The British Academy of Management (BAM) 2025 Conference, hosted by Kent Business School, took place earlier this month attracting over 1000 business and management scholars from around the world. This included a combination of 800 in-person delegates with 200 delegates attending online.
BAM is the leading authority in the academic field of management in the UK, representing business and management scholars and supporting and promoting engagement with international peers. As hosts of their annual conference, Kent Business School put both themselves and Canterbury on the international stage, bringing many delegates to the city for the first time.
The BAM 2025 conference took place over the course of the first week in September and in addition to a virtual day (1 September), included a PhD symposium (2 September) where young scholars met academic mentors and presented their research. The three in-person days ran from Wednesday 3 September to Friday 5 September with sessions taking place across a range of venues on the Canterbury campus, including the versatile events arena and state-of-the-art lecture theatres. The conference, titled ‘On the Border: Management Challenges, Business Opportunities and Disrupted Institutional Contexts’, examined borders in all their forms, including geographical borders, business borders and social borders with three keynote panels considering each of these different forms of border.
The theme of the first keynote panel was geographical borders and addressed the question of overcoming borders through refugee entrepreneurship and the role it can play in helping people build new lives. The keynote speakers were Paul Gurney of BecomingX and Dr Sophie Alkhaled of Lancaster University. The panel was chaired by Professor Iain Wilkinson (Kent).
Speakers on the second keynote panel addressed the issue of business borders and included industry leaders Daniel Rubin, Founder and Executive Chairman of The Dune Group and Wendy Barlett MBE, Founder of BM Caterers. They were joined by Professor Andre Spicer, Executive Dean of Bayes Business School and Professor Elina Meliou, University of Southampton who chaired the panel.
Social borders and the presence of borders in everyday life were discussed by the speakers on the final keynote panel. This includes Professor Yvonne Benschop, Vice Dean of Research, Radboud University and Kali-Hamerton-Stove, Co-Founder of the Glasshouse Project. The panel was Chaired by Professor Chidiebere Ogbonnaya, King’s College London.
Patricia Lewis, Professor of Management at Kent Business School and Co-Chair of the BAM 2025 Conference, with her colleague Professor Thanos Papadopoulos, said: ‘It was wonderful to bring an international group of academic scholars together to discuss the very contemporary topic of borders. In taking a broad approach to this theme, the conference explored the complexity and ubiquity of borders in our professional and personal lives.’