Mrs Alice Stephenson

I started my career in HR before moving into law, qualifying as a solicitor in 2011. I spent over a decade as an employment, data protection, IP and technology lawyer across private practice and in-house roles, before founding and scaling my own legal services business and ultimately selling it. That breadth — people management, commercial law, M&A — is what I bring to both my teaching and my research.

My doctoral research at the University of Bath examines identity regulation in professional service firms: what happens to the account a professional can give of herself when the demand to become a certain kind of person outruns the language available to describe it. I work on the affective and embodied conditions under which regulation comes to be inhabited, rather than on its discursive content alone. It is supported by an ESRC-funded studentship.

Underneath both strands is a single interest in people and change — how organisations shape the people who work for them, and what that shaping asks of them.