• • Undergraduate
  • Masters
  • PhD
• • Departments
  • People
  • Research
• • Leadership
  • Executive
  • SMEs
• • Alumni
  • Recruiters
  • Careers
• • About Us
  • News
  • Events

Staff Profiles

Home > Staff Profiles > Professor Bill Cooke

Professor Bill Cooke

Professor, Head of Department

External Roles

Bill is on the editorial board of the journals Management and Organizational History, Organization, and the Critical Management Board of The Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences.

He has been a resident Visiting Professor at FGV-EAESP in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and is ongoing visiting professor there. He is a supporter of LAEMOS, the Latin-American-Europe Management and Organizational Studies Group, and has been a keynote at their conference.

Bill is a board member and trustee of the international humanitarian NGO MAG (www.mag.org.uk); and  between 2004 and 2008 he held leadership roles in the Critical Management Studies Interest Group of the US Academy of Management. In 2008 he led the Interest Group to Division status in the Academy. In 2010 he participated in symposia on engagements between management and international development.

He has also served as an external PhD and masters' examiner for a number of institutions including the Open University, Leicester, Cambridge, Bristol, St Marys Canada, University of Sydney, Birmingham, Bradford, and City University/Tavistock Institute.

Current Teaching

Bill enjoys teaching undergraduate, post-graduate Masters' and MBA classes. He also has worked extensively with managers in the workplace, and is keen to teach in a way which blends management theory, and his and his students' work experiences.

Bill was module tutor on the latest cycle of the International Masters in Practicing Management (inspired by the work of Henry Mintzberg), where he worked with managers from (among others) LG, Boeing, and Lufthansa.

Professional Role

Head of the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology

Member Management School Policy and Resources Committee

Qualifications

BA (CNAA),MSc (Sheffield City Polytechnic), PGCTLHE (Teesside), PhD (Manchester), Member, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (MCIPD)

Profile

After graduating as a mature student, Bill worked in local government, and then as an OD consultant, first for BT and then as a partner in his own consultancy business. His first academic post at the University of Teesside.

Having worked in Eastern Europe while at Teesside, he then joined the Institute for Development Policy and Management at the University of Manchester, where he directed both its MSc in Organizational Change and Development, and its MA in Development Administration and Management. While there he also worked in Kenya, Tanzania, Nepal, and with the UN Secretariat.

Bill left IDPM to join Manchester School of Management, which soon after became part of the new Manchester Business School. There he developed his work on the global and historical spread of management.

He was pleased to be invited to join Lancaster in 2007, and proud to follow in the footsteps of Professor Brian Bloomfield and Professor Lucas Introna in becoming Head of Department of Organisation, Work and Technology in 2010/11.

Research Interests

Bill's interests are in the temporal and spatial spread of managerialism (that is, its historic development and its international applications). He is currently working these related areas

• Management and Organizational History as an international phenomenon
• The role of international  development institutions in the spread of management
• Participatory management processes.
• Brazil

Current Research

Bill is currently working on a book about the history of American Philanthropy and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. His projects at the moment are:

• Managerialism and management gurus in Brazil (with colleagues from FGV-EAESP, Sao Paulo)
• The Ford Foundation and management education in Brazil (supported by a British Academy Grant)
• The Rockefeller Foundation and the transatlantic roots of soft managerialism (the book project)
• The World Bank's uses of management ideas.
• The "New" Management in International Development
• Participatory research methododologies

He is keen to supervise PhD students in these and related areas.

• View All Profiles
• Browse Profiles by Department