Dr Adam Nix

Dr Adam Nix

Department of Management
Lecturer in Responsible Business

Contact details

Address
Birmingham Business School
University House
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TY
United Kingdom

Adam is a member of Birmingham Business School’s Centre for Responsible Business and co-leads its participation in UN PRME. He is also part of the editorial team for the journal Business History.

Adam’s research looks at corruption and misconduct within organisational contexts, focusing particularly on their use in evolving market environments. His research has been published in Business History Review, Business History and AI & Society.

Qualifications

  • PhD in Management, 2019
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2016
  • MSc in International Business, 2012
  • BA (Hons) in Business and Law, 2011

Biography

Adam joined the University of Birmingham in 2021. He holds a PhD in Management from Aston Business School. His research interests include issues of corruption and misconduct within organisational contexts, focusing particularly on their use in evolving market environments. Recent and ongoing projects include research on organisational responses to EDI-related abuse, the role of linguistic trust in professional misconduct, and the use of historical approaches in researching wrongdoing and irresponsibility. 

Adam’s research on manipulation of deregulated electricity markets has received international recognition, winning the Henrietta Lawson Award for the Best Article in Business History Review in 2021 and the British Academy of Management’s Best Full Paper Award in Organisational Studies in 2023. He also received the Birmingham Business School’s award for Outstanding Research in 2023. 

Passionate about preserving digital-era company records, Adam has collaborated internationally on Arts and Humanities Research Council and Mellon Foundation-funded projects to develop AI-based tools for searching email archives. He has worked with and presented research to various government and organisational stakeholders, including the Cabinet Office’s Central Digital and Data Office, National Archives UK, and Hagley Museums and Libraries.

Adam’s teaching focuses on themes of business ethics, sustainability, and corporate responsibility, and his pedagogical research focuses on responsible business learning and teaching.

Teaching

Adam’s teaching is focused on Responsible Business, which he delivers at both an undergraduate and postgraduate level:

  • Responsible Business: Theory and Practice (UG)
  • Sustainable and Responsible Practices (PG)
  • Sustainability and Responsible Business (PG)

Postgraduate supervision

Guting Shen, PhD Management, ‘The Business Models of Department Stores in Modern Shanghai, 1880s-1940s’

Research

Current Research Interests 

Markets and deregulation within the energy supply industry 

  • Organisational responses to interpersonal EDI-related misconduct
  • Preservation and access to organisational email archives archives
  • Corporate corruption as an illicit organisational practice
  • Linguistic trust mechanisms in cases of professional misconduct

Funded Projects 

Co-investigator, “Understanding the linguistic mechanisms of trust to combat corporate corruption”. (January 2023 – March 2024). Award: £160,000, HM Government. 

Co-investigator, Email Contextualisation Discovery (EMCODIST). Full title “Discovery environments for using email archives: Evaluating user needs with prototype version of EMail COntextualisation DIScovery Tool”. (January 2022 - December 2023). Award $57,000 (US), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation via the Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community (EA:BCC) re-grant programme. 

Co-investigator, Contextualising Email Archives (CEA). Full title: “Historicising the dot.com bubble and contextualising email archives”. (February 2020 - February 2022). Award: £100,000, Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Other activities

Editorial Team (Book Reviews Editor), Business History (Journal).

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Kirsch, D, Decker, S, Nix, A & Kuppili Venkata, S 2023, 'Using Born-Digital Archives for Business History: EMCODIST and the Case of E-Mail', Management & Organizational History. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2023.2183220

Nix, A, Decker, S & Wolf, C 2022, 'Enron and the California energy crisis: the role of networks in enabling organizational corruption', Business History Review, vol. 95, no. 4, pp. 765-802. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680521001008

Decker, S, Kirsch, D, Kuppili Venkata, S & Nix, A 2022, 'Finding light in dark archives: using AI to connect context and content in email', AI & Society, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 859–872. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01369-9

Nix, A & Decker, S 2021, 'Using digital sources: the future of business history?', Business History. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1909572

Chapter

Nix, A, Decker, S, Kirsch, DA & Venkata, SK 2023, Archival research in the digital era. in S Decker, WM Foster & E Giovannoni (eds), Handbook of Historical Methods for Management. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., pp. 156-172. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800883741.00019

Nix, A & Decker, S 2023, Historical Approaches to Researching Organizational Wrongdoing. in C Gabbioneta, M Clemente & R Greenwood (eds), Organizational Wrongdoing as the “Foundational” Grand Challenge: Consequences and Impact. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, vol. 85, Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 141-158. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20230000085008

Book/Film/Article review

Nix, A 2022, 'Business History: A Research Overview: by John F. Wilson, Ian G. Jones, Steven Toms, Anna Tilba, Emily Buchnea, Nicholas Wong, Routledge, 2022, 137 pp, illus., £44.99, (hardback), ISBN 9781138326989, £15.29, (ebook), ISBN 9780429449536', Business History. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2022.2106931

Nix, A 2021, 'History in the age of abundance? How the web is transforming historical research: by Ian Milligan, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019, xi + 310 pp, illus., CND$120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-7735-5696-6; CND$32.95 CAD (paperback), ISBN 978-7735-5697-3; CND$32.95 (eBook), ISBN 978-7735-5822-9', Business History, vol. 63, no. 8, pp. 1466–1467. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1724651

Nix, A 2021, 'Risk and ruin: Enron and the culture of American capitalism', Business History, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 159-160. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2018.1527431

Conference article

Nix, A, Decker, S, Wolf, C & Vaidya, K 2017, 'The social foundations of organizational corruption', Academy of Management Proceedings, vol. 2017, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2017.12773abstract

Conference contribution

Kuppili Venkata, S, Decker, S, Kirsch, D & Nix, A 2022, EMCODIST: A Context-based Search Tool for Email Archives. in Y Chen, H Ludwig, Y Tu, U Fayyad, X Zhu, X Hu, S Byna, X Liu, J Zhang, S Pan, V Papalexakis, J Wang, A Cuzzocrea & C Ordonez (eds), 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE, pp. 2281-2290. https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData52589.2021.9671832

Web publication/site

Decker, S, Nix, A, Kuppili Venkata, S, Kirsch, D & Girish Jain, S, EMCODIST: Email Contextualization Discovery Tool, 2022, Web publication/site.

Decker, S, Kirsch, D, Nix, A & Kuppili Venkata, S, The Dotcom Archive: Contextualizing Email Archives, 2022, Web publication/site. <https://dotcomarchive.bristol.ac.uk/>

View all publications in research portal