Portsmouth Business School

Profile

Dr Sarah Gilmore PhD (Portsmouth), MSc (London) BA (Hons) (Essex). 

My academic career was preceded by fifteen years spent in the charitable and third sector; more specifically, I worked as a National Officer for Britain's largest public sector trade union, Unison, where I was responsible for all aspects of training and development in the areas of diversity as well as the local government and utilities service conditions groups.  This prompted my continuing interest in aspects of people management - as witnessed in my research interests and the interweaving of the disciplines of psychoanalysis, training and development and HRM.

Whilst some of my research is still located within a public sector, higher education context, other work has taken place within a very different environment - that of the English Premier League and the sport's governing bodies.  Starting with a focus on the training and development of English football club managers, my work has been used by the League Managers Association, the Professional Footballers Association and the Football Association as the foundation of their Certificate in Applied Management for Football.  More recently, I have been employed as an advisor to the Football Association, the Football League Trust as well as a number of Premier League and Championship clubs.  And in addition to my published research work, my ideas have also been published in a range of national and local media such as the BBC's Newsnight programme, The Guardian and The Sunday Times.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in three connected areas: HRM, training and development and psychoanalysis.  Together with Dr Steve Williams, I am a co-editor and contributor to Human Resource Management (published by OUP).  My current work in this area uses a range of lenses to explore high performance organizations; looking at the role of rhetoric, institutional theory and leaders/institutional entrepreneurs in their creation, maintenance and decline.

I also have a long-standing interest in training and development which I see as being a key strategic lever to the creation of high performance organizations.  My work here has not only focused on the management development of those operating in fast-paced environments such as football managers, but also looks at the role being played by professional bodies and the macro and micro implications of their influence.  A project conducted with Dr Valerie Anderson on the use of experiential learning within professional contexts has been sponsored by the UFHRD and my published work with Steve Williams won an Emerald Literati award for Outstanding Paper.

The third strand of my research work explores the use of psychoanalytic theory within the management and organization studies domain.  This has links to my research in online pedagogy, executive development and the use of experiential learning within professionally accredited settings.  As a result of this, I was stream convenor for the Psychoanalysis, Sex, Sexuality and Gender stream at the Critical Management Studies Conference at Warwick Business School.

Publications

Teaching

My teaching has included the Strategic Leadership, Culture and Change unit for the MBA programmes, the dissertation option for the BABS, BABA, Marketing and HRM degrees and Organizing in a Virtual World for final year undergraduate students on the same pathways.