Professor Penny Dick
Management School
Chair in Organisational Psychology
+44 114 222 3365
Full contact details
Management School
B025
Sheffield University Management School
Conduit Road
Sheffield
S10 1FL
- Profile
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Penny received her PhD from Sheffield University in 2000, which was concerned with the social construction of gender in police work. She is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and holds a certificate in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Penny´s professional background is in Occupational Psychology. She held a number of positions as an Occupational Psychologist in both the public and private sector prior to taking up an academic post at the University of Teesside in 1993.
Her areas of professional expertise include critical incident stress debriefing, stress counselling, stress management, assessment and selection, management development, and training.
She lectures in Organizational Behaviour at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, focusing on critical perspectives in work psychology and management.
- Research interests
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Penny´s research interests can be broadly described as critical management.
She is interested in the relationships between social structures and individuals and how these create and perpetuate inequalities in employment and careers.
She is also interested in how taken-for-granted ideas and practices influence how individuals understand their experiences at work, and whether and how these ideas change and evolve.
She is particularly interested in the role of language in these processes, and much of her recent work utilises a discursive psychology approach in which close attention is paid to how individuals produce accounts of their experiences and what these accounts can tell us about power.
Penny is currently researching how accounts of sexism or harassment are influenced by the context in which such accounts are constructed, specifically, how different formal, institutional interactions influence the believability of an account.
- Publications
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Books
- Rethinking Gender Inequalities in Organizations. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Journal articles
- Connecting eastern and western perspectives on management: Translation of practices across organizations, institution and geographies. Journal of Management Studies, 57(1), 1-24. View this article in WRRO
- Police partnership working: Lessons from a co-located group pilot. European Journal of Policing Studies, 5(3), 76-76. View this article in WRRO
- Nonconformance With Regulatory Codes in the Nonprofit Sector: Accountability and the Discursive Coupling of Means and Ends. Business & Society. View this article in WRRO
- An Introduction to the Special Issue on Managing Complexity within and Across Organizational Boundaries. Journal of Management Studies, 54(2), 129-131.
- From Rational Myth to Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? Understanding the Persistence of Means–ends Decoupling as a Consequence of the Latent Functions of Policy Enactment. Organization Studies, 36(7), 897-924.
- To See Ourselves As Others See Us? Incorporating the Constraining Role of Socio-Cultural Practices in the Theorization of Micropolitical Resistance. Gender, Work & Organization, 22(1), 16-35. View this article in WRRO
- Discipline and punish? Strategy discourse, senior manager subjectivity and contradictory power effects. Human Relations, 67(12), 1513-1536.
- The politics of experience: A discursive psychology approach to understanding different accounts of sexism in the workplace. Human Relations, 66(5), 645-669.
- The politics of experience: A discursive psychology approach to understanding different accounts of workplace sexism. Human Relations, 66(5), 645-669.
- The Victorious English Language: Hegemonic Processes in the Management Academy. Journal of Management Inquiry, 22(1), 122-134.
- The Victorious English Language: Hegemonic Processes in the Management Academy. Journal of Management Inquiry.
- The relationship between ceremonial adoption of popular management practices and the motivation for practice adoption and diffusion in an American MNC. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, 22(18), 3849-3866.
- Exploiting the exploited: The psychological contract, workplace domination and symbolic violence. Culture and Organization, 17(4), 293-311.
- The social construction of the meaning of acute stressors: A qualitative study of the personal accounts of police officers using a stress counselling service. Work and Stress, 3(14), 244-266.
- The transition to motherhood and part-time working: mutuality and incongruence in the psychological contracts existing between managers and employees. WORK EMPLOY SOC, 24(3), 508-525.
- Bending over Backwards? Using a Pluralistic Framework to Explore the Management of Flexible Working in the UK Police Service. BRIT J MANAGE, 20, S182-S193.
- Hegemonic practices and knowledge production in the management academy: An English language perspective. SCAND J MANAG, 25(1), 119-123.
- Consent as resistance, resistance as consent: Re-reading part-time professionals' acceptance of their marginal positions. GENDER WORK ORGAN, 13(6), 543-564.
- Reproducing gender inequalities? A critique of realist assumptions underpinning personnel selection research and practice. J OCCUP ORGAN PSYCH, 79, 481-498.
- The psychological contract and the transition from full to part-time police work. J ORGAN BEHAV, 27(1), 37-58.
- Dirty work designations: How police officers account for their use of coercive force. HUM RELAT, 58(11), 1363-1390.
- The position of policewomen: a discourse analytic study. WORK EMPLOY SOC, 18(1), 51-72.
- Between a rock and a hard place - The dilemmas of managing part-time working in the police service. PERS REV, 33(3), 302-321.
- Barriers to managing diversity in a UK constabulary: The role of discourse. J MANAGE STUD, 39(7), 953-976.
- A social constructionist account of police culture and its influence on the representation and progression of female officers: A repertory grid analysis in a UK police force. Policing: an international journal of police strategies and management, 24(2), 181-199.
- Managing diversity within a police force setting. INT J PSYCHOL, 35(3-4), 327-327.
Chapters
- A Social Constructionist Critique of Positive Psychology, Routledge International Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (pp. 151-169). Routledge
- Understanding Stress as a Form of Institutional Maintenance and Disruption Work, Stress and Suffering at Work (pp. 155-175). Springer International Publishing
- Social Constructionism, The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Social Psychology (pp. 59-80). Palgrave Macmillan UK
- The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Social Psychology Palgrave Macmillan UK
- The Future of Policing Routledge
- Organizational Efforts to Manage Diversity: Do They Really Work?, Individual Diversity and Psychology in Organizations (pp. 131-148). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
- Identity Politics at Work Routledge
Conference proceedings papers
- Resistance, gender, and Bourdieu's notion of field. MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY, Vol. 21(3) (pp 327-343)
- Line manager involvement in work-life balance and career development: can't manage, won't manage?. BRITISH JOURNAL OF GUIDANCE & COUNSELLING, Vol. 34(3) (pp 345-364)
- Rethinking Gender Inequalities in Organizations. Edward Elgar Publishing.
- Research group
- Teaching interests
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Penny’s teaching is very much informed by her practitioner experience which was gained before she became an academic in 1993.
Feedback from students indicates that they find the modules she teaches highly relevant and enjoyable and very thought provoking.
Penny’s research interests are all in the area of critical management, which means that she looks at the politics of work and work experiences and exposes how taken-for-granted ideas influence what happens in organisations, particularly in relation to inequalities and the distribution of power and resources.
She encourages students to question mainstream theory and ideas in her lectures and seminars, through group discussion; critical examination of everyday organisational practices, such as, for example, recruitment interviews or stress management interventions; and through helping students apply theory to make sense of their own experiences.
- Teaching activities
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Penny currently teaches an undergraduate module, MGT310: Critical Perspectives on Work and Organisational Psychology, and the postgraduate module MGT658: Professional Development.
- Professional activities and memberships
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She has published in journals such as Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Work, Employment & Society, and the Journal of Occupational & Organisational Psychology.
From the 1st July 2013 to 2016, Penny took up a three year role as Associate Editor for the Journal of Management Studies.
She is also on the editorial boards of Personnel Review, Human Resource Management Journal and Journal of Organisational Behaviour.
- PhD supervision
She is interested in supervising PhD students who have an interest in studying issues around inequalities (on the basis of class, gender, education, race, etc) or power/resistance, using qualitative methodologies, especially discursive approaches.