Mollie Painter

Role
Mollie Painter is Professor of Ethics and Organisation and leads the Responsible and Sustainable Business Lab (RSB Lab), a bespoke research centre within Nottingham Business School (NBS). The RSB Lab is dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of research, training and practitioner engagement around responsible and sustainable business practice. Professor Painter’s teaching is focused on integrating responsible leadership, ethics and accountability into NBS’s postgraduate programmes. She is also active in executive development programmes and consultancy activities in these areas.

Career overview
After a stint as a Fulbright scholar in Boston, USA, Professor Painter's career started with a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and the Business School at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. After moving to Chicago, USA, in 2003, she occupied a tenured professorship in Philosophy at DePaul University. After 10 years in the USA, she moved to the UK in order to take up the position of Professor of Ethics and Organisation at Nottingham Business School. She also holds a part-time position at IEDC-Bled in Slovenia, and has been a visiting professor at various European institutions, such as HEC in Paris, ESCP Europe in Paris / London, EDHEC in Lille, Hanken in Helsinki, and IAE in Aix-en-Provence.

Research areas
Professor Painter’s research focuses on organisational culture, leadership, and ethics within complex organisational environments. In dealing with these topics, she draws on the conversation between European philosophy and organisational studies. Her current research deals with organisational habituation, leadership and gender, embodiment, and relational accountability. She has published peer-reviewed articles in prominent journals, such as Organization Studies, Organization, Journal of Business Ethics, and Business Ethics Quarterly. She is also the author of a number of books, such as Business Ethics and Continental Philosophy, co-edited with René ten Bos (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which was also translated into Dutch as Bedrijfsethiek. Filosofische perspectieven (Boom, 2013).

Professor Painter has often been part of teams of researchers delivering corporate and government-commissioned research reports on corruption prevention and organisational culture. She has been active as a consultant in the areas of business ethics and sustainable business.