Our Vision
The British Academy of Management is supporting the drive to reimagine business.
Who benefits? asks Gibson Burrell in this issue when discussing the role of business in the world.
That question is close to our heart as an organisation that seeks to make the world a better place, and is echoed in the many thoughtful contributions printed in this magazine. Quinetta Roberson recommends businesses to ask themselves ‘how they can be true citizens of the world’ as part of creating sustainable organisations.
Tera Allas sees the impact on customers, employees and community as the starting point for any business. Others importantly point to good mental health and good work as central to sustainability.
So, how does the British Academy of Management support and enact this drive to reimagine business and management as a force for good?
Our vision is to be a pluralistic learned society, contributing to the development of management knowledge and practice nationally and internationally. We strive to be inclusive, recognise and respect the diversity in our community, and promote excellence in all we do.
In this way we create a ‘safe space’ for our members, outside and beyond their own institutions, where they can share ideas, develop new skills, build new networks, and find peer support and – importantly – friendship. This can open up forward-looking, imaginative and inclusive conversations.
Sound structure
A sound structure is central to the sustainability of any community, so we created new trustee roles for Equality, Diversity, Inclusivity & Respect and for Sustainability to embed these core values in everything we do – ‘Actions, not words’, as Sacha Sadan aptly notes in this magazine.
Actions underpin our BAM2024 strategy. We commissioned and are publishing innovative research looking at EDI and mental wellbeing in business and management academic careers, and have produced concrete recommendations for how to make our academic institutions into better workplaces.
We published a practical guide to staging accessible, inclusive and sustainable events (All Welcome). We created the BAM Framework to give all scholars the means of understanding and navigating the academic career landscape, and we stage events and programmes to support them as they find their own path through that landscape – whether it’s research-focused, education-focused or engagement-focused.
Our international scholarly journals – the British Journal of Management and International Journal of Management Reviews – publish excellent research, but our editors also have a remit to develop the community, which they do via a developmental approach to review plus direct engagement with scholars around the world. We signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and publicly express our support for the Responsible Research in Business and Management movement (RRBM) as expressions of our mission to benefit our world.
We constantly strive to reimagine business and management as a force for good.
Engagement
Engagement beyond the academy – with policy, practice and wider publics – is vital if that research is to be useful and make a difference. We bring together expertise and knowledge to help those making public policy through participation in consultations, and we publish an innovative book series on the impact of management research.
Our enthusiastic members work together to provide our members with growth opportunities through a packed programme of workshops, training events and community-building activities, as well as through our Peer Review College. Within our 24 Special Interest Groups we grow future leaders of our wider communities who can take our core values out into the world. International collaborations with sister bodies that share our values give us new perspectives.
Within the British Academy of Management we constantly strive to reimagine business and management as a force for good, so that an activity which has lain at the heart of human endeavour for millenia works for people and for our planet. Our community is growing fast, with over 2200 members, ranging from doctoral researchers through to those leading business schools and entire universities, and who are located in more than 50 countries right around the globe. Through the energy and dedication of our volunteers putting our core values into practice we can make a difference.
