AoM 2025 - Copenhagen - Positive Academia was there

Reports on our Positive Academia Professional Development Workshop at the Academy of Management meeting

Christa Sathish - (updated Sun 31 Aug 2025 07:38)

[This post first appeared on the Positive Academia website on 30 July 2025 and was authored by Christa Sathish, who is the key driver of this initiative]

After actively building Positive Academia since 2022, we have officially founded the Community Interest Company in 2024 and successfully published, in online first, our manifesto ‘Let’s form a PACT – reimagining our academic values and interaction’ in the Management Learning Journal.

This year’s AOM in Copenhagen gave us a great chance to connect with a diverse group of international scholars with whom we have been engaging over the past three years, and of course, to reach an even wider audience. We achieved this through our PDW ‘Let’s form a PACT: How to be the change you want to see, and create more Positive Academia? Did you miss our PDW but would like to know more about it? You can download the slides here.

As the energetic driver, I [Christa Sathish] opened the PDW alongside Anne-Wil Harzing as the guiding co-pilot. As a complementary team, we then introduced our manifesto with Anne-Wil’s start of the why we need Positive Academia, followed by my summary of the what (values) and how (interactions).

We had a panel with more than a dozen academics who have made major contributions in one of the six elements that we see as key to a more Positive Academia. They included late career academics like Anne-Wil who have “grown up” in the system and have been professors for a long time, such as Mats Alvesson, Veronique Ambrosini, and Bill Harley, but also ECRs and mid-career academics such as Alexandra Bristow, Anna Brown, Suwen Chen, Sylvia Grewatsch, Marleen Wierenga, and more recently promoted professors such as Emma Levine, Maryam Kouchaki, Sarah Robinson, Kevin Rockman, and Lisa Thomas. Our panellists are affiliated with institutions in Australia, North America, Europe and the UK and hail from more than ten different countries.

Katrin Heucher, Samantha Kassirer, Olga Loza, Wren Montgomery, Olivier Ratle, and Betina Szkudlarek were on the programme but were unable to join us, mostly because of financial constraints, but they all had co-authors to represent their contributions. Unfortunately, Kevin Rockmann and Alexandra Bristow both had a session clash, but Kevin was gladly able to join us for the breakout groups.

With about 60 participants, our PDW was very well attended, and looking at the crowd during the introduction, it felt quite overwhelming and exciting at the same time. Many of our participants were new faces for both of us, and we had a wonderfully balanced gender representation. Our audience was very attentive, and many made notes during the presentations. We could not have wished for a more proactive and passionate audience and panellists who are now in a position to spread our Positive Academia message.

Following the panellists’ presentations, our audience had the opportunity to join the breakout groups, which were very dynamic and engaging. During this time, we had some wonderful colleagues reaching out to us, which led to new and upcoming collaborations and opportunities for us to achieve Positive Academia’s goals. Special thanks for reaching out go to Anna Górska, Monika Kostera, Shamika Almeida and Sarah Robinson, as well as the many other participants whose names we unfortunately didn’t catch, for voicing their gratitude and positivity they experienced during this session.

Although we started AOM the day before with mixed feelings – unsure of what to expect from our PDW – we can look back with satisfaction at a highly successful event. We are very grateful for this experience and opportunity to show that starting something small out of pure passion and enthusiasm on social media has potential to grow “in real life”. Believing in what we are doing and remaining resilient, even when we are tired and doubtful, are both key to ‘walking the talk’. We thus also transformed our Every Little Action Counts online campaign into a booklet, which we presented to each of our panellists, and it is now available on Amazon.

Thank you to all of our continuing supporters and to all those who actively spread our message! We can’t wait to work with many of you in the near future, and exciting times with international travel to spread our message are awaiting us!

If you are interested in collaborating, support, or any additional information, please feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn, through our website contact page or by sending a direct email to mail@christasathish.com.

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Copyright © 2025 Christa Sathish. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Sun 31 Aug 2025 07:38

Christa Sathish is a researcher of Organizational Culture & Change and a Lecturer in Management & Marketing at the University of Westminster. She is an all-around, transdisciplinary researcher who enjoys theoretical and empirical research using mixed-method research approaches, and digital methods. As co-founder of Positive Academia CIC (Community Interest Company) her passion is to make academia a better place for everyone.

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