Culture, Organisations and Markets

The COM group focuses on  culture, organisations and markets (COM) and provides a forum for scholars interested in the study of work, cultures of work, work systems/organisation, and to markets, consumers and consumption within the context of social and economic change. Embracing qualitative and ethnographic methods, the group’s research perspectives that are inter-disciplinary and sensitive to gendered social relations in work and consumption and to issues of power, inequality, identity and accountability in cultural formations. Members of the COM group serve as editors and assistant editors for the journals Gender, Work and Organization (GWO), Marketing Theory and Ethnography. They are actively engaged in organising the annual GWO conference and the annual Ethnography conference jointly with Liverpool University.

Supervision Topics

The Culture, Organisation and Markets group have a wealth of PhD supervision experience and wishes to encourage applications in the following areas. If you are interested in any of these topics, or a closely related topic, then please do contact Liz Parsons at e.parsons@keele.ac.uk.  Further details on how to apply can be found here

Emma Bell

  • organisational culture
  • representations of organization in popular culture including film
  • work and identity, including professionalization, embodied identity and power/gender relations
  • spirituality, religion and belief in organization
  • organizational memory, death, loss and grief
  • research using qualitative methods, including ethnography/autoethnography or visual methods
  • critical management studies

 Geoff Heath

  • performance measurement in the public sector;
  • new approaches to budgeting and costing in the public sector

 Bahar Ali Kazmi

  • corporate social responsibility

 Mihaela Kelemen

  • culture
  • quality
  • leadership
  • community/volunteering
  • American Pragmatism
  • cross-cultural management
  • identity
  • service industries

Anita Mangan

  • Theoretical focus: Foucault, power and control, identity and subjectivity, critical management studies
  • Empirical research: Volunteers and volunteering processes, non-profit modes of organising, community organisations.

Helen Oakes

  • The roles of accounting in organisations, including Habermasian, phenomenological or postmodern analyses
  • Alternative accountings
  • Methodological and epistemological issues relating to accounting
  • Ethical issues in smaller firms
  • Tax evasion, tax avoidance, tax havens

 Liz Parsons

  • consumer culture
  • material culture
  • Alternative and/or second-hand consumption
  • critical marketing
  • gender and identity at work