Dr Adam Nix

Dr Adam Nix

Department of Management
Lecturer in Responsible Business

Contact details

Telephone
+44 (0)121 414 7351
Email
a.nix@bham.ac.uk
View my research portal
Address
Birmingham Business School
University House
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TY
United Kingdom

Adam is a Lecturer in Responsible Business and an Associate of the Lloyd’s Centre for Responsible Business. His research employs historical approaches to management and organization studies, with a particular focus on understanding misconduct and corruption as organizational issues.

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 July 2021. He holds a PhD in Management from Aston Business School, and his research seeks to address the use of corruption and misconduct within organisational contexts. He has a particular interest in how such practices can become a part of organisational strategy and operations, particularly when ambiguity follows new or changeable market environments. His recent research focuses on Enron’s manipulation of deregulated electricity markets in the early millennium.

He is passionate about preservation and access to digital-era company records for historical research. He is part of an international collaboration looking at organisational email, which has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the Mellon Foundation (US). This work seeks to develop AI-based solutions to searching email archives and is currently focused on developing an email discovery tool for historical and qualitative research. Through this work, Adam has engaged with key heritage stakeholders, including the National Archives, the British Library and the Digital Preservation Coalition. 

Before joining the University of Birmingham, he worked first at Aston Business School and then De Montfort University where, in addition to his research activities, he taught CSR and business ethics, research methods, management, and international business. Adam’s teaching currently centres around responsible business, which covers diverse themes, including business ethics, sustainability, and governance.

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)
  • Principles of Responsible Business (PG)

Postgraduate supervision

Adam is currently interested in supervising qualitative or historical research projects relating to organizational wrongdoing, responsible business or digital-era business. Prospective students are welcome to contact him directly.

Research

Research interests

  • Responsible business in the utilities sector
  • Organisational misconduct and corruption
  • Management of digital-era organisational records
  • Historical organisation studies and business history

Funded Projects 

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. 

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. 

Other activities

  • Book Reviews Editor, Business History (Journal)
  • Committee Member, Business History Collective
  • Co-editor, Organisational History Network

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 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

Paper

Nix, AJ, Decker, S, Wolf, C & Vaidya, K 2017, 'The Social Foundations of Organizational Corruption'. https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2017.12773abstract

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