Damian O'Doherty

Additional Information

Damian is a a passionate award winning teacher and is currently engaged in a number of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching including module leadership and examination responsibilities. He currently teaches a first year introduction to management and organization for 1st year undergraduates and a final year undergraduate module called 'Transformational Leadership'. Damian has also supervised 12 doctoral students through to completion and is currently supervising another 4.

Damian is an internationally recognised scholar for his work in management and organization theory. He is current head of the Management and Organizations group in the Alliance Manchester Business School. Professor O'Doherty is also founder and co-director of the BEAM nuclear and social research network based in the Dalton Institute at the University of Manchseter.

Damian writes and publishes in the areas of organization theory, the philosophy of organization, management education and learning, critical management studies, and labour process analysis. He sits as editorial board member for a number of top ranking global academic journals including Organization Studies, Academy of Management Learning and Education and Organization. He is currently working on papers based on his ongoing research into the management of the nuclear industry and theoretical papers based on his work in voluntary and community organizations in Manchester and the North-West of the UK.

Damian is also director of the Manchester Ethnography Network centred at the Alliance Manchester Business School and in 2017 took on the role of conference chair to host a major international conferece on ethnography in business and management at the University of Manchester. He will be taking up a visiting professorship at the Copenhagen Business School in the academic year 2020/2021 under the Otto Monsted fellowship scheme.

Damian has recently published Reconstructing Organization with Palgrave Macmillan. Based on a 2.5 year ethnographic study of UK international airport group this book reports finds that airports are complex sites of contested political, social and economic agendas. His findings suggest that the operation of airports exceed existing paradigmatic boundaries and demand serious reflection on the nature of social scientific research. He has published several papers that lay out the innovative nature of this study (Organization, 2009) and has presented a number of early papers based upon the original empirical material at a number of international academic conferences. A BBC film was made about this research and was broadcast in December 2010 and he has presented to a number of industry and policy making institutions in the UK and European aviation industry including the British Aviation Group and various international tourist associations interested in the economic development potential of airports.

This current research builds upon a longer term interest in questions of order and disorder in organization that was first addressed in a quartet of papers that looked at the question of theory in organization analysis; radical developments in "anti"-methodology; developments in subjectivity and identity; and pedagogy in management and organizational analysis. He has been published in various international peer reviewed journals, including Organization, Organization Studies, Sociology, Sociological Review, International Studies in Management and Organization, and Anthropology Today. He is former editor of the journal Culture and Organization and is currently Associate Editor of Organization is director of the Manchester Ethnmography network www.manchesterethnography.com

Most recently he has embarked on two new major research projects, one that involves supervision of a 5-year program of ethnographic research at the Sellafield nuclear facilities funded by the British Nuclear Fuels Endowment. His other major program of research is developing new approaches to understanding landscape as a hidden condition of possibility for business and organization, which has taken him to complete pilot ethnographic work in the Dee Estuary on the border of England and Wales in the UK.