Dr. Karen Handley is a Principal Lecturer in Management and Organisational Studies, and the Research Area Leader for pedagogy research in the Oxford Brookes Business School. Prior to joining Brookes, Karen was a Research Associate at Imperial College, University of London. She has also worked in the financial services industry and as a management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Karen's pedagogic research interests include student engagement, assessment feedback, and staff identities and forms of participation in communities of practice.
Her business research interests include employee engagement, management learning, and client-consultancy projects and relationships. She recently completed an ESRC-funded project, Knowledge Evolution in Action: Client-Consultancy Relationships, which was part of a programme of research on the Evolution of Business Knowledge. A key theme of the research was to explore how clients and consultants share knowledge and generate new ideas. Of particular interest was the processes of 'contesting' knowledge and the impact of interventions involving challenge and humour.
Karen has published in the Journal of Management Studies, Management Learning, Organization and Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.
Karen has a PhD in Business Education from Imperial College, an MBA from Cranfield School of Management and a BA(Hons) in International Relations from the University of Sussex.