Staff Profile
Dr Owen Powell
Lecturer in Human Resource Management
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Creating space and time to engage, learn, and thrive is central to my personal philosophy and thus to my approach to life, work, and research.
I studied BA (Hons) in Business Studies and Marketing (with International Experience), MA in Management by Research, followed by a PhD at Bangor Business School, Bangor University. My doctoral thesis, ‘Creaking, slipping, and the goldilocks zone: Cultivating relevance in established and scaled worker cooperatives’ (Powell, 2021), drew from four case organisations, employing grounded theory analysis to develop a nuanced understanding of the experiences of members. The findings contributed to our understanding of prefigurative modes of organising – and indeed organising more generally, with respect to popular interest in sustaining horizontal structures and developing worker participation and ownership models.
Between 2019 and 2022 I freelanced part/full-time while finishing my PhD write-up and then after submitting my thesis. My practice primarily involved working with SMEs (limited by shares and by guarantee) across the varied fields of social innovation, music, manufacturing, arts festivals, and community-led housing. This hands-on experience of applying much of what I had studied as a business student was hugely rewarding. In 2021/22 I worked as Research Associate on an HE-industry partnership project for Birmingham Business School (University of Birmingham). In 2022 I was hired as a part-time Research Fellow role, supporting the Institute of Local Government Studies’ ‘Social Prescribing, Assets, and Relationships in Communities (SPARC): Coproducing Shared Responsibilities for Wellbeing’ Project (University of Birmingham).
I have experience effectively collaborating with partners, stakeholders, and colleagues to develop and deliver projects that achieve their aims and deliver desired outputs and outcomes. My experience of developing funding bids outside of academia includes leading on securing a total of £52k (Arts Council England, SolidFund, City of York Council) and contributing to securing a further £74k (Locality / Community Housing Fund) in 2021.
- School – York Business School
- Email – o.powell@yorksj.ac.uk
Teaching
I have been engaged in teaching in higher education since 2016 and attained Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy while undertaking my doctoral studies at Bangor University. I am currently working towards full Fellowship via York St John.
I am comfortable delivering teaching in lecture settings but have also found significant enjoyment in delivering/facilitating seminars to groups of 10 to 20 students, where more dialogic and student-centred approaches are more feasible. Despite the challenges, I have found that group work and presentation skills remain an essential feature of business school pedagogy – both in terms of the benefits to learning and the importance of developing associated skills for future employment.
I bring not only my enthusiasm for academia and research into my teaching, but also my lived experience of devising, developing, and delivering engaging and successful projects for individuals and communities. This combination of education and experience enables me to breathe life into the material my students are studying, and I take pride in being able to engage them in theories and concepts whilst connecting this to their own experience.
I believe human organising is a fantastically rich area of study, research, and work; one that fuses multiple fields of knowledge with the fabric and practice of our lives. There is much to learn and still more to discover; providing students with the language, tools, and resources to do so is a privilege.
Research
In Autumn 2022, I co-authored a paper with Dr Daniel Wheatley, Professor Matthew Broome, Professor Tony Dobbins, and Dr Ben Hopkins at the University of Birmingham (submitted for publication). In June 2022, I co-delivered a paper titled ‘Social Prescribing, Assets and Relationships in Communities (SPARC): Co-producing a Social Model of Wellbeing’ with Dr Koen Bartels (INLOGOV, University of Birmingham) at the 8th Cross-Sector Social Interactions Symposium, Wageningen. In 2020, I delivered a paper titled ‘Democratic organising: Insights from the cooperative frontier’ at the 36th European Group for Organisation Studies Colloquium, Hamburg.
I am currently working on a paper titled ‘Unlearning for democratic organising’ with Dr Koen Bartels as well as a joint research project focused on the UK worker cooperative movement with a small team including researchers at Nottingham Trent University and Swansea University.
My research interests include but are not limited to: organization studies; horizontal structures; participation; sensemaking; knowledge creation/sharing; qualitative research; interpretive research; relational process ontology; integrative governance; social innovation; community wellbeing; land ownership; cultural strategy; design for good.
