Menu Close
Chair Professor, New Social Research, Tampere University

I am recently retired as the Research Director of the NSR programme at Tampere University, Finland, and am visiting professor at CHEER, University of Sussex. I started my career with a PhD in public administration at the University of Manchester, but a period as a senior tax inspector in the UK combined with significant changes in the way in which the public sector operated from the 1980s gave me a very different perspective on how ‘the public’ can be understood and managed. I returned to the academy, but this time as a critical accounting academic. Throughout my career I have pursued how regimes of accounting and management control discursively frame organisations.

My principal research interest now how the funding and management of knowledge-creating organisations, especially universities, affects them and the knowledge that they produce. In particular, I address how the increasing financialisation and marketisation of universities globally is affecting them. I am currently exploring the effects and implications of student loan systems. I have a substantial stream of work on the financing of private education. I also work in the field of critical studies in tax and undertake qualitative work on trade credit in the UK.

Experience

  • 2017–present
    Chair professor, Tampere University

Education

  • 1988 
    University of Manchester, PhD
  • 1979 
    University of Manchester, BA Politics and Modern History