ECU Team and Associates

Derin Kent

Derin Kent is Associate Professor of Organisation Studies at Warwick Business School and Co-Director of its Extreme Contexts Unit. He specialises in ethnographic research with people who work in physically or psychologically dangerous settings. Over the years, this has meant embedding with participants ranging from storm chasers to seafarers to disaster relief teams to derive insights into how people and organisations thrive under adversity. His research appears in top academic journals including Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, and Organization Theory, and outlets like Harvard Business Review and The Conversation

Prior to joining Warwick, Derin was a postdoc at Aalto University (Finland) and obtained his PhD at Queen’s University (Canada). Outside of academia, Derin is an outdoor enthusiast and an Operational Team Leader at the British Red Cross.

Adrian Marrison

Adrian Marrison, PhD (Cambridge), is an organisational ethnographer who studies how people engage with their work, their occupations, and the organisations that shape them – particularly when risk, uncertainty, and danger are part of everyday life. As Assistant Professor of Organisation & Work at Warwick Business School and Co-Director of its Extreme Contexts Unit, he has spent extended periods embedded in challenging work environments, including a twelve-month, full-time ethnography inside a prison and (as analyst) collaborative research on citizen policing groups. His teaching draws on these themes to explore how people and organisations navigate change and complexity in everyday work. His research has been recognised in top academic journals such as The Academy of Management Journal and through honours including Finalist for the 2024 Grigor McClelland Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Davide Nicolini

Davide Nicolini is Professor of Organisation Studies at Warwick Business School and coordinates the IKON Research Centre and co-ordinates the Practice, Process and Institution Research Programme and the KIN network. His current research focuses on the development of the practice-based approach and its application to phenomena such as expertise, managerial knowing and attention, collaboration, safety and technological innovation in organizations. He is also interested in the refinement and promotion of processual, relational and materialist research methods. He has used these approaches to study healthcare organizations, managerial work, construction sites, factories, public organizations, cybersecurity, pharmacies, and scientific labs.

April Wright

April Wright is Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. Her research broadly examines the processes of how institutions, professions and organizations are maintained, changed and disrupted, with particular theoretical and empirical interests in frontline professional work, values, extreme contexts and place. She has conducted research studies in a wide variety of empirical contexts, including hospital emergency departments in Australia, English County cricket, doctors in Kenya, natural disasters in Australia, management education, and social housing. Her work applies Institutional and Organizational Theory, multi-level processes, and inductive qualitative methods such as interviews and participant observation. Her research has been published in leading including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Organization Theory, and Journal of Business Venturing.

April is an Associate Editor of JMS Says at Journal of Management Studies, a former Associate Editor at the Academy of Management Learning and Education and Journal of Management, and serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies and Organization Research Methods.

Tina Dacin

Tina Dacin is the Stephen J.R. Smith Chair of Strategy and Organizational Behavior at Smith School of Business, Queen's University, Canada and also the Principal Investigator of the Community Revitalization Research Program. She is the former Director of the Smith School of Business Centre for Social Impact as well as a former member of the University Senate at Queen's University and Former Chair of the Principal's Innovation Fund Committee.

Professor Dacin's research interests include cultural heritage and traditions, social innovation/entrepreneurship, and strategic alliances. Her work has been published in leading management journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management, Journal of World Business, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. She has also served as Senior/Consulting Editor for Organization Science, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management Inquiry. She has previously served for multiple terms on the Editorial Review Boards of the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of International Business Studies, Strategic Organization and Strategic Management Journal.

Professor Dacin teaches courses in leadership, change, and strategy. Professor Dacin advises and speaks to major corporations in the airline, biotechnology, defense, energy, financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications sectors as well as a number of public sector and non-profit organizations. She currently sits on the boards of the Kingston Community Foundation and GRLI, a global advocacy organization for promoting responsible leadership in business schools and organizations. Professor Dacin has received several awards and recognition for research and teaching. Most recently, she was inducted as a Visiting Fellow into Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge, UK and is a Visiting Fellow of the Judge Business School. She has also been a Visiting Professor for several years at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India.

Mark de Rond

I use fictional techniques and the short story form to explore how people can live a variety of circumstances decisively (or else find themselves overwhelmed with the strangeness of it). Some of my stories are rooted in my fieldwork with doctors and nurses in a field hospital in Helmand and a psychiatrist to the Taliban | with a ragtag band of adventurers rowing the Amazon and a Cambridge crew preparing for the Boat Race | with stop-the-war activists on a march from Berlin to Aleppo and those who’ve made it their life’s work to bait paedophiles in public spectacles of humiliation. Stripped of their certainties, these stories show people improvising their way through life: recklessly, self-destructively, and with occasional moments of clarity. As Ottessa Moshfegh said, we need characters to be free to range into the dark and wrong for how else will we understand ourselves?

Markus Hällgren

Markus Hällgren is Professor of Management and Organization at Umeå School of Business and Economics, Umeå University, Sweden. He researches, teaches, and organizations frequently hire him to speak or do workshops to large and small audiences, about leadership and team behaviour in extreme contexts. He is incredibly passionate about this because settings such as mountaineering expeditions, police work, and zombies are exceptionally good at highlighting beneficial and disastrous mechanisms and processes related to, i.e., safety, boredom, routines, collective leadership, ignorance, groupthink, and goals.