Helen Spencer-Oatey’s educational background is in both social psychology and pragmatics (a branch of linguistics), and throughout her career she has worked at the interface of the two disciplines. After completing her first degree, she worked in Austria and then went to live and work in Hong Kong, followed by Shanghai, China. Those experiences made her realise how closely interconnected three key issues are – relationships, communication and culture – and how they affect workplace life in complex interactive ways.

After returning from over 10 years of living and working in East Asia, she completed a PhD on working relationships and started a career as an academic. Initially this focused on the usual combination of teaching and research, but later she took up the management of a £4M Sino-UK e-learning programme (three phases, spanning 7 years in total), giving her superb first-hand experience of the challenges and joys of managing a set of international projects and the complex relationships of all the people involved. On completion of this programme, she took up the post of Director of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick.

She retired from the University of Warwick at the end of 2020, but continues her research. One of her current aims is to make the academic insights from her field more accessible and available to professionals from different walks of life, and her most recent two books, Global Fitness for Global People and Making Working Relationships Work, have been aimed at that audience. Her next book on managing rapport, to be published by Routledge, addresses both a professional and academic audience. Helen carries out consultancy work relating to her areas of expertise.