Professor Geoff Goldman is a Professor of Critical Management Studies in the Department of Business Management at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), where he is also Head of Postgraduate Studies.
On Wednesday, 04 October 2023, he presented his professorial inauguration address in front of the Executive Dean of the College of Business and Economics (CBE), Professor Lungile Ntsalaze as well as invited guests.
The title of his address “I Searched for form and land, for years and years I roamed: Reflecting on an (a)typical academic journey” explored the discipline of business management.
Prof Goldman shared his varied family background and the life lessons he has distilled from his family tree. This, together with the era in which he grew up in, as part of Generation X, paved the way for an interesting and colourful journey down the path of academia. This path started off by accident and took many twists and turns and was by no means a ‘typical’ one.
The more he grew as an academic, Prof Goldman realised that certain things in and about the discipline of business management were just not making sense.
This steered Prof Goldman down a path to search for the essence of management. This trajectory eventually led him to the critical discourse in management, a peripheral discourse that recognises the fallibility of capitalist doctrine, distrusts positivist inquiry, and exhibits an overall awareness of the paradoxes borne out of the mainstream ideology and encountered in mainstream management thinking.
It is this space that Prof Goldman has been exploring and specialising in for the past 11 years. As this is an underexplored space in South Africa, he has made it his mission to grow Critical Management Studies as a scholarly endeavour in South Africa.
By way of conclusion, Prof Goldman shared insights that have assisted him to not only be a more nuanced academic, but also to be a more refined individual.
Professor Geoff Goldman is a highly accomplished academic with a Doctorate in Leadership in Performance and Change from UJ. He has a strong mentoring record, having successfully supervised over 20 Master’s and 5 PhD graduates. As a qualitative and conceptual scholar, he has an extensive publication record, contributing to more than 120 scholarly articles, conference papers, book chapters, books, and conference proceedings. His research interests primarily revolve around Critical Management Studies, Business Ethics, and Strategy Implementation.
Additionally, Prof Goldman plays a crucial role in the academic community as the managing editor of the SCOPUS indexed management journal Acta Commercii. He is also actively engaged in editorial roles for journals in both South Africa and Europe, furthering his commitment to academic scholarship and dissemination.
Beyond his academic pursuits, Prof Goldman has a range of diverse hobbies, including collecting cycads, motorcycling, and expertise in scale-modeling, particularly focused on World War II aircraft. He is also a notable philatelist, boasting one of the most extensive collections of Union of South Africa and 20th Century RSA stamps in the world.
Following his inaugural address, Professor Remiguisz Gawlik from Krakow University of Economics in Poland gave a brief response.