Professor Michal Izak
Professor
Biography
Michal Izak is a Professor in Organisation Studies at the Chester Business School, University of Chester. He is an active researcher and has published in international scholarly journals such as Organization Studies; Human Relations; Work, Employment and Society, and many other. He is an Associate Editor of Management Learning journal, as well as an editorial board member of Organisation Studies, and acts as a regular reviewer to over thirty academic journals. He is the Business School Research Lead and REF 29 Unit of Assessment coordinator (UoA 17). He also conducts research outreach activities (recently: TEDx), and writes for practitioner outlets. Prior to joining the University of Chester he worked at the University of Essex, Lincoln and Roehampton, as well as had a brief career in consulting before joining the academia.
Teaching and Supervision
Michal strongly believes that teaching at the university level should be research-informed. Consequently, his main areas of teaching correspond to his research areas (e.g. the recent re-shaping of the work and employment patters, flexible, mobile and hybrid work), as well as methodological expertise (qualitative research methods and research philosophy). He convened, taught and coordinated twenty research-informed courses in the areas of Organisation Studies, Human Relations and Organisational Behaviour at all levels of UG and PGT/PGR provision, led a PhD program and successfully supervised doctoral projects to a completion.
Research and Knowledge Exchange
His research interests include flexible working discourses and their ideological underpinnings, ethnographic and narrative approaches to organisational analysis, as well as critical management studies. His main research focus is on critically exploring opportunities and contradictions embedded in the New World of Work (NWOW) in the context of its impact on the future of work. He also researches organizational communication and especially those organizational contexts in which dialogic perspective on communication is ill-suited.