Dr Gemma Lord

Professional biography

I am a Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour in the Department for People and Organisations at The Open University Business School (OUBS). My research examines how organisations and communities organise care, responsibility and socioecological relations under conditions of political, economic and ecological constraint. I am particularly interested in what different forms of organising make possible, difficult or consequential, and in how organisations negotiate tensions between economic viability, social purpose and ecological conditions.

My work spans public and voluntary-sector organising, care and public value, sustainability and socioecological change, and alternative and post-growth forms of organising. I take a critical, interdisciplinary approach, drawing particularly on organisation studies, critical management studies, sociology, political ecology and critical public policy.

Before joining OUBS, I completed a PhD in Business and Management at the University of Manchester and an MA in Politics: Governance and Public Policy. Prior to academia, I worked for nearly a decade in public and voluntary-sector roles focused on service design, participation and engagement. These experiences continue to inform my research and teaching.

Research interests

My research is concerned with how organising shapes relations of care, responsibility and value, particularly where organisations and communities are working within, against or beyond established economic and institutional arrangements. Across different empirical settings, I examine how responsibilities are allocated, how particular forms of knowledge and value come to matter, and how social, economic and ecological conditions become consequential in organisational practice.

I am interested both in the pressures that reshape organisations - including austerity, marketisation and performance-driven forms of governance - and in attempts to create and sustain alternative ways of organising. Rather than treating these as straightforward oppositions, my research attends to the tensions, compromises and unintended consequences that emerge in practice.

My current research develops across three connected areas:

1. Care, public value and the organisation of responsibility: Research examining how care and public and voluntary-sector work are shaped by austerity, marketisation, commissioning and changing relations between the state, civil society and communities. This builds on longstanding interests in poverty, charity work, accountability and the conditions under which relational forms of care can be sustained.

2. Alternative organising and socioecological change: Current research examines organisations seeking to organise differently in response to social and ecological challenges. This includes multi-sited ethnographic research with permaculture-rooted initiatives, exploring relations with land, socioecological regeneration, sufficiency and the practical work involved in sustaining alternative forms of organising.

3. Collective change, post-growth and distributed organising: Research concerned with how alternative practices and orientations become consequential beyond individual organisations. This includes work on post-growth and degrowth, prefigurative organising, and forms of scaling and coordination that do not depend upon conventional organisational growth or centralisation.

Methodologically, my research is primarily qualitative and ethnographic. I am particularly interested in how close attention to everyday practices, relationships and situated understandings can contribute to conceptual development, while remaining attentive to complexity, contradiction and the limits of what empirical research can claim.

PhD Supervision

I welcome PhD proposals related to:

• Care, public value and public or voluntary-sector organising
• Sustainability, socioecological change and agroecology
• Alternative, prefigurative and post-growth organising
• Organising, responsibility and social change
• Critical approaches to policy, evaluation and accountability
• Qualitative and ethnographic approaches to organisation and management

Teaching interests

I teach across organisational behaviour, critical management and research methodology. My teaching brings theory into conversation with complex organisational and societal questions, drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and my previous experience in public and voluntary-sector organisations. I am committed to inclusive, reflective and critically engaged approaches to teaching that encourage students to question assumptions, engage with different perspectives and connect organisational ideas with the worlds in which they are practised.