MrTim Williams

Dr Tim Williams is an Adjunct Fellow in the Management Department at the UTS Business School, following a former role as lecturer. His work has been focused on the management challenges and opportunities relating to society and the environment, with an overall aim to understand how organisations transition toward ecological and social sustainability and how this can be encouraged. 

Tim has advanced longstanding and highly-cited UTS research by examining the role of important but neglected organisational practices and processes in this ‘black box’ change process. His PhD studied the role of strategy in sustainability transitions, and specifically how organisations can embed sustainability into their core strategy. Doing so provided new insights, showing that taken-for-granted strategy thinking and strategy practices have important and unexpected effects by both enabling and constraining the shift to sustainability. More recent research has looked at the nature of the 'sustainability work' within organisations which drives ecological and social outcomes. The insight of this 'work' lens is to recognise that sustainability in practice is a combination of the agency and activity of leaders, sustainability professionals, other change-makers, and people throughout the organisation, interacting with many tools and technologies.

Alongside this focus on how sustainability is achieved within management practice, Tim’s parallel interest is how sustainability can best be embedded within management education to equip current and emerging business leaders with the skills and knowledge to navigate an increasingly complex and challenging environment.

Tim has a background as a leading corporate sustainability and public affairs practitioner, including 15 years' experience at the Westpac Group.