About

Bruce Barry is Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. Professor of Management at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology. He is affiliated faculty at Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

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.

Prof. Barry’s current and recent research explores the social context of ethical decision making, the intersection of ethics and emotion, deception in negotiation, and ethical aspects of group process. A current book project explores the role of political ideology in the exercise of corporate influence on public policy. His previous book at the intersection of business and policy, examining free expression and workplace rights from legal, managerial, and ethical perspectives, was 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 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 faculty web page at Vanderbilt is located here. Download his c.v.

Contact Information:

Bruce Barry
Owen Graduate School of Management
Vanderbilt University
401 21st Ave. South
Nashville, TN 37203 USA
tel. 1.615.322.3489
email: bruce [dot] barry @ vanderbilt [dot] edu
twitter: @brucebarry

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