Keynote Speakers

Dr Pat Bazeley provides training, assistance, time out (and good food) to local and international researchers from a wide range of disciplines at her research retreat at Bowral, in Australia. She also holds an adjunct position as Senior Research Fellow in the Quality of Life and Social Justice Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University.

Since graduating in psychology, Pat has worked in community development, project consulting and in academic research development. She has experience with research design and methodology broadly across the social sciences, but her particular expertise is in helping researchers to make sense of both quantitative and qualitative data and the use of computer programs for management and analysis of data. She has a particular interest in developing data analysis tools for integrated mixed methods research.

Pat has publications dealing with the experience of early career researchers, qualitative data analysis with NVivo, and issues and strategies in mixed methods analysis and computing.

Nita Cherry BA (Melb), MA Occup. Psych. (Melb), PhD (RMIT), MAPS, ASH (Assoc.) is Professor of Leadership  in the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Nita has over 35 years' experience combining the roles of senior executive, management consultant, director,  practising psychologist, educator, and researcher. She has worked in both the private and public sectors, in large corporations and small entrepreneurial businesses, in the not-for-profit sector,  in many parts of Australia and in the Asia-Pacific region.

Her statutory appointments have included Director on the Boards of the then Victorian Accident Compensation Commission, the Victorian Accident Rehabilitation Council and the Victorian Cytology Service.

She has also been a major contributor to leadership and executive development in Australia, designing and implementing development programs, building management competency models and undertaking executive coaching for all the leading Australian banks,  major mining and energy companies, the country’s largest telco and many government departments and agencies.

Nita was founding Director of the Master of Business in Management/Organization Change and Development at RMIT University.  She is also a Chief Investigator in a team awarded an Australian Research Council grant worth $447,000 between 2007 and 2011.

Bob Dick in the distant past was in turn shop assistant, electrician, draftsperson, recruitment officer, and industrial psychologist.  For most of the past 35 years he has been a practitioner and academic.  He now divides his work time between independent scholarship, occasional academic work (an adjunct appointment at Southern Cross University), and consultancy work in community and organisational change.

Jonathan Schroeder is Professor of Marketing at the School of Business and Economics, University of Exeter. He is also a Visiting Professor in Marketing Semiotics at Bocconi University in Milan, and Visiting Professor in Design Management at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.  His Ph.D. is in Social Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the production and consumption of images, and has been widely in marketing, organisation, psychology, design, and law journals. He is the author of Visual Consumption (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Brand Culture (Routledge, 2006). He is an editor of Consumption Markets  & Culture, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, Marketing Theory, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management and Advertising and Society Review.