Paula Hyde is Professor of Organisation Studies in the Department of Management, Birmingham Business School. She was made fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2018. She is a trustee for the Learned Society for the Study of Organising in Healthcare (SHOC), Academy of Social Sciences having served on the executive committee for over a decade. An internationally recognised researcher and teacher, she spent twenty-five years working in higher education before moving to University of Birmingham in 2018. Previously she taught at the Universities of Durham, Salford and Manchester where she was Director of the Health Services Research Centre. Before commencing an academic career she was an occupational therapist and she returned to practice, part-time during the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020-22.

Paula is an expert in qualitative research methods, particularly participatory research with older people and acts as an advisor to NIHR funded projects as well as teaching social research methods to MSC and PhD students across the College of Social Sciences. She is co-editor of the Research Handbook on Contemporary Human Resource Management for Health Care and has published theoretical, methodological and empirical work for academic, policy and practitioner audiences.

Her current programme of research operates at the intersection of disciplinary fields; organization studies, social psychology and human resource management. Through extensive research at the frontline of health and social care organizations, she has been able to contribute and shape academic thinking about health workforce, service organization and delivery. Outputs from this research activity have contributed to significant academic developments in a number of fields: for example, organization studies (corporate colonization - Aroles et al 2021, Organization Studies), ethnography (linguistic performativity - Aroles et al 2021, Organization) and HRM in health care (McDermott et al, 2024 - Research handbook).

Paula's current programme of research includes work on international health care workforce, inclusive leadership, organization theory in health care and the effects of different business models in health and social care.