Professor Mark Saunders

Mark Saunders is Professor of Business Research Methods and Director of PhD Programmes at the Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Mark currently holds visiting professorships at the Universities of London (Birkbeck), Surrey and Worcester. He was elected to Fellow of the British Academy of Management in 2014 and in 2017 was awarded the British Academy of Management Medal for Leadership in recognition of prolonged contribution to doctoral capacity building. In 2019 he was awarded a Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences for his research on methods and human resource management and his contribution to capacity building.

Mark’s research interests include human resource aspects of the management of change, in particular the interrelationship between trust and distrust, and doctor-patient trust. His work on the nature of and interrelationship between trust and distrust, has been published in Journals such as Human Relation and Journal of Small Business Management; and on doctor-patient trust, in journals such as Social Science and Medicine and Health. His is a steering committee member of the interdisciplinary First International Network for Trust (FINT), an associate editor of the International Journal of Management Reviews and European editorship of The Service Industries Journal.

Mark is also interested in research methods, in particular participant selection and methods for understanding organizational relationships. He is one of the leading figures in research methods, being the 11th most highly cited person on Google Scholar in this field with over 35,000 citations. His textbook Research Methods for Business Students (currently 8th edition) has sold in excess of 400,000 copies and his recent work on sample selection is the most cited paper from 2016 in the British Journal of Management with over 3,000 downloads; his methods research also being published in leading journals such Field Methods, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management and the Journal of Personnel Psychology. He is series editor of Edward Elgar’s Handbooks of Research Methods series, each providing the definitive overview of the range of methods for a particular management subject, and co-editor on the Handbook of Research Methods on Trust.

Mark has a long-term interest in facilitating research capacity building and doctoral training and supervision. He has organised numerous doctoral summer schools, symposia and colloquia, including for the British Academy of Management, the University Forum for Human Resources Development and the First International Network on Trust. He has supervised 23 doctorates to successful completion and examined in excess of 30 doctorates. He is currently co-editing a book titled How to keep your Doctorate on Track.

Human resource aspects of the management of change; the interrelationship between trust and distrust; doctor-patient trust; research methods, in particular participant selection and methods for understanding organizational relationships