The Open University

Professional biography

Mike joined The Open University Business School in 1997 as a regional academic based at the OU's East of England office in Cambridge. From 1998 to 2003 he was closely involved with the design and development of The School's BA (Hons) in Business Studies programme. In 2003, he was appointed as Programme Director for Undergraduate Business and Professional Development, planning and leading the subsequent expansion of the programme.

Mike lives in Cambridge with his wife and two sons.

Research interests

Mike's current research interests are in processual and discursive approaches to organization, organizational ethnography and visual methods in organizational research. His previous scholarship work includes contributions to the development of practice-based learning, as part of the Work-Based Learning Futures network, and on student-focused staff development in distance learning. In 2008-9 he was a Fellow of the OU's Centre of Excellence in Teaching & Learning (CETL) in Practice-Based Professional Learning.

Teaching interests

Mike has authored contributions to the following OU courses: Understanding Management (Y179), Understanding Business Behaviour (B200), Working and learning: developing effective performance at work (BU130), Managing in the workplace (B121) which he chaired 2003-8, and most recently, Management Practice (B123 - due for first presentation Autumn 2014).

Publications

Journal articles

‘Nomadic’ organization and the experience of journeying: through liminal spaces and organizing places (2014)
Lucas, Mike
Culture and Organization, 20(3) (pp. 196-214)

The organizing practices of a community festival (2014)
Lucas, Michael John
Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 3(2) (pp. 275-290)

Book chapters

Community Festivals and Their Spaces: Relational Practice and the Production of a Relational Good? (2017-11-24)
Lucas, Mike
In: Sacchetti, Silvia; Christoforou, Asimina and Mosca, Michele eds. Social Regeneration and Local Development: Cooperation, Social Economy and Public Participation. Studies in Social Enterprise and Social Innovation
ISBN : 978-1-138-23639-4 | Publisher : Routledge

Conference items

Compassion in Volunteer Work: An Ethnography of a Befriending Organization (2018)
Vincett, Joanne; Wright, Alex and Lucas, Mike
In : 78th Annual Meeting of The Academy of Management (10-14 Aug 2018, Chicago, Illinois, USA)

"The problem of photography": the spatiality of photographs in organizational ethnography (2018)
Lucas, Mike and Wright, Alex
In : Academy of Management Annual Meeting (9-14 Aug 2018, Chicago, USA)

Organizing spaces: photography and the visual production of space-texts in organizational ethnography (2015-12-09)
Lucas, Mike and Wright, Alex
In : APROS/EGOS Colloqium 2015 Sub-theme 12: Organizational Ethnography and the Challenge of Social Space (9-11 Dec 2015, UTS Sydney, Australia)

Coffee break: the intertextual production of liminal spaces in the workplace (2015-12-09)
Lucas, Mike and Wright, Alex
In : APROS/EGOS Colloquium 2015, Sub-Theme 19: The Liminality of Organizational Spaces (9-11 Dec 2015, UTS Sydney, Australia)

Leadership, anxiety and the search for liminal space: a visual auto-ethnography (2015-11-29)
Lucas, Mike
In : ACSCOS Conference 2015 (29 Nov - 1 Dec 2015, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia)

Liminal performativity: Modern-day festivals and embodied practice (2013-07)
Lucas, Mike and Wright, Alex
In : European Group for Organization Studies Colloquium (EGOS 2013) (5-7 Jul 2013, Montréal, Canada)

“Deep in the forest, something stirred…” Examining the influence of community on the organizing practices of a festival. (2012-09-11)
Lucas, Mike J.
In : British Academy of Management Annual Conference (11-13 Sep 2012, University of Cardiff)

Parallel journeys: An auto-ethnographic account of how a change of place impacts on our conceptions of community, identity and practice (2012-07)
Lucas, Mike
In : 30th Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism 2012 (11-14 Jul 2012, Barcelona)