact. Rigorous analysis of facts, the hard boundary between truth and opinion, and fidelity to reputable sources of factual information are all in alarming decline. A 2018 report published by the RAND Corporation labeled this problem "truth decay" and Andrew J. Hoffman lays the challenge of fixing it at the door of the academy. But, as he points out, academia is prevented from carrying this out due to its own existential crisis - a crisis of relevance. Scholarship rarely moves very far beyond the walls of the academy and is certainly not accessing the primarily civic spaces it needs to reach in order to mitigate truth corruption. In this brief but compelling book, Hoffman draws upon existing literature and personal experience to bring attention to the problem of academic insularity - where it comes from and where, if left to grow unchecked, it will go - and argues for the emergence of a more publicly and politically engaged scholar. This book is a call to make that path toward public engagement more acceptable and legitimate for those who do it; to enlarge the tent to be inclusive of multiple ways that one enacts the role of academic scholar in today's world.

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Andrew Hoffman is a Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. Professor Hoffman's research uses organisational behaviour models and theories to understand the cultural and institutional aspects of environmental issues for organisations.

He has published over 100 articles and book chapters, as well as 18 books, which have been translated into six languages. In this work, he focuses on the processes by which environmental issues both emerge and evolve as social, political and managerial issues, including: the evolving nature of field level pressures related to environmental issues; the corporate responses that have emerged as a result of those pressures, particularly around the issue of climate change; the interconnected networks among non-governmental organisations and corporations and how those networks influence change processes within cultural and institutional systems; the social and psychological barriers to these change processes; and the underlying cultural values that are engaged when these barriers are overcome. He also writes about the role of academic scholars in public and political discourse.

He has received many awards and honours, including ONE Teaching Award (2020), the Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business Curricula (2020) and the Responsible Research in Management Award (2019).