REWP Staff Profile

Frank is Chair in Accountability, Organisations & Strategy at Durham University Business School. Prior to this appointment he was Professor of Strategy and Organization at Newcastle University Business School. His research is focused on understanding organizational change as a discursive, political and strategic project under conditions of neo-liberalism and managerialism. In recent years he has analyzed official discourse’ in the context of the banking inquiry, the audit inquiry, the tax avoidance inquiry and the Mull of Kintyre inquiries. What is crucial in some of these inquiries is a certain type of boundary work that needs to be accomplished: for example, in the tax avoidance debate, the boundary work by philanthropists was directed at distinguishing charitably giving from tax avoidance activities. His interest in philanthropy is in the symbolic and discursive work that carves out a distinct space for philanthropy in the field of power so that it can protect or enhance the existing economic and symbolic capital of those who occupy spaces within it.