Emeritus Professor Andrew Thomson

Emeritus Professor

Professor Andrew William John Thomson, OBE, FBAM was born on 26 January 1936 in Stockton, the son of a Scottish engineer who had moved south to work for ICI. He was educated at St Bees School in Cumberland.  During his national service he was a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery of the British Army between 1954 and 1956, and later a Lieutenant in the Parachute Regiment of the Territorial Army from 1958 until 1963.  After national service he obtained a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1959 from St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, before transferring to Cornell University, where he obtained a MS in Industrial Relations in 1961.  He then returned to Britain to work as a Brand Manager for Lever Brothers between 1961 and 1965.  However in this latter year he returned to Cornell to do a PhD, which he obtained in 1968.

His academic career began when in 1968 he joined the Department of Social and Economic Research in the University of Glasgow, becoming lecturer, senior lecturer and then reader before being appointed as Professor of Business Policy in the recently formed Department of Management Studies in 1978.  He was invited to a visiting role at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business in 1973 and again in 1977. He held various posts in the research councils, including Vice-Chairman of the Industry and Employment Committee of the Economic and Social Research Council from 1983 to 1985 and Chairman of the Joint Committee of the ESRC and the Science and Engineering Research Council. He was also Dean of the Scottish Business School, a joint activity of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Strathclyde Universities, from 1983 until 1987. In this latter capacity he became involved with the Council of University Management Schools, and was its Chairman from 1985 to 1987. He also became a founder member of the British Academy of Management in 1987, and then its second Chairman from 1990 to 1993. In a non-academic capacity, he was also a Director of the Scottish Transport Group from 1977 until 1984 and a Member of the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board from 1985 until 1999.

In 1988, he was appointed as the first Dean of the School of Management at The Open University on the School’s establishment as a separate faculty in the University.  There followed a period of dynamic growth, expanding the curriculum to include an MBA and widening the operations of the School to the Continent of Europe as well as supervising its expansion in academic and other staff numbers. He then stood down from the deanship in 1993, remaining as a Professor in the School until his retirement in 2001. His contribution was recognised when he was awarded an OBE in 1993 for services to education.  He was awarded an emeritus professorship by the Open University in 2006.

He was also actively engaged in research during his career and his publications, with a range of co-authors, include: The Nationalised Transport Industries (1973); The Industrial Relations Act (1975); Grievance Procedures (1976); Collective Bargaining in the Public Sector (1978); A Portrait of Pay (1990); and Changing Patterns of Management Development (2001). When the Management History Research Group was formed in 1994 at the initiative of Edward Brech, he became its Secretary until his retirement in 2001,  but still continues his writing and has written (with John Wilson) The Making of Modern Management: British Management in Historical Perspective (2006). He is currently involved in a biography of Lyndall Urwick, the leading figure in the history of British management. After his retirement he moved to New Zealand, where he has been involved with a number of institutions, including the Rotary Club of Bay of Islands, whose President he has been in 2006 -2007.

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