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• Lecturer in the Strategy Group
• Course Organiser:
  • Managing Across Borders and Cultures (Undergraduate)
  • Global Business and the Sustainable Development Goals (Undergraduate)
• Programme Director (Sabbatical Cover)
  • MSc Global Strategy & Sustainability
• Member (Research Champion)
  • Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability Committee 
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  • MEPALS (Minoritised Enterprise Policy and Action Lab Scotland)

Nkosana develops tools that help leaders and institutions make better decisions. 

He received his PhD from Monash University and was awarded the Mollie Holman Medal, a top academic honour awarded annually to 10 doctoral graduates across the university for exceptional research. Nkosana also holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Queensland with first-class honours and was valedictorian at the business school.

Nkosana’s academic interests sit at the research-practice-policy interface. As a researcher he investigates how strategic leaders navigate market uncertainty, cross-cultural conflict, and sustainability challenges. His work, published in the Journal of Business Venturing, has earned three Best Conference Paper Awards from the European and American Academies of Management. An award-winning educator at the University of Edinburgh Business School, he has received three Excellence in Teaching Awards since joining in 2022. His teaching philosophy emphasises developing critical, resilient thinkers who excel in complex, uncertain conditions.

Previously, he was the CEO of a software company backed by Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company. For three years, he served as the managing director of CYALA (the Council for Young Africans Living Abroad), which he founded in 2015. Since 2021, he has supported governance and strategic implementation in the NFT industry, exploring innovative governance models for emerging technologies.

Nkosana’s governance work spans academia, culture, and policy. He serves on the boards of:

• Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS): A Scottish Government agency distributing £1 billion annually to support 180,000 students.
• Historic Environment Scotland (HES): Overseeing Scotland’s historic sites, including Edinburgh Castle, which collectively attract 3 million visitors annually.

Past appointments include roles on the advisory council of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Queensland Multicultural Advisory Council, and as Chair of the Global Shapers Community in Australia, an initiative of the World Economic Forum.

How can strategic leaders elevate their decision-making in a world where humanity's limitations clash with the growing complexity of society and technology?

This question lies at the core of Nkosana's research. His work integrates macro-level societal trends and micro-level psychological processes to understand and improve decision-making in organisations.

Nkosana's research program can best be described as the Microfoundations of Society and Technology in Organisations — a focus that drives him to examine how social dynamics and technological advancements influence strategic leadership and decision-making within organisations.

Through a multidisciplinary lens that draws on insights from organisation theory, sociology, and cross-cultural psychology, he produces theoretically significant and practically relevant research to confront the diverse challenges presented by our rapidly changing world.

Society in Organisations: In his first research program, Nkosana investigates how perceptions of inequality within markets and across borders and cultures influences decision-making processes. This program explores, for instance, how immigrant social class experiences, reflecting inequalities across different contexts, shape the strategic decisions of entrepreneurs. In another project, he examines how abandoned cultural artifacts are re-legitimised in fast-growing markets, where these artifacts often suffer from unequal attention and recognition. Combining principles from psychology and sociology, he is developing frameworks to help strategic leaders make better decisions.

Technology in Organisations: Nkosana’s second research program explores how emerging technologies can enhance decision-making practices. One project integrates decentralised storage with multimodal AI to develop advanced methods for archiving social media data. Another project employs large language models to assist in qualitative data analysis. By creating tools for better data collection, retrieval, and analysis he helps strategic leaders avoid decision paralysis.

Phenomena: Transnational venturing, social entrepreneurs, impact investors, socio-technical disruption, diaspora communities, digital communities, digital dark age

Theoretical Interests: Organisational paradox, cross-cultural psychology, organisational sociology, social evaluations (class, status, stereotypes, authenticity, legitimacy) 

²Ñ±ð³Ù³ó´Ç»å²õ:ÌýNarrative interviews, netnography, comparative case study, questionnaires, vignettes, digital archival