About

Bruce Barry is Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. Professor of Management Emeritus at Vanderbilt University.

Prof. Barry’s research and expertise lie in two areas: (1) social issues in management, including ethics, workplace rights, and public policy; and (2) the psychology of interpersonal and group behavior in organizations, including power, influence, negotiation, conflict and justice. He has published on these topics in numerous scholarly journals and volumes. His book at the intersection of business and policy, examining free expression and workplace rights from legal, managerial, and ethical perspectives, is Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace (Berrett-Koehler, 2007). His (co-authored) books on negotiation (published by McGraw-Hill) are among the most widely adopted texts on that subject in colleges and universities worldwide.

Prof. Barry was editor in chief of Business Ethics Quarterly (published by Cambridge University Press) from 2016-2021. He is a member of the editorial boards of Negotiation and Conflict Management Research and Work and Occupations, a past president of the International Association for Conflict Management, and a past chair of the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management.

A native of New York, Prof. Barry earned undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Virginia and a PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 1991 and was Director of the Owen School’s PhD Program in Management from 1998-2004. He was Chair of the Vanderbilt University Faculty Senate in 2008-09. He has also taught at UNC-Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and has been a visiting professor at the Melbourne Business School and the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

A long-time board member (and currently treasurer) of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, he served on the national ACLU board from 2015-2023, and is a past president of the Tennessee affiliate. On the side he is a columnist writing on political, economic, and social issues for the Tennessee Lookout. He was a long-time contributing writer for the Nashville Scene (until being vindictively canned in 2018 by the paper’s new ownership). He is married to Megan Barry.

His web page at Vanderbilt is located here. Download his c.v.

Contact Information:

Bruce Barry
email: bruce [dot] barry @ vanderbilt [dot] edu
twitter: @brucebarry

Views are my own, not those of my former employer, attorney, accountant, friends, family members, pets, or others who may wish to coopt my opinions for their own nefarious purposes.