Dr Richard Longman

Professional biography

I am Head of The Open University Business School and a researcher working across critical organisation studies and the business humanities. My work is organised around questions of audibility: who is heard in organisational life, whose knowledge becomes authoritative, what is ignored or classified as noise, and how silences are produced and maintained. These questions shape both my scholarship and my approach to academic leadership.

As Head of School, I lead the academic direction and organisational development of a globally delivered, triple-accredited School. My ambition is for the School to demonstrate that openness, inclusion, and academic excellence can be mutually reinforcing: offering rigorous management education at scale, producing research grounded in organisational life as it is lived, and extending access to people historically excluded by more conventional models of business education.

I was originally trained as a classical musician and worked for many years as a performer, conductor, and musical director. That experience continues to inform how I understand organisations: as embodied, affective, and aesthetic accomplishments in which rhythm, listening, interpretation, and collective attention matter. It also underpins my continuing research into songs, sounds, and silences as ways of encountering the political and ethical dimensions of organisational life.

Research interests

My research examines how organisations determine what can be heard and known. I am particularly interested in the relationships between knowledge, voice, and effect, and in how these shape organisational responses to contested social and ecological conditions.

A distinctive strand of this work develops the idea of organisational audibility. Rather than treating listening as a neutral or universally benevolent activity, I examine how listening is structured by institutional expectations, professional classifications, and established relations of power. Organisations do not simply receive voices; they help decide which voices sound credible, competent, disruptive, excessive, or out of place.

This research encompasses several connected areas:

• the organisation of voice, silence, and listening;
• classification and the governance of professional identities;
• feminist, posthuman, and postqualitative approaches to knowledge making;
• aesthetics, embodiment, and affect in organisational life; and
• critical and alternative approaches to management and organising.

Much of my empirical work is based in creative and cultural settings, including opera, orchestras, and arts organisations. These settings make especially audible the organisational politics of interpretation, authority, discipline, collaboration, and embodied judgement. They also offer resources for thinking beyond assumptions that organisations can be understood solely through managerial categories, formal structures, or measurable outputs.

Publications and public scholarship

My research has appeared in journals including Work, Employment and Society, Management Learning, Organization, Feminism and Organization, Women, Gender & Research and puntOorg, as well as in edited collections on critical management, aesthetics and epistemology. I have also contributed to the Financial Times’ Business School Professors’ Picks.

Alongside academic publishing, I also write Organising Songs, Sounds, and Silences – a public-facing series exploring music, sound, and social life. The essays bring sonic analysis into conversation with organisational inquiry, political critique, and personal narrative. Songs become ways of thinking about solidarity, authority, memory, classification, belonging, and collective possibility.

This public scholarship is part of a wider commitment to making critical work intellectually serious without making it inaccessible. It approaches listening as a method of inquiry and a political practice: a way of noticing how social worlds are organised, whose presence they amplify, and what they train us not to hear.

Teaching interests

My teaching is grounded in critical thinking, intellectual openness, and close engagement with the complex realities of organisational life. I want students to encounter business and management education as a space in which received ideas can be examined, competing forms of knowledge brought into relation, and questions of responsibility pursued without easy resolution.

I have designed and led teaching across online, hybrid and face-to-face settings for diverse and internationally distributed student groups. I am the author of the award-winning case study Leadership, Legacy, and Accountability, which places students inside a contested organisational situation involving institutional history, ethical responsibility, and the limits of individual leadership.

I hold a Master’s in Education from the University of Cambridge, a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Professional Practice, and Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.

Doctoral supervision

Editorial and external engagement

I am an Associate Editor of Culture and Organization and Feminism and Organization, and serve on the editorial boards of Organization and Management Learning. I previously served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal and as Chair of the Critical Management Studies Division of the Academy of Management.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and work with scholars, practitioners, artists and institutions interested in critical management education, cultural organisation and more inclusive ways of producing and sharing knowledge.