Research
My emerging doctoral research sits at the intersection of disability lived expertise, executive leadership, governance, organisational performance and public value.
The research grows from a practical question I have encountered repeatedly across executive leadership, governance and public policy: what happens when lived experience is developed into expertise and sits alongside professional knowledge, executive capability and genuine authority?
PROPOSED DOCTORAL RESEARCH
Beyond Representation
The Strategic Value of Disability in Executive Leadership, Governance and Organisational Performance
Thesis statement. This research will examine how disability lived expertise, developed through reflection on and application of lived experience, may shape executive leadership capability and practice, and the organisational and governance conditions under which that capability is recognised, enacted and connected to organisational performance and public value.
Central research question. How, if at all, does disability lived expertise shape executive leadership capability and practice, and under what organisational and governance conditions is that capability recognised, enacted and connected to organisational performance and public value?
What I am interested in
Lived experience to lived expertise
How lived experience may become developed knowledge through reflection, professional practice, community engagement and critical learning, without assuming that disability automatically creates expertise.
Executive capability and authority
How disability-informed knowledge may shape strategic judgement, governance, risk, stakeholder relationships, innovation, organisational change and leadership through complexity when leaders hold genuine decision rights.
Organisational conditions
How culture, accessibility, psychological safety, governance, institutional norms, market pressures and informal credibility can enable, constrain, marginalise or translate lived expertise into changed practice.
Performance and public value
How leadership practice may be connected to decision quality, organisational learning, stakeholder trust, resilience, accessibility, service and policy outcomes, while carefully testing alternative explanations and avoiding causal overclaim.
Research approach
The proposed PhD is qualitative-dominant and explanatory. It is designed to combine a focused literature review, interviews with executives and board directors with disability and selected organisational stakeholders, embedded case analysis where feasible, and a targeted survey to test the relevance and transferability of emerging themes.
The research will deliberately look for negative and disconfirming cases. It will examine not only possible capability and value, but also tokenism, fatigue, disclosure risk, emotional labour, exclusion, inaccessible systems and the possibility that organisations may seek to extract lived expertise without providing genuine authority or support.
From practice to research
My academic background is professionally oriented. I hold an MBA and formal qualifications in management and governance, and my career has been grounded in executive leadership, boards, government engagement and systems reform. I am approaching doctoral study as an opportunity to bring my professional experience into a deeper academic research setting, strengthening the theoretical and methodological foundations of the questions I am already exploring.
What I bring is close access to the problem: more than 25 years of leadership experience, current work across government, regulated markets and disability policy, and lived experience that has sharpened the questions I am asking. What doctoral study needs to add is the methodological discipline, theoretical depth and critical challenge required to test those ideas properly.
Selected writing
Beyond Representation: When Inclusion Stops Short of Power
Why disability leadership must move from presence and lived experience to lived expertise, executive capability, authority and meaningful decision rights.
Further writing on leadership, governance, disability and public-purpose reform is available through Writing & Thought Leadership.
Representation is not authority. Access is not influence. Inclusion that stops short of power is not enough.
Jeramy Hope, Beyond Representation
Research direction and methodology remain subject to supervisory advice, institutional requirements and ethics approval.
Jeramy Hope 