Hindertje (Hin) Hoarau-Heemstra is a Professor of Organization and Management at Nord University. Her research focuses on tourism, sustainability, and organizing in more-than-human contexts, with particular attention to relationships between humans, animals, and the environment.
She has published in leading international journals such as Ecological Economics, Journal of Tourism Research, Tourism Geographies, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, and Annals of Tourism Research, and has also contributed to several international edited volumes.
Hindertje holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental and Social Sciences from Radboud University in Nijmegen (the Netherlands), and a master’s degree in International Development Studies from Wageningen University (the Netherlands). She earned her PhD in Business Administration from the former University of Nordland in 2010.
She has been affiliated with Nord University since then, first at the Business School and later at the Faculty of Social Sciences, where she worked as an Associate Professor in Organization and Management. She has taught a wide range of courses within the field.
Her background in environmental studies and international perspectives informs both her research and teaching. In her doctoral work, which was part of the project Experiences in the North, she explored tourism as a context for understanding innovation and organizational processes.
Her academic work has particularly focused on sustainability issues in tourism and Arctic communities, addressing themes such as posthumanism, ethics, collaboration, knowledge, innovation, and leadership. She is especially interested in understanding relationships between humans, nature, and wildlife, and how these shape behavior and decision-making in the organization and management of businesses and tourism destinations.
About the lecture
Title: "Rethinking Organisation and Leadership in a More-than-Human World: Lessons from Tourism and the Arctic"
How can we understand organizations and leadership in a time marked by climate change, biodiversity loss, and increasing pressure on ecosystems? In this lecture, Hindertje draws on her own research on tourism—particularly in Arctic contexts—to challenge established understandings of organization and management. From a posthumanist perspective, attention is directed toward how organizing is not only about humans, but also about relationships between humans, animals, nature, and technology.Through examples from whale watching and other forms of animal-based tourism, the lecture highlights how decisions are made in situations characterized by uncertainty, ethical dilemmas, and interspecies interdependence. The lecture builds on recent research published in international journals and demonstrates how organizations can be understood as relational and ecologically embedded practices. Tourism studies offer a particularly valuable contribution by making visible how humans and animals are entangled within shared organizational landscapes. This challenges traditional notions of separate spheres and calls for organization and management theory to respond to a more-than-human perspective. The lecture argues for the need to move from sustainability-oriented management—understood as reducing negative impacts—toward regenerative approaches, in which organizations actively contribute to restoring and sustaining ecological systems. Finally, the lecture explores how posthumanist perspectives open up new approaches to organizational practice, with implications for decision-making processes, ethics, power relations, work structures, leadership, innovation, and environmental responsibility. Such a perspective provides concrete guidance for organizations in the domains of environmental responsibility and animal welfare, and emphasizes how ecosystems, habitats, and animals must be understood as stakeholders in their own right.
Professorial Inauguration – The new Professor shares their knowledge
When students complete a bachelor’s or master’s degree, we celebrate these years of knowledge development with a formal ceremony. This is important both for the individual and for us as an institution. Becoming a professor is the result of 15–25 years of scholarly development. We mark this achievement with a professorial lecture, in which the new professor shares some of their expertise with colleagues, students, and the wider public. In this way, we celebrate that the university – and the faculty – has a scholar who has been assessed by their peers as possessing top-level competence within their particular field of expertise.
Following the lecture, all participants are invited to a social gathering in the cafeteria, featuring an aperitif, coffee, and cake.