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Professor Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo

Professor of Organisational Social Psychology
About

About

Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo is Professor of Organisational and Social Psychology and Director of the MSc in Organisational and Social Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science.

Her research examines how people and organisations navigate threshold states: periods of disruption, breakdown, and uncertain transition that resist conventional management frameworks. Empirically, her work has focused variously on necessity entrepreneurs in post-crisis Spain, housing activists organising under austerity, workers caught between precarious employment and self-employment, and field technicians managing digital transformation. A recurring concern across these contexts is how vulnerable actors sustain agency and build collective practice when institutional support is absent or actively withdrawn. Methodologically, she is committed to longitudinal ethnography, returning to the same actors and collectives over years. This sustained presence allows her to trace how organising practices form, unravel, and reconstitute across time rather than capturing a single moment of change.

Professor Garcia trained as an organisational psychologist at the University of the Basque Country, Spain before coming to London to conduct research towards a PhD on Cultural Change in Organisations. She holds postgraduate qualifications in Group Analysis (IGA) and Business Coaching (HBS), and is a Chartered Psychologist (CPsych), Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (AFBPsS), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). She also serves as advisor for the UK Government Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and is a former Senior Editor at the Journal of Business Ethics.

Expertise: Organisational change and development; precarious work; entrepreneurship; identity work, collective action; longitudinal ethnography; practice theory; organisational identity