Kent Glenzer Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, USA
Kent is the dean of the Graduate School of Policy and Management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, where he also has a joint appointment as associate professor in the MBA and Development Practice and Policy programs. His life’s vocation, hobby, obsession, and source of joy is helping social change agents straddle discursive regimes, challenge institutionalized silos, and so nudge entrenched relations of power and privilege towards greater equity. He has a particular passion for organizations which self-identify as working on poverty alleviation, human rights, and gender equity/equality, and unknotting the self- and system-imposed blockages which constrain their impacts.
Kent’s done much of his work in sub-Saharan Africa, working in 23 countries with international NGOs like CARE, Oxfam America, PATH, and governmental organizations such as Peace Corps over the last three decades. Since moving into academia in 2011, Kent has focused his research and teaching on catalyzing new forms of collaboration between public, private, and nonprofit actors. He is an Associate Editor for the Action Research Journal. When not obsessing or teaching about organizations with social justice missions, you can find Kent with his wife of 30 years in the back country trails of Big Sur, the Sierra Nevadas, or Santa Cruz mountains.
Kent's research and consulting focuses on the intersection of power in and between development organizations, knowledge claims, strategic and programmatic planning, and decision-making. He has a keen interest in long-term learning and inquiry systems, systems that permit managers and activists to understand and foster change that is structural and that may take many years. Kent spent much of the 1980s and 1990s working with international nongovernmental organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, and obtained his Ph.D. from Emory University’s Institute of the Liberal Arts (ILA) in 2005, where he focused bringing together the ethnography of development, political anthropology, and neoinstitutional organizational sociology in an investigation of democratic decentralization in Mali. His publications investigate development as discourse, development organizations as social constructions, and the nature of long-term learning systems themselves. Kent is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Development at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where he has a joint appointment between the MBA and Public Administration departments.
