Sarah Gilmore

• Professor (Associate) at University of Exeter

This special issue of Management Learning on ‘Writing Differently’ builds on a groundswell of resistance to ‘scientific’ norms of academic writing. These norms are restrictive, inhibit the development of knowledge and excise much of what it is to be human from our learning, teaching and research. Contributors to the special issue explore how, relea...

The aim of this article was to investigate the emotional educational–training–practice gap in the professional formation of sport and exercise psychologists in the United Kingdom through the theoretical lens of emotional labor. Twenty semistructured interviews were conducted with 4 participant groups: master’s students (n = 5), trainees (n = 5), ne...

The authors explore the was by which a journal paper came into being. In so doing, their stories expose the traditional narratives concerning research processes to be a hoax. The traditional model is of a linear, logical flow of ‘progress’ from idea to data collection, analysis and successful navigation of the journal review processes. The archaeol...

Objectives Our aim was to provide an insight into professional challenges encountered by sports medics and scientists (SMSs) in elite sport organizations and illuminate the emotional labor required to navigate such challenges. Design A semi-structured interview research design was used, and data informed the development of composite vignettes, a f...

This article gives a rare account of the working life of a sports psychologist in the English Premier League, the elite division in English professional football. It shows how members of emerging professions such as sports psychology are a new precariat. John is more successful than many sports psychologists, but his job security is dependent on hi...

The aim of the present study was to explore how sport medicine and science practitioners manage their emotions through emotional labor when engaging in professional practice in elite sport. To address the research aim a semi-structured interview design was adopted. Specifically, eighteen professional sport medicine and science staff provided interv...

This paper seeks to understand leaders as material presences. Leadership theory has traditionally explored leaders as sites of disembodied traits, characteristics and abilities. Our qualitative, mixed method study suggests that managers charged with the tasks of leadership operate within a very different understanding. Their endogenous or lay theor...

This article contributes to contemporary debates about the significance of emotions within Higher Education. Using a psychoanalytic lens we analyse the ways in which experiences of anxiety and tension are essential for learning. The anxiety associated with learning can stimulate meaningful and reflexive outcomes but ‘learning inaction’ [Vince, R. 2...

Football, or soccer as it is known in the United States, is one area in which managerial positions are hugely volatile with what is often called a ‘merry-go-round’ of managers sacked for poor performance at their club and reemployed by another club. Not only does this practice often not increase performance but it is also very costly. Considering t...

This study responded to recent calls for the investigation of employees’ responses to repeated organizational change events. Data were gathered via 20 semi-structured interviews with 10 employees from 2 organizations competing in English football's Barclays Premier League. The results indicated that employees responded to recurring organizational c...

For clubs qualifying for the UEFA Europa League, participation generates a series of tensions. UEFA has provided financial rewards for those clubs, but with qualification comes additional pressures on playing squads which are often less able to deal with the performative demands of an extra competition, as they generally possess fewer financial res...

For clubs qualifying for the UEFA Europa League, participation generates a series of tensions. UEFA has provided financial rewards for those clubs, but with qualification comes additional pressures on playing squads which are often less able to deal with the performative demands of an extra competition, as they generally possess fewer financial res...

Leadership studies have largely ignored the materiality of leadership, that is, the physical presence of leaders in interaction with followers. An emergent aesthetics of leadership points to ways of exploring leadership as embodied communication. This paper explores how managers work on their appearance and in so doing embody discourses of leadersh...

While organizational ethnographers have embraced the concept of self-reflexivity, problems remain. In this article we argue that the prevalent assumption that self-reflexivity is the sole responsibility of the individual researcher limits its scope for understanding organizations. To address this, we propose an innovative method of collective refle...

Despite the emergence of and widespread uptake of a growing range of medical and scientific professions in elite sport, such environs present a volatile professional domain characterized by change and unprecedentedly high turnover of personnel. This study explored sport medicine and science practitioners' experiences of organizational change using...

One of the most significant changes in contemporary organizations concerns the position of women who increasingly occupy and share organizational spaces that were previously male dominated. This signals potential for changes in organizational 'modes of existence' and, especially, new possibilities for gendered identities. This paper explores some o...

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate how sports science was institutionalised and rapidly deinstitutionalised within a Premier League football club. Institutional theory has been critiqued for its lack of responsiveness to change, but recent developments within institutional theory such as the focus on deinstitutionalisation as an explanation o...

How do researchers account for their interactions with participants when employing in-depth, ethnographic studies of organizations? In this chapter, instead of limiting ourselves to discussions of ‘reflexivity’, a common term among organizational ethnographers, we propose that ideas from the neighbouring field of psychosocial and psychoanalytic stu...

Accounting for homogenous action in seemingly apparent heterogeneous organizations is a research question that persists across prominent organizational studies literatures, and which have become more persistent and pertinent as organizations have become more global and diverse. To address how differing forms of relatively homogeneous solutions to p...

This article contributes an analysis of the use of experiential learning and reflection within a management education context where its use has received less attention: a learning environment dominated by the requirements of a professional body, where successful attainment of the qualification offered by the programme is linked with entry into the...

Purpose This paper aims to explore the introduction of a new experience‐based learning process in the learning and teaching of human resource development (HRD) within a professionally accredited curriculum in a UK University. Design/methodology/approach An action enquiry approach is taken, and qualitative data gathered over a full academic year fr...

You have to feel a degree of sympathy for Roy Keane and his managerial colleaguesin association football. While many occupying the manager’s position are certainly handsomely remunerated and enjoy a certain lifestyle, they are also subjected to intense media and stakeholder scrutiny with regard to their performance and associated decisions. The exp...

Based upon an extended case study of Bolton Wanderers Football Club, this article argues that asset management strategies need to be accompanied by human resource management (HRM) practices capable of identifying, attracting, developing and retaining strategically valuable staff (as well as skilled players) with the requisite knowledge and abilitie...

Purpose To explain how an organization has been able to use seismic changes in its wider external environment to transform its performance without the need for radical internal restructuring or coercive forms of leadership. Design/methodology/approach This paper utilises a three year case study from elite sport, an under‐represented sector in the...

Using qualitative data drawn from one specific instance of workplace virtuality and emotion — the experience of delivering online seminars using `chat-rooms' — we explore how emotion was productively transformed through the use of virtuality in a teaching and learning setting, a workplace environment for thousands of academics. Using social constru...

Purpose The purpose of this article is to analyse the extent to which the CIPD's professional project can be successfully realised. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on a two‐fold literature review that analyses the professional project with reference to nascent professions. This review is then applied to the CIPD's qualification sche...

Over the past decade innovation and creativity have been portrayed as a crucial means by which organisations secure competitive advantage. Seeking to enhance the creative potential of their employees, many seemingly progressive organisations utilise an array of methodologies - from creating culture of fun and play, to commissioning beautifully desi...

I think you've got to have a good relationship with your team and with your players - you've got to have a good trusting relationship with them…there has to be a balance - whether you call it respect or trust. Our job is to make the team better and to m ake the players better - individually and collectively. Our job is to make…to get success we nee...