Dr Andrew Smith

Department of Management
Associate Professor, Responsible Management

Contact details

Email: a.d.a.smith@bham.ac.uk

Address: University House
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Andrew teaches about responsible business at the University of Birmingham Business School. He previously taught at the University of Liverpool Management School and Laurentian University. Andrew was educated at the University of Western Ontario and Queen’s University and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London. He has published his research findings in such journals as Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Management Studies, Business History Review, Business History, among others and in monograph form. Andrew held research grants from the British Academy/Leverhulme, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He welcomes the opportunity to work with non-academic organisations, such as companies, charities, faith groups, and government agencies. Andrew has acted as an expert witness in a constitutional court case that had important business implications.

Andrew welcomes enquiries from prospective doctoral students.

Qualifications

PG Cert, University of Liverpool 2016
PhD, University of Western Ontario 2005
MA, University of Western Ontario 2000
BA Hons, Queen’s University 1999

Biography

Joined the University of Birmingham in 2023. Previously, he worked at other universities in the UK and Canada. He has held a wide range of administrative roles in different institutions, including programme leadership positions, research management roles, and extensive engagement in student recruitment. He has also done extensive Impact and consultancy work.

Teaching

Andrew teaches responsible management at a variety of levels. From 2023-24, he will be teaching the MBA course on Responsible Business and will be contributing to the teaching of other responsible business modules, such as Principles of Responsible Business.

Postgraduate supervision

Currently supervising a PhD student named Diana Madibekova. She is doing research on the business-peace relationship that has involved interviews with business people in Istanbul.

Research

What makes societies free, prosperous, and just? Much of his research revolves around that macro-level question, although he also do meso-level research on firms (as a good business historian should) and on the individual level micro-foundations of everything that is going on. Andrew has drawn on the ideas of what he regards as great theorists from across the social sciences. In his publications, he has applied, adapted, and extended the theories produced by scholars ranges from Elinor Ostrom to Oliver Williamson to Michel Foucault to Gordon Tullock. In the past, his research focused on constitutional political economy questions and the making of what Oliver Williamson called Level Two institutions, such as the written constitutions that set the rules of the political game. He is increasing interested in informal norms and institutions, recognising their importance of causal drivers to a degree previously ignored. He is now doing research on how culture influences the incidence of rent-seeking entrepreneurship, the wicked problem of modern slavery in a world of heterogenous national political institutions and global supply chains, and the legacies of Black slavery.

Other activities

Andrew’s impact work involves helping managers and others to think about the legacies of slavery. In the past, he has undertaken consultancy work.

Publications

Smith, A., & Brownlow, G. (2022). Informal Institutions as Inhibitors of Rent-Seeking Entrepreneurship: Evidence From US Legal History. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 10422587221134926.

Smith, A., Tennent, K., & Russell, J. (2022). The rejection of industrial democracy by Berle and Means and the emergence of the ideology of managerialism. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 43(1), 98-122.

Smith, A., Wong, N. D., Sørensen, A. R., Jones, I., & Coraiola, D. M. (2022). Historical narratives and the defense of stigmatized industries. Journal of Management Inquiry, 31(4), 386-404.

Van Lent, W., & Smith, A. D. (2020). Using versus excusing: The Hudson’s Bay company’s long-term engagement with its (problematic) past. Journal of Business Ethics, 166(2), 215-231

Smith, A., & Johns, J. (2020). Historicizing modern slavery: Free-grown sugar as an ethics-driven market category in nineteenth-century Britain. Journal of business ethics, 166, 271-292..

Smith, A., & Umemura, M. (2019). Prospects for a transparency revolution in the field of business history. Business History, 61(6), 919-941.

View all publications in research portal