Tony Watson

BA (London), MSc (Loughborough), PhD (Nottingham)

Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Work and Org.

Department: Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management
E-mail: Tony.Watson@nottingham.ac.uk

Tony Watson an organisational sociologist whose work focuses on 'real practices' in the organisational and managerial world with a significant proportion of his research and consultancy having been carried out by actually joining management teams in organisations.

He started his business career in Rolls-Royce, carrying out academic research at the same time as co-ordinating a major organisational change. Later, in the 1990s, he worked on secondment for a year as a senior manager in GEC-Plessey Telecommunications. This led to the writing of the highly influential and much cited participant-observation ethnography, In Search of Management (1994) - which has sold well over 10,000 copies. Alongside research articles and the other research monographs The Personnel Managers (1977) and The Emergent Manager (1999), there have been several textbooks, including Organising and Managing Work (2nd edition 2006) and Sociology, Work and Organisation, 7th edition 2017).

Recent work focuses on applying the four concepts of self-identity, social-identity, persona and identity-work to people's involvement in work organisations. Stress is put on the advantages of setting these and other issues within pragmatic realist and emergent-relational methodological and theoretical frames of reference.

Recent Publications

The following lists my publications from 2014 to the present day.

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Type	Year	Publication
Chapter in book	2020	Watson, T. (2020)., "Human identities, identify work, and Organizations: Putting the sociological imagination into practice", in AD Brown (ed.) ed Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations, pp. 279-297, Oxford University Press
Chapter in book	2018	Watson, T. (2018)., "Ethnography and the Management of Organisations", in Qualitative Methodologies in Organisation Studies, (1), Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan
Authored book	2017	Watson, T (2017)., Sociology, (7th), London, Routledge
Chapter in book	2016	Watson, T. (2016)., "Organizational identity and organizational identity work as valuable analytical resources", in Pratt, M.; Schultz, M; Ashfort, B ed The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity, Oxford OUP
Chapter in book	2014	Watson, T.J. (2014)., "Organizations as Negotiated Orders", in International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Amsterdam: Elsevier., forthcoming
Chapter in book	2014	Watson, T.J. (2014)., "HRM as a Profession", in Wiley Encyclopedia of Managemen, London: Wiley., forthcoming
Journal article	2014	Spedale, S.; Watson, T.J. (2014)., "The emergence of entrepreneurial action at the cross-roads between institutional logics and individual life-orientation" International Small Business Journal, Vol. 32, pp. 759-776

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There is a strong continuity between my research, my writing and my teaching. For me, research is about developing knowledge, and writing and teaching are two ways in which this research is communicated to audiences - whether these be students, other researchers or practitioners. And there is an especially close relationship between research and teaching in supervising student dissertations (which I do across the range from PhD to undergraduate). My teaching at Nottingham includes the leadership of a large undergraduae module on 'Organising and Managing in Practice', and contributions to the MBA, the Executive MBA, Executive development work and the doctoral programme.

The emphasis has been integrative and innovative. Integration comes in the linking of societal, organisational and ?personal identity? levels of work organisation and experience in modern societies. The work has been innovative in method (developing ethnographic techniques), theory (developing a distinctive ?pragmatist? and ?relational? perspective) and presentation (developing, for especially sensitive research material, a novel ?ethnographic fiction science? technique and making a film, ?It?s not your business?). The aim, across research publications, has been to bring a distinctive methodological and theoretical approach to areas ?beyond OB?: making significant contributions to thinking on strategy, HRM, management learning, ethics, entrepreneurship, methodology (esp. epistemology and ontology), and methods (esp. ethnography).

Tony is currently supervising the following Research Students:

Justus Boeckmann

Tony Watson

Recent Publications

Nottingham University Business School

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