Associate Professor Tim Butcher

Tim Butcher is Associate Professor of Organisation Studies at the Tasmanian School of Business and Economics. He researches work and wellbeing in relation to social change. Tim is a visual ethnographer using multimodal methods that combine photography with discourse analyses to understand lived experiences of what work means to us socially and culturally. As discourses of life and work shift and change, so too do our relationships with work and organisation. Through research projects with a range of communities and organisations over more than 20 years, Tim’s ethnographies uncover how social and economic change not only influence what work we do, but also how it affects our wellbeing. Work is a cultural touchstone in our lives that can be both enriching and a source of trauma, anxiety and depression. Overall, Tim’s research aims to identify futures in which work can be experienced by more people as something individually fulfilling, socially purposeful and culturally meaningful.