Team
Prof Michael Heller
Principal investigator
Northumbria University
Prof Michael Rowlinson
Co-investigator
University of Exeter
Itamar Blauer
Consultant
Prof Michael Heller is a business and marketing historian whose main areas of research cover the history of office work, the history of company magazines and internal communication, the history of public communications, corporate communication, and corporate and product branding. His work has been published in the British Journal of Management, European Journal of Marketing, Enterprise and Society, Business History and other leading management and business history journals.
Prof Michael Rowlinson joined the University of Exeter Business School from Queen Mary University of London in 2016. He has previously worked at London Metropolitan University, Royal Holloway University of London, and the universities of Nottingham, Southampton, and Aston.
He edited the journal, Management & Organizational History, for five years until the end of 2013, and then became a Senior Editor for Organisation Studies. He is a former editor of the Association of Business Schools Academic Journal Quality Guide. In 2016, he co-edited a Special Topic Forum of the Academy of Management Review on History and Organization Studies: Toward a Creative Synthesis.
Itamar Blauer is a Search Engine Optimisation expert based in London. He has worked in the SEO industry for several years and is currently the Senior SEO Director at StudioHawk, a global award-winning SEO agency. He helps businesses reach their target audience through search engine optimisation. His work helps websites get higher rankings, targeted traffic and more leads. He regularly contributes advice to some of the largest industry publications, and have been featured in the likes of Semrush, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. In 2020, he published the book Keywords for SEO: Actionable Knowledge Bombs to Help you Rank on Google.
Prof Alan McKinlay
Alan McKinlay completed his doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford in 1986. His doctoral research was on business strategies and work organisation, an abiding interest. He has researched and published widely on work organisation and business history: including in engineering, shipbuilding, and the creative industries. His research on bureaucracies and internal labour markets has focussed on banks. His research has demonstrated that internal communications was fundamental to projecting the banking career as a moral, realistic and equitable project for all employees.
He is an expert on the philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault. Alan has published extensively in social science and business history journals; and has authored and edited several books, including Jimmy Reid: A Clyde-built man. Alan has been a professor since 1994, most recently at Newcastle University.
Previous Team Members
Dr Emily Rees
Previous Research Fellow at Northumbria University
Dr Joe Chick
Previous Research Fellow at Northumbria University
Dr Emily Rees was a previous Research Fellow on the ESRC-funded project An Institutional History of Internal Communication in the UK. She is a historian of twentieth-century Britain, with a focus on histories of science and industry, and how these intersect with visual culture, gender and professional practices.
Prior to this role, she worked as a research fellow and open access consultant at the Science Museum Group and as a research assistant at the University of Leeds on a project on the history of women in engineering.
Dr Joe Chick was a previous Research Fellow on the ESRC-funded project An Institutional History of Internal Communication in the UK. His research was on the rise of large organisations since the late nineteenth century, focussing on the discourse and practice of employer communication with employees. With a background as a historian, he is interested in long-term trends in social history from the medieval era to the present day. His first monograph Urban Society and Monastic Lordship in Reading, 1350-1600 was published with Boydell & Brewer in 2022.
He is now a Research Associate in Medieval History at the University of Leicester. Find out more here.