Geoff Walters

I am Senior Lecturer in Management and a Director of the Birkbeck Sport Business Centre. I began my academic career working for the Football Governance Research Centre at Birkbeck and was responsible for the annual State of the Game reports into governance of the football industry. During this period I was awarded a three-year scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council to work on a PhD researching corporate governance in the football industry, before being appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Management in January 2008. My research interests concentrate on the broad concept of governance although there are two focused strands that direct my research. The first strand is on the concept of organisational governance, and more specifically within the non-profit sporting context. I am interested in the role of the board and I draw on process-based methodology to help understand how boards function. The second area of research interest is on how and why organisations engage with different stakeholders. Drawing on the concept of systemic governance, I am interested in the nature of power dynamics inherent within these stakeholder networks and how the networks evolve and are shaped over time. Underpinning these two strands of research is a commitment to phenomenon-driven research, which seeks to ensure the duallity of research from both a theoretical, conceptual basis and a practical reality. I have received research funding from the Economic and Social Research Council in addition to UEFA and the Sport and Recreation Alliance. I was also involved in the development of the Voluntary Code of Good Governance for the Sport and Recreation Sector and was part of a European Union funded project led by the Sport and Recreation Alliance focused on developing a European version of this Code. I have Geoff consulted for UEFA, Moore Stephens and the Sport and Recreation Alliance, and I continue to work with UEFA and CDES Limoges on the MESGO and MIP Executive Master's programmes.