Professor Michael Heller is a business, management and organizational historian whose research focuses on the history of work, business communication, the emergence of the large-scale organisation and management in the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a multi-disciplinary scholar whose work combines history, marketing, organization studies, human relations and corporate communication. He is particularly interested in how organisations have garnered social and political legitimacy through the pioneering of business practices and social institutions such as public relations, corporate communication, branding, corporate social responsibility, personnel management, and professional and managerial associations and education. His work combines empirical historical research and theory and has investigated and theorised on methodology and historiography within historical organizational studies. He has also researched the uses of history and the past by organisations in the present and has an interest in corporate heritage branding and marketing, rhetorical history and the uses of the past by business and organisations.
Michael's main areas of research are in the history of office work, the history of public relations and corporate branding, the history of internal communication, the history of CSR and industrial welfare, and corporate heritage branding. He currently holds a £630,000 grant from the ESRC to research 'An Institutional History of Internal Communication in the UK.' This involves project partners from major global companies and professional associations: Unilever, Boots, John Lewis, the Postal Museum, AB Communications, Simply-Communicate, the Charted Institute of Personnel and Development, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, the Institute of Internal Communication and The British Library. He has published in a number of leading journals including Organization Studies, British Journal of Management, Business History, European Journal of Marketing, Enterprise and Society and Journal of Macromarketing. He is an assessor for the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants and editor of the Palgrave Macmillan international book series, Debates in Business History. He is a regular contributor at the Academy of Management.
Professor Heller offers PhD supervision and welcomes interest from candidates in the following areas:
- Business History
- Marketing and Brand History
- Corporate Communication and Public Relations
- Internal Communication
- Social Media Branding and Online Communities
Back to top
