Research Spotlight: Ishbel McWha-Hermann

Can you give a brief summary of your career to date, and the journey that brought you here to us at the University of Edinburgh Business School?

The first job I ever had was wrapping Christmas presents at the local shopping mall dressed in an elf costume, when I was 16 years old. Perhaps that experience influenced me to study psychology, I don’t know! But it certainly fostered in me a fascination about how people treat others, and particularly how people are treated at work.

Later, after I completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology, I moved to Asia to work for local aid organisations. I was at the time in my life where I really wanted to travel and experience the world, but I didn’t want to do that as a tourist, I really wanted to experience how it was to live and work in a culture very far from New Zealand, where I grew up.

After a slightly scary experience being medevacked out of Cambodia with dengue fever, a professor from my former university got in touch. He had won a DFID-ESRC grant to look at pay and employee relations in the aid and development context, and wondered if I would be interested to manage the project. To sweeten the deal he offered a full PhD scholarship on the side!

It was an amazing opportunity to work with an international and interdisciplinary team on a topic I had been living and breathing for 2 years. I returned to New Zealand and the rest is largely history! I’ve had a couple more international moves since then, first to Cornell University in the U.S. where I took my insights on intergroup dynamics and workplace inequality into a research faculty role focused on experiences of employees with disabilities, in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. After two years there I took a career break when my daughter was born, and we relocated to Edinburgh. Shortly thereafter I was delighted to join the Business School to teach on the newly launched MSc in International Human Resource Management.

If you had to give your ‘elevator pitch’ and explain in layman terms what your research and/or teaching focuses on, how would you answer?

I am a work and organisational psychologist, and I am particularly interested in the experiences of marginalised/vulnerable workers, and the role of HR policies and practices in helping to address big societal issues like poverty, inequality and climate change. In my teaching I shine a light on how HR managers can influence inside their organisations to address these issues – which I link to the current United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Through my research I work with organisations to understand how their HR policies and practices, and in particular pay policies and practices, can play an important role in societal wellbeing. This includes studying complex pay structures of international aid and development organisations operating around the globe, as well as studying living wage policies amongst organisations here in Scotland.

With regard to your work, is there anything exciting in the pipelines that you are working on?

At the moment I am in the first cohort of an exciting new collaboration between the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to help academics across humanities and social sciences to find ways to enhance and extend the impact of their work. Through this I have set up a membership organisation, called Project Fair, which brings together a network of HR and reward managers from international non-government organisations, to collaborate and obtain insights from academic research about how to create fairer pay structures within their organisations. Having continued to study this topic since I started my PhD over seventeen years ago, it is so exciting to be engaging directly with these organisations, and to be helping to shift the norms around how we think about aid and development organisations. We are developing training programmes, and thinking about how to support organisations to impact change to create systems which are fairer and more ethical.

As well as this I am currently working on an edited research handbook on decent work, commissioned by publisher Edward Elgar. ‘Decent Work’ is a concept that came out of the International Labour Organization, which highlights the importance of good quality working conditions for wellbeing and quality of life. This book is really exciting because it brings together some of the best minds from different disciplines, to get into the importance of why decent work is important for individuals, families and communities, and how work can be more decent.

What do you enjoy most about your teaching and/or research? What challenges and excites you across both?

I love the opportunity to connect a topic like Human Resource Management (HRM), which is very much focused on how policies and practices are structured to influence how people feel at work, to big global challenges like poverty, inequality and climate change. Being able to connect the dots between decisions about how workplaces treat employees, and how that then impacts employees’ families, communities and societies, is wonderful. It is hugely rewarding when students tell me I have opened their mind to a whole new way of thinking about HRM!

What do you enjoy most about working at UEBS?

I love the people I work with. We have some amazing colleagues who are so generous with their knowledge, and time. There is some amazing thought work going on within UEBS around topics of such profound importance for the world. It is inspiring to hear about this work and to have a chance to collaborate with some of these people!

What advice would you give to your younger self, about to leave home and embark upon further education?

Across my whole life I have been a perfectionist. I have always known it, but at times it can be really difficult to live with – I recall it was particularly tough when I was in the throes of writing up my PhD. Looking back I would tell myself to remember that we are not the outcome of our accomplishments. Regardless of whether we win or lose, succeed or fail, what is important is to follow one’s heart and be true to ourselves.

What one book, piece of music and beloved item would you take with you to a Desert Island?

One of my favourite authors is Sarah Maine, there is something about her writing which I find so compelling. She writes about connections of people within the same spaces but across time, and I love how she links Scottish history and culture with others, including New Zealand.

I am a total ‘muso’ – I sing, play the flute, and the piano. But it is a little known fact that I played bass and did backing vocals in a rock band when I was at high school! We were called Trash, we wore black rubbish bags and played Garbage covers…another Scottish connection! I am mad about the Foo Fighters, so any of their pieces of music would be a must on my island.

Beloved item is a difficult one. Having shifted country so many times I try not to be too attached to things. Ironically, given it is a desert island, I would probably choose to bring the glass bottle of sand which sits on my mantelpiece. This sand is a mixture of sand which my husband and I combined at our wedding – once mixed it cant be separated. It is one of my most prized possessions.

If you could invite anyone over for dinner (past/present) who would it be and why?

My paternal grandmother, Isa. She was an amazing woman of whom I have the most wonderful warm memories. She worked as a bookkeeper so that my dad could go to university (the first in the family). Isa worked till she was well into her 80s, when she was annoyed to be made redundant because her employer shifted to a computerised bookkeeping system. I would love to chat to her about how she pushed against prevailing gender stereotypes of the time.

If you could visit anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

I have been lucky enough to visit so many amazing places in my life already. I have listened to the Dalai Lama teach in Dharamsala, travelled the Tsar desert by camel, seen the penguins at Boulders Beach near the Cape of Good Hope, and snorkelled in the coral reefs of Fiji. I have yet to properly explore South America, and the Amazon, so that is high on my bucket list. I also really want to go in a hot air balloon, so perhaps I can combine the two!

Ishbel McWha-Hermann

Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director (Academic) MBA Programmes