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Mollie Painter

Professor

Nottingham Business School

Staff Group(s)
Department of Management

Role

Professor Mollie Painter is an international scholar and public speaker specializing in business ethics, CSR, sustainability and responsible leadership. She has held academic positions in South Africa, the USA, the UK, and Slovenia. She currently heads up the Responsible and Sustainable Business Lab (RSB Lab), a Research Centre within Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, UK and is an Extraordinary Professor at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria.

Career overview

After a stint as a Fulbright scholar in Boston, USA, Professor Painter's career started with a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and the Business School at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. After moving to Chicago, USA, in 2003, she occupied a tenured professorship in Philosophy at DePaul University. After 10 years in the USA, she moved to the UK in order to take up the position of Professor of Ethics and Organisation at Nottingham Business School.

Research areas

Mollie’s most recent research focuses on sustainability, organisational culture, leadership, and ethics within complex organisational environments. As a philosopher by training, her trademark is bringing insights from 20th century and contemporary philosophy to management and organisational studies. Topics she has published include leadership and gender, relational accountability, critical perspectives on organisational ethics, and rethinking ethics pedagogies. In addition to Gender, Leadership & Organization (Springer, 2011, with Volume 2 forthcoming in 2021), she has also authored Business Ethics as Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Business Ethics and Continental Philosophy, co-edited with René ten Bos (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which has been translated into Dutch as "Bedrijfsethiek. Filosofische perspectieven" (Boom, 2013).

External activity

From August 2021, she will be serving as co-Editor-in-Chief of Business Ethics Quarterly. Between 2015-2020, she held the Coca-Cola Chair of Sustainability at IEDC-Bled in Slovenia on a part-time basis and has been a visiting professor at HEC, ESCP-Europe, EDHEC and IAE in France. In partnership with the Academy of Business in Society (ABIS) and African faculty, she developed the African leadership programmes of focusing on developing values-driven leadership on the African continent, with active programmes now running in Egypt, Kenya and South Africa.