Andrew Thomson obituary

My father, Andrew Thomson, who has died aged 78, was one of the leading figures in postwar management education and history. A founder and chairman of the British Academy of Management (BAM) and the first dean of the School of Management at the Open University, he strove to improve the quality of management in the UK and was appointed OBE in 1993 for his efforts.

In later years he went on to become an important historian of the practice and the profession of management, publishing widely on the subject and writing, in 2010, with John Wilson, an acclaimed biography of a fellow management pioneer, Lyndall Urwick.

Born in Stockton-on-Tees, the son of Andrew, a Scottish engineer, and his wife, Helen, he was educated at St Bees school in Cumberland (now Cumbria). After reading philosophy, politics and economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, he did his master’s and then a PhD at Cornell University, New York, before joining Glasgow University as a lecturer in 1968. While there he was active in the Labour party and became good friends with Donald Dewar, who would become the inaugural first minister of the Scottish parliament after devolution. A lifelong believer in social justice, Andrew had earlier met my mother while canvassing for the Labour party in Hampstead.

My father’s academic career developed rapidly and he was appointed professor in the Glasgow department of management studies in 1978. He was a founder member of BAM in 1987, and then its second chairman, from 1990 to 1993. He became the first dean of the School of Management at the OU in 1988 and directed a rapid expansion, including the launch of an MBA and a foray into international markets. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, he took the school into central and eastern Europe by bartering management education for stocks of Hungarian wine.

In 2001, he retired to Paihia, in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. In his retirement he put into practice, at a local level, what he believed so passionately about – the importance of people helping each other and working together.

He is survived by his third wife, Angela Bowey, whom he married in 2001; by two sons, Jack and me, from his first marriage, to Joan Hughes, which ended in divorce; and by four grandsons, Luka, Matija, Toby and Euan.

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