Dr. Kenneth Kimura is an Assistant Professor of Management, Business Administration, and Public Policy. He also serves as APU’s Director of Corporate Programs.
In addition to his doctorate in education from Harvard University, Kimura holds an Ed.M. in Higher Education from Harvard; an M.A. in Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies in Higher Education from Stanford University; and an Honors B.A. from Swarthmore College.
Kimura’s scholarship answers the question of why nonprofit and for-profit organizational behavior converge in higher education by demonstrating how campuses increasingly rely on executive education. His work argues that executive programs operate at a strategic position near fields of practice, where institutional means and ends loosely couple between for-profit and nonprofit logics and lucrative tuition revenue is at stake as adult learning migrates from the periphery to the core of higher education.
The first of his three research streams contributes the institutional history of executive education’s origins, social legitimation, and diffusion at American schools of management. This includes executive education’s developmental role in the birth of organizational strategy theory, innovation of the case study pedagogy, and pioneering of educational returns on investment (EROI). His second stream explains executive education’s cultural entrepreneurship among philanthropic foundations, university libraries, and humanities institutes as reactions to the rise of economics as a discipline, spread of neoliberalism, and expansion of higher education bureaucracy. Third, his emerging scholarly interests with the corporation acting as a state entity explores how executive education among indigenous institutional fields, such as Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs), socially constructs knowledge about public goods, including community healthcare, lifelong learning, and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs).
Dr. Kimura teaches MBA students at APU the following courses: organizational behavior, organizational development, managerial economics, the MBA Capstone in competitive strategy, business ethics, as well as quality management. He also is a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians (LIAL). At Harvard’s LIAL program, Kimura teaches about library leadership, reorganization strategies, and the future of higher education. He is also a former management consultant of strategy and operations at Deloitte.
As a fourth generation Alaskan who hails from a founding family of the city of Anchorage, Kimura spends time away from APU’s campus in Eagle River, Chugiak, and at the remote cabin he built in his youth with his brothers and parents on Three Island Lake, near Glenallen. Outside of his research, teaching, and service at APU, he can be found on campus running the cross country trails he raced during high school and shooting hoops at Moseley Sports Center, the gym where he played basketball on weekends growing up.
