David Billis

David is Emeritus Reader at the London School of Economics (LSE). He has taught, researched and consulted in the public, private and third sectors in more than 50 countries and is the author or editor of eight books and several hundred academic papers. He has taught for the United Nations and most recently was visiting professor at Imperial College Business School. His books include Organisational Design; Welfare Bureaucracies and Organising Public and Voluntary Agencies.

He began his academic career at Brunel University undertaking collaborative action research with social welfare agencies and published Welfare Bureaucracies in 1984. He developed the “Worklevel” theory there, which was adopted by the private sector and implemented in several multinationals where he introduced global change projects covering more than 100 countries and some 700,000 people.

His work with the third sector began in 1978 when he founded the world’s first postgraduate research and teaching centre for voluntary/nonprofit sector management at Brunel University. In 1987 this transferred to the LSE where he became founding Director of what eventually became the Centre for Civil Society. In 1990 he co-founded the journal Nonprofit Management and Leadership. In 1995 he became the first non-American to be awarded the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA – the leading international research Association). His most recent book is Hybrid Organisations and the Third Sector (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and his theoretical chapter will be published in 2015 in Classics of Organisation Theory, 8e, by Jay M. Shafritz.