2024 Conference

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the way business and management research is conducted. AI-powered tools now enable researchers to analyse large datasets, automate literature reviews, extract insights from textual data, and develop predictive models with greater efficiency and accuracy. As AI technologies continue to evolve, business scholars must understand how these tools can be used to enhance research methodologies while maintaining rigorous and responsible research practices.

This Professional Development Workshop (PDW) introduces participants to practical applications of AI in business and management research. The session will explore how AI can support key stages of the research process, including literature review, qualitative data analysis, quantitative modelling, and research dissemination. Through demonstrations and interactive activities, participants will gain hands-on exposure to AI tools that can assist with tasks such as text mining, sentiment analysis, AI-assisted literature synthesis, and data visualisation.

The workshop will also address important ethical and methodological considerations, including transparency, algorithmic bias, data privacy, and responsible use of AI in academic research. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss challenges and opportunities associated with integrating AI into research workflows and explore how AI can support innovative research designs across different business and management disciplines. This session is designed for doctoral students, early-career researchers, and established academics who wish to develop practical skills and knowledge in AI-enabled research methods.

By the end of the workshop, participants will gain a clearer understanding of how AI can enhance research efficiency, improve methodological rigour, and expand the analytical possibilities of business research. 

This workshop is designed for early- to mid-career scholars with peer review experience who are looking to transition into editorial roles. SI editing is often the first step towards broader editorial responsibilities and is widely recognized as an essential stepping stone for future editors (Rynes, 2003). However, formal training for SI editors is scarce, and concerns have been raised about the impact this has on the integrity of the peer review process (Paglieri, 2016). This PDW builds on prior initiatives such as the EGOS 2025 workshop on “Becoming and Performing as an Associate Editor.” Unlike Associate Editors, who often receive structured mentoring from senior editors, SI editors typically receive little to no formal training. This session will address this gap by providing interdisciplinary insights and practical strategies for managing SIs effectively. The workshop will be hosted by the BAM Peer Review College (PRC) and will feature experienced speakers from PRC members and fellows. By leveraging the expertise of the PRC, this event contributes to the ongoing capacity-building efforts within BAM’s research community.

Key Takeaways for Attendees: 

• Practical lessons and step-by-step guidance on becoming an SI editor.
• Interactive discussions with experienced editors on managing SI challenges.
• Networking opportunities within the editorial and academic publishing community.
• Access to key references and recommended readings on editorial best practices.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a technology of the future. It is a present, practised reality with algorithms curating work flows, generative tools co-authoring documents, and automated systems shaping decisions in hiring, finance, and healthcare. This raises an urgent question for our community: what does it mean to thrive as humans living and working alongside intelligent machines? Taking up the BAM 2026 theme of Thriving Together: Impact, Innovation, and Inclusion, this PDW interrogates human–AI co-existence through a practice theory lens. While dominant strands of AI research foreground system capabilities or macro-level economic effects, practice-informed inquiry directs attention to the messy, negotiated, materially mediated realities of everyday human–machine co-existence. With its flat ontology and focus on the routine, embodied, and sociomaterial accomplishment of social life, practice theory is exceptionally well-placed to interrogate how AI is reshaping work, organisations, and society.

Staged by the brand new Practice Theory (PT@BAM) track, and the Strategy-as-Practice track, the workshop brings together a diverse set of senior scholars and early career researchers to provoke critical dialogue across three thematic strands: Impact (how AI reshapes practices, routines, and agency), Innovation (what new practices emerge at the frontier of human–AI collaboration), and Inclusion (how AI systems embed, reproduce, or challenge the normative practices of dominant groups).

Key benefits of attending:

• Engage with field-leading scholars in practice theory and the study of AI in organisations.
• Build new cross-track networks and collaborations. 
• Shape ongoing conversations on AI in Business and Society.

In line with the main Conference theme, Thriving Together: Impact, Innovation, and Inclusion in Business and Management, this PDW brings together six leading researchers and practitioners in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) to examine the evolving landscape of DEI as a field. This workshop addresses a significant gap in our understanding of DEI practitioners as an emerging professional group—their backgrounds, identities, competencies, career pathways, struggles, and the structural conditions that enable or constrain their work. Their work becomes more complex or challenging as conceptualisation of diversity and associated DEI policies and practices is highly context-dependent (Farndale et al., 2015) and adoption of policies and practices from Global North might result in confusion or backlash in other contexts like the Global South. Through this workshop, we try to bridge the gap between understanding of DEI work between Global North and Global South contexts. By bringing scholars and practitioners together, we would advance theoretical and practical understanding of how DEI roles are defined, legitimised, and sustained within organisations.

This workshop aims to benefit both scholarship on emerging professions, DEI and practitioners working in DEI through:

• Articulating key tensions and dilemmas in DEI work and professionalisation
• Identifying critical professional development needs and resources for DEI practitioners supporting their career growth and well-being.
• Enhancing the understanding of organisations on role descriptions that ensure responsibility, accountability and contribution of DEI professionals
• Generating actionable insights for practitioners, policymakers and educators developing DEI professional pathways
• Suggesting future avenues for impact-driven research for DEI work

Effective teaching has always required the right tools. But in an era defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, the pedagogical arsenal available to management educators is showing its limits. Frameworks like PESTLE (STEEP-V) and SWOT remain valuable, but they were built to analyse current environments — they were not designed to encourage exploration of the unfamiliar, the unlikely, or the genuinely open-ended futures that management students will actually inhabit.

This workshop introduces two powerful additions to the teaching toolkit: Scenario Planning and the Tension Map. Grounded in collaborative and experiential learning principles, these foresight-driven techniques reposition the educator as facilitator — creating conditions in which participants co-construct knowledge, challenge assumptions, and develop strategic imagination together. Rather than arriving at predetermined conclusions, learners are guided through the productive discomfort of real uncertainty.

Using the Futures of Business Education as a shared theme, participants work in diverse small groups to select two STEEP-V variables, map the tensions between their extremes, and build plausible future scenarios that move well beyond linear projections of current trends. The methodology deliberately opens space for unfamiliar and unlikely futures — stretching what students and practitioners believe it is possible to imagine. Participants leave with two outcomes of equal value: substantive insight into the forces reshaping business education, and a transferable toolkit ready to deploy across teaching, research, and organisational strategy.

Facilitators also gain a practical lens for surfacing blind spots — the overlooked assumptions that often prove most consequential precisely because they go unexamined. New tools. Richer conversations. Better-prepared learners.

Management education has a problem. We equip graduates with frameworks, models, and methodologies — but leave them ill-equipped for the one thing that matters most in uncertain times: the professional judgment to question what they've been taught. When practitioners can't interrogate prevailing narratives, challenge stakeholder assumptions, or ask whose future is being built — they don't lead. They replicate. This Professional Development Workshop tackles that gap head-on. Drawing on more than five decades of combined consulting, industry, and teaching experience — and over 250 real-life student engagements — we reveal how professional discernment can be deliberately cultivated, and why most management development programmes fail to do it.

At the heart of the session is Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), a powerful foresight tool that goes beneath the surface of dominant narratives to expose hidden assumptions, unspoken value conflicts, and the futures our frameworks quietly endorse — while excluding others. CLA doesn't just sharpen thinking. It transforms how practitioners engage with complexity, ambiguity, and competing stakeholder agendas. We also identify six predictable failure modes that arise when discernment is absent and show how foresight practices interrupt them before they take hold. Whether you work in business schools, executive education, or organisational development, you'll leave with actionable insights and a transferable pedagogical toolkit — ready to embed professional discernment and futures thinking across your teaching and practice. This isn't a session about adding another framework to the pile. It's about helping the people you develop think beyond the pile entirely. Please join us — and help grow the next generation of genuinely discerning practitioners.

This Paper Development Workshop (PDW) is designed to support researchers who are preparing empirical manuscripts for the Special Joint Initiative of the BJM and IJOPM “Reshaping Organisations and Supply Chains in a Polycrisis Era: Interdependent Climate, Geopolitical, Economic and Technological Shocks.” The workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary panel of BJM and IJOPM Editors-in-Chief whose expertise spans human resource management, organisational behaviour, operations and supply chain management, digital sustainability, and innovation studies. Through developmental exchanges, the PDW aims to help authors sharpen their research questions, strengthen theoretical framing, refine methodological designs suited to multi-crisis complexity, and articulate contributions that advance understanding beyond single-crisis approaches.

This PDW aspires to create a rigorous yet supportive intellectual environment that will help researchers todevelop empirical manuscripts that meet the expectations of BJM and IJOPM while advancing scholarship on polycrisis.

• • To help participants to move beyond descriptive accounts of isolated crises and instead develop theoretically grounded analyses of how multiple shocks interact, amplify, and cascade across organisational and inter-organisational systems.
• To support the development of research designs capable of capturing the complexity, simultaneity, and temporal dynamics inherent in polycrisis phenomena.
• To assist authors articulate clear and original theoretical contributions, particularly regarding how intertwined crises reshape organisational dynamics, supply chains, governance, and stakeholder relationships.
• To provide transparent guidance on the complementary editorial expectations of BJM and IJOPM, helping participants position their work appropriately while meeting high standards of empirical rigour, transparency, and practical relevance.
• To help foster interdisciplinary network of scholars, encouraging ongoing collaboration and peer support throughout the research, submission, and review process.

This workshop will be led by members of the leadership team of the Centre for Management Consulting Excellence (CMCE). They will present their insights into how generative AI tools can be used to investigate different types of business problem: work typically performed by a management consultant. They will use this as the basis for reviewing and discussing CMCE’s research and insights into the impact that this is having on the way that clients engage with management consultants.

This workshop will be of interest to BAM Members who are interested in:

• Understanding how the use of generative AI can be tailored to specific situations
• Deepening their understanding of clients typically engage with management consultants and how this is evolving
• Identifying opportunities for further research into the application of generative AI in analysing business issues and research

Sustainability transformation demands more than organisational change, it requires leaders who can collaborate across boundaries, navigate competing interests and create systemic impact while maintaining strategic advantage. This interactive PDW explores the distinctive leadership challenges of leading sustainability transformation across organisational ecosystems. This interactive session will help participants:

•  Understand the distinctive leadership challenges of sustainability transformation
• Map the ecosystems surrounding complex sustainability problems
• Recognise the paradoxes leaders must navigate
• Explore how leadership mindsets shape sustainability innovation
•  Identify the capabilities needed for transformative sustainability leadership
• Develop a practical action plan for leading sustainability initiatives