Please call the press office on 01509 223491 to arrange an interview with Dr Jeannie Holstein. Bookings can also be made online at globelynx.com.
Dr Jeannie Holstein joined Loughborough Business School as a Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Innovation in April 2024.
She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2015 and where she worked until recently as Assistant Professor Strategic and Public Sector Management at Nottingham University Business School (NUBS). Jeannie holds a BA (Hons) Modern History from Oxford University and an MBA from NUBS. Prior to her academic career she worked as a business strategist in the ceramics industry, leading the UK subsidiary of a German plc, among other roles, and then as a management consultant in the Higher Education sector.
Jeannie combines an interest in practically relevant topics such as the role of language, openness and participation in strategic change and strategy-making with a theoretical interest in discursive and narrative processes. The broader academic conversations she is associated with are: strategy as narrative (storytelling); processual views of strategizing and organizing; strategy as practice; and open strategy. In her research Jeannie mainly focusses on policy-rich pluralistic contexts, such as higher education and more recently social care, alongside a theoretical contribution to open strategizing and open organizing. Jeannie continues to be enchanted by the craft of glass and ceramics and is open to participating in discrete research projects that examine grassroots organizing and place, through (and in) craft and craft learning, in addition to her main research focus on the role of language in opening up organizing processes.
She has presented her work at several leading international academic conferences and has published in leading management and organization journals such as Organization Studies, Strategic Organization, European Management Review, International Small Business Journal, and in the inaugural Cambridge Handbook of Open Strategy.
In her academic career to date, Jeannie has taught and developed the curriculum across all levels: undergraduate, MBA, MSc, PhD and Executive Education. In her previous role, she led the strategic management component on the Executive MBA (UK and Singapore), and also historically on the Executive Education programme, the public policy (in respect of societal challenge) component and its intersection with business and organisations, on the undergraduate programmes, and the academic citizenship element within the PhD Programme. She has recently been awarded Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in recognition of her inclusive and reflective teaching and learning practice, and her work in effectively influencing the learning and teaching and practice of others.
Jeannie has an extensive record of service and academic citizenship, including in her previous role, Athena Swan Lead, Deputy Director of Accreditation, and PhD Senior Tutor (then Deputy Director of PhD Programme), alongside undergraduate personal tutoring, MSc dissertation supervision, External Examining, and PhD and staff mentoring.
Jeannie has been invited to present at prestigious (invitation-only) workshops, such as the European Theory Development Workshop (twice), and delivered seminars in the UK (eg Newcastle, Liverpool), and Finland (Aalto and Oulu), and recently on a panel on open organizing and innovation at the University of Vermont, US.
Jeannie has consistently shared her research at prestigious conferences (Academy of Management, European Group of Organisation Studies (EGOS), Process Organisation Studies (PROS) and British Academy of Management (BAM). She organized an all-academy symposium at the Academy of Management (2017-Vancouver) on What's the Next Chapter for Strategy as Narrative. In 2016 Jeannie was invited to join the organizing committee for the Strategy as Practice Research Community Platform at EGOS (European Group of Organization Studies) and served as Liaison to the EGOS Board, for 3 years. In 2019 Jeannie was co-organizer of the Strategy as Practice Research Community Platform Day at EGOS, in Edinburgh in 2019.
Jeannie was invited as a collaborator (alongside Vaara (Oxford), Holt (Copenhagen Business School), on the prestigious Academy of Finland bid (Rantakari), accepted July 2023. She was also an external reviewer of FWF-Austrian Science Fund bid, EUR 399.824 on Open Strategy.
She regularly reviews in the field (strategy, strategy processes, open strategy, open organizing, narrative, dialogicality, regional growth, enterprise and management education), in the following journals Academy of Management Learning and Education (AJG 4); British Academy of Management (AJG 4); Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice (AJG 4); Journal of Management Studies (AJG 4*); Organization Studies (AJG 4*); Organization (AJG 3); Strategic Organization (AJG 3); and Studies in Higher Education (AJG 3).
Between 2019-2022 Jeannie was Nottingham University Business School Representative on Athena Swan UK Business School Network and sharing best practice as follows: Case study on NUBS Athena Swan successful resubmission to UK’s Business School Case study on lessons learned from support to carers during Covid-19, by establishing a local Carers Network.
In her research Jeannie mainly focus on policy-rich pluralistic contexts, where she combines an interest in practically relevant topics such as the role of language, openness, and participation in strategic change (strategizing) with a theoretical interest in discursive and narrative processes. She focusses on policy-rich and pluralistic sites, including higher education. More recently she has focused on social care as an empirical site.
Jeannie continues to be enchanted by the craft of glass and ceramics and is open to participating in discrete research projects that examine grassroots organizing and place, through (and in) craft and craft learning, in addition to her main research focus on the role of language and story-telling in opening up organizing processes.
On a practical and theoretical level her work has the potential to open up strategy making in practice, making it more inclusive and diverse, aligned to the Business School’s ambition to shape a fairer and more sustainable future in and through purposeful organisation.
Holstein, J, Rantakari, A (2023) Space and the dynamic between openness and closure: Open strategizing in the TV series Borgen, Organization Studies, 44 (1), pp. 53-76.
Greenman, A, Holstein, J (2023) Dialogue and the micro-processes of founder meaning making during growth, International Small Business Journal, 42 (2), pp. 185-211.
Li, M, Holstein, J, Wedekind, V (2023) The historical shifts of in/formality of learning within craft skills ecosystems in the UK, The International Journal of Training and Development, 27 (3/4), pp. 405-421.
Starkey, K, Holstein, J, Tempest, S (2021) Xenophobia, the unconscious, the public sphere and Brexit, European Management Review, 18 (1), pp. 25-35.
Holstein, J, Starkey, K, Wright, M (2018) Strategy and narrative in Higher Education, Strategic Organization, 16/1, pp. 61-91.