Dr Charles Barthold is a senior lecturer at the Open University and a member of the Research into Employment, Empowerment and Futures (REEF) academic centre of excellence.

Charles employs a variety approaches to organisation studies and leadership in relation to contemporary economic, environmental and social issues. He is interested to study how organisations and leadership reproduce power relations. This includes different types of organisational power relations such as organisational control; anthropocentrism in relation to the environment; and organisational logics informed by gender, racialisation and precarious work. Secondly, his project is to analyse how resistance, politics and ethics in organisations can bring about novel forms of democratisation and emancipation. Thirdly, Charles is interested about organisational discourses. Methodologically, his work is qualitative (ethnography, film analysis, discourse analysis) or conceptual.

The work of Charles has been published in leading journals such as Organization; Journal of Business Ethics; Business Ethics: A European Review; Critical Perspectives in Accounting; Scandinavian Journal of Management; Gender Work and Organization; Culture and Organization; and Theory, Culture and Society. Charles has also published a book: Resisting Financialization with Deleuze and Guattari.