Professor Damian O'Doherty BA (Hons.), M.A, PhD

Personal Statement

Damian is Professor of Management and Organization and was appointed into the Work Organization and Management Group at the University of Liverpool in June 2021. He is current group director of research and is driving research in the school around organizational and employee well being. He is also an Honoury Professor at the Alliance Manchester Business School in the University of Manchester and held an Otto Monsted Visiting Chair at the Copenhagen Business School 2020-2021, where he also a visiting professor. He has previously held posts at the University of Manchester where he held a chair in Management and Organization Studies and was founding director of two research centres: The BEAM nuclear and social research network that integrates work in the Dalton Institute with research by colleagues in business and management studies, anthropology and the social studies of science and technology; and the Manchester Ethnography Network that was funded to deliver a 5 year program of research activities including primary research, publication and impact.

Damian is widely published and has attracted international recognition for his work. His reputation was established during early work he conducted in labour proces theory helping to establish the 'Manchester School' of critical management studies. Early papers also made contributions to debates in the standing conference on organization symbolism. His most recent monograph 'Reconstructing Organization: The Loungification of Society' published by Macmillan was nominated for book of the year by the European Group of Orrganization Studies (EGOS) in 2018. He is senior editorial board member of Organization and senior editor for the Academy of Management Learning and Education. He also sits on the editorial board of a number of other journals, and is former editor-in-chief of Culture and Organization. Damian works as an ethnographer of organization which is informed by anthropological and philosophical discipline drawing inspiration from contemporary work in the social studies of science and technology and a counter-modern or 'anti-tradition' of intellectual inquiry that draws a line from Nietzsche into Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida.

Damian has been working in recent years on extending the understanding of organization beyond its anthropogenic limits and is conducting fieldwork into patterns of organization that link a range of human and non-human materials and practices across restaurants, farming, the working of soil, permaculture, homesteading communities, landscape ethnogeomorphology, community forest gardens, and party political policy development. He is working on papers that address debates in social movement theory, alternative organizations, community resiliance, and organization and the natural environment. His most recent publications have addressed the role of ethnographic film in the management learning of climate change and extinction.