Title: Professor
Company: Michigan State University
Location: Williamston, Michigan, United States
William N. Cooke, PhD, professor with the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Educators for dedication, achievements, and leadership in research and educational consulting.
At Michigan State University, Dr. Cooke teaches collective bargaining and negotiations to graduate students and employee relations and research methods to undergraduate students and, from 2008 to 2019, he served as director of the school. Over the span of nearly 50 years in academia, he has also trained over 5,500 human resource professionals and union leaders in negotiations and consulted with 35 organizations in contract negotiations and developing high-performance workplace systems.
Dr. Cooke earned a BS in economics from Eastern Illinois University in 1970 and an MA and PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1973 and 1977, respectively. He began teaching in 1977 as an assistant professor at the University of Maine, during which he also held one-year appointments as a visiting scholar with the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley and as a visiting fellow with the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. In 1981 he joined the faculty at Purdue University where he served as chair of organizational behavior and human resource management at the Krannert Graduate School of Management until 1983.
For the next 8 years, Dr. Cooke was an associate professor and director of executive education programs in negotiations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he also co-directed the university’s Joint Labor-Management Relations Center. From 1990 to 2007, he served as a senior research professor, associate dean, and director of the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues at Wayne State University and concurrently continued directing executive education programs in negotiations at the University of Michigan.
Having been listed in Who’s Who in Economics, Dr. Cooke is the author of four books and more than 20 journal articles published in leading academic journals and has made over 90 conference and related research presentations across 20 countries. In addition, his research has been funded by NSF, the Russel Sage and Rockefeller Foundations, and the U.S. Department of Labor, among other organizations.
Dr. Cooke’s most recent publication is his 2024 book “Negotiating High Performance-Focused Partnerships: The 5 Stages of Effective Labor-Management Negotiations,” coauthored with two distinguished human resource management professionals. He considers this book to be his most valuable and potentially most impactful publication and plans to continue writing for a broader public audience about labor-management relations and human resource strategies and practices.
Dr. Cooke credits his success to hard work and his passion for investigating complex human and organizational decision-making through original theoretical modeling and empirical testing of hypotheses. He advises others pursuing similar paths to pursue their intellectual curiosity in earnest and to enjoy the challenge of potentially making a difference in organizations and society through one’s research and scholarship, teaching, and public engagement.
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