Welcome to Russell and Kate’s Research web blog
Russell and Kate are two academics at a research-informed university in the north of England
The views offered on these pages are our views and should in no way be construed as representing those of our institution affiliations.
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Russell is a Reader (Associate Professor) in HRM at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University.
Russell graduated from the University of Liverpool and began a career in banking specialising in financing SMEs before moving into HR roles with the bank, including working in graduate recruitment.
Russell subsequently moved into a public-private partnership role co-ordinating training and development before moving into a learning and development role with a major UK airline.
Russell began his career as an academic at the then Newcastle Polytechnic in 1989 soon after the formation of Newcastle Business School. During this time Russell led a HND in business enterprise and subsequently an MA in HRM validated by the CIPD.
Moving on from Northumbria, Russell joined Leeds Business School and led CIPD programmes in Leeds and general business programmes in Hong Kong before being seconded to BMW-Rover Group where he led manager and leadership development programmes working across various manufacturing sites in the UK and Germany.
Russell then moved to a Scottish university to lead manager and professional development within the university’s HRM department. More recently Russell was at the University of Chester where he was Programme Director for MBA degrees and was partly seconded to a public-private partnership body, LDL, with an organisational development remit.
Russell holds adjunct professorships at Moscow’s prestigious Institute of International Trade and Law and at AACSB accredited, and FT “top 20” European business school, Aalto University Business School in Finland. Russell was awarded his Doctorate in 2006 for a study into professional learning in the workplace.
Russell’s research interests currently include workplace learning and development, manager and leadership learning, organisational learning, knowledge and wisdom, later-career learning, manager identities and well-being at work.
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Kate is a Senior Lecturer in HRM/D and Programme Leader for the Undergraduate HRM programme at at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University.
Kate’s early career was as a Marine Ecologist at a Field Centre in rural Pembrokeshire. She later moved into retail management as an HR Manager (Recruitment and development) at branch level where her key role was to drive the recruitment and training strategy during a period when the branch was under considerable strain both locally in terms of staffing availability, and as a result of changing sales strategies.
Kate joined Newcastle Business School in Summer 2014 following 10years at the University of Chester, latterly within Chester Business School where she was Senior Lecturer in HRM, Programme Leader for the MSc Management (with pathways) programmes and International Partnerships Manager.
Kate is a full member of the CIPD and is Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Kate completed her PhD part-time at Lancaster University in August 2013. Her research examined the learning of professionals working within multi-agency teams within a local authority Children’s Services department.
Emerging through her PhD research, Kate’s current research interests lie in the importance of informal, workplace learning for professionals in the contemporary knowledge economy. Kate is currently working on a joint small funded research project into later-career learning. This project aims to ascertain the implications of an ageing workforce for organisational development policy and practice.
Her research adopts a largely qualitative approach to data generation, with particular emphasis upon visual methods such as photo-elicitation and the use of participant-generated pictors.
Kate also undertakes pedagogic research examining such areas as student attendance and engagement and international students’ postgraduate experiences. She has worked to maintain the relevance of the research methods and dissertation elements of management education in the light of the changing demographic of management students in UK universities. This has informed one of her current projects that is examining the role of the undergraduate Business/Management dissertation in developing skills and capabilities for employment.
Kate is a keen distance trail runner and mountain/hill walker.
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