Professor Thomas Clarke is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and international corporate governance expert. He is a former editor for governance and sustainability of the Journal of Business Ethics a FTSE 50 journal. He is the editor of The Sage Handbook of Corporate Governance , and an editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation . He is editor of the Cambridge University Elements in Corporate Governance book series which features works on corporate purpose and sustainability. He contributed to the formulation of the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance (1999). He conducted the 2012 Census of Women in Leadership for the Australian Government, launched by Governor-General Quentin Bryce. He is the Inaugural Sir Adrian Cadbury Scholar of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) that represents $54 trillion institutional investor funds. His current research interests include the pivot towards corporate sustainability including integrating targets and measures, progress towards decarbonisation, and the circular economy.

He conducted pioneering research on cooperative enterprise at Warwick University and later published the first critical works on the process of privatization at St Andrews University in the UK. He was awarded the first funded chair in Corporate Governance at Leeds Business School in 1992, and became a foundation Professor of Management at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai, a joint venture of the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) and Shanghai Jia Tong University. He taught on Institute of Director programs in the UK and contributed to the development of AICD programs in Australia where he is Emeritus Professor at UTS Sydney. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Paris, Dauphine; University of Toulouse and ESC Lille, France; University of Geneva, Switzerland; FGV Business School, Sao Paulo, Brazil; and UAM Business School, Mexico City.