Professor Rashedur Chowdhury

Biography

Rashedur Chowdhury is Professor of Business and Management at Essex Business School (EBS). He also holds an honorary, lifetime Batten Fellowship at the Batten Institute, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia (UVA), and an Affiliate Membership at University College Dublin (UCD) Earth Institute. He recently received the 2024 Outstanding Mid-Career Researcher Award from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Essex and was honored with the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for the 2024/2025 academic year. Rashedur specializes in understanding the dynamic relationship between firms and marginalized groups, conceptualizing how marginalized groups influence firms and how firms respond. He does so, by immersing himself with marginalized people and their spaces, where they live, suffer or experience pain, reject dominant institutions, and aspire to thrive on their own terms or maintain non-conformist lifestyles. Rashedur’s empirical works include research in access to low-cost HIV/AIDS medication and Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa; low-paid garment workers, microcredit borrowers and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh; violence against transgender people in Pakistan; and mining activists in South Asia and the UK. His recent project examines rhetoric and reality in the context of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh; making sense of how victims of Rana Plaza see their own situation. Under this project, his article titled, ‘Rana Plaza Fieldwork and Academic Anxiety: Some Reflections’ (first published: 9 February 2017) became one of the most downloaded articles from the Journal of Management Studies. As of the end of 2017, this article had received 2,463 downloads. In around a year and a half since its publication on 5 September, 2022, his paper titled 'Misrepresentation of Marginalized Groups: A Critique of Epistemic Neocolonialism' has been accessed more than 12,000 times without any social media promotion. Rashedur’s Ph.D. thesis, titled “Reconceptualizing the Dynamics of the Relationship between Marginalized Stakeholders and Multinational Firms,” received The Society for Business Ethics Best Dissertation Award, 2014. His award-winning thesis brought a unique perspective on how powerful actors can and should explore new mechanisms for engaging marginalized stakeholders. By challenging old dogmas, including the commonly held assumption that because marginalized stakeholders are poor and uneducated, they are incapable of understanding and participating in politics, Rashedur argued that marginalized stakeholders have the “political imaginations and capabilities” to challenge the powerful actors. PRIOR EXPERIENCE Prior to joining EBS as Professor of Business and Management on 1 August 2022, Rashedur held the post of Associate Professor at Southampton Business School, University of Southampton (2018-2022), Assistant Professor at Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, UCD (2014-2018). Rashedur has been invited as a Visiting Scholar by various institutions, including INSEAD Business School, France; Darden, UVA; Smurfit, UCD; Faculty of Business and Economics, HEC Lausanne, Switzerland; School of Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä, Finland; Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of the Western Cape, South Africa; School of Government, Peking University, China; School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine; and Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. FUNDING AND AWARDS Rashedur received numerous research funding awards, and other awards, from diverse institutions around the globe such as University of Cambridge, Magdalene College at Cambridge, UCD, University of Jyväskylä, University of Southampton, Smuts Memorial Fund, the Charles Wallace Trust, the Batten Institute (funded for the 2013/2014 academic year), the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for the 2024/2025 academic year, the Kaufman Foundation, Oikos, Erasmus+ and AESOP+ [European Union projects], the Irish Research Council, and the Foundation for Economic Education (Finland). Most notably, he was awarded a first class honours for his BSc and the prestigious Drapers’ Company Undergraduate Prize 2006 for outstanding academic merit and excellence. In 2020, the Academy of Management (AOM) conferred him the award for the Best Critical Management Learning and Education Article on Black Scholarship. In 2021, the AOM’s Entrepreneurship Division awarded him Best Article on the Rohingya Refugee Crisis, and the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Division awarded him Best Article on Gender, Work and Organization. In 2023, the AOM's CMS Division awarded him the Best Critical Business Ethics Article for his study on Undocumented Immigrants’ Experiences of Legal Violence. His article on Epistemic Injustice and Black Scholarship is the winner of Human Relations journal's Paper of the Year Award 2023. In an issue between 1 January 2021 and 15 December 2022, his research on COVID-19 from a rural part of Bangladesh became top cited article among work published in Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management. His work entitled “Economic Lives of Rohingya Refugees Matter: Beyond the Romantic Tale of ‘Market Works for All’” is most viewed among all Managements Studies Insights blogs (official blog of the Journal of Management Studies). He serves on the editorial boards of Human Relations, Organization, Business and Society, and the Journal of Business Ethics. OCCASIONAL REVIEWER OF DIVERSE ACADEMIC JOURNALS (APPROX. 36), BOOK PUBLISHERS AND FUNDING BODIES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES SUCH AS: Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Organization, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Management, Australian Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Organization, Organization Theory, Organization Studies, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Management Inquiry, International Journal of Business Environment, International Journal of Project Management, Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal., Journal of Business Ethics, Business and Society, Business and Society Review, Business Ethics: A European Review, Business and Human Rights Journal, Journal of Management History, Management Learning, California Management Review, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Cultural Dynamics, Cogent Arts & Humanities, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, Social Sciences, International Review of Victimology, Journal of Political Ideologies, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Macmillan Publishers, Economic and Social Research Council, UK, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. NOTABLE DATABASES (SELECTED) 1. Rana Plaza Collapse: 400+ interviews (to the best of author's knowledge, this is one of the largest datasets to record victims’ authentic accounts in a systematic manner since the Second World War) 2. Rohingya Refugee Crisis: 200+ interviews and roughly 1000 individual survey data 3. Representational Rights of Garments Workers: 100+ interviews 4. Phulbari Movement, Bangladesh: 140+ interviews 5. Microfinance and its Implications in Bangladesh: 120+ interviews and roughly 1000 individual survey data 6. COVID-19 in Phulbari, Bangladesh: 63+ interviews 7. Transgender Violence in Pakistan: 76+ interviews

Qualifications

• PhD University of Cambridge,

• MSc University of Warwick,

• BSc Queen Mary University of London,

Appointments

University of Essex

• Associate Director of Research and Impact, EBS, University of Essex (9/2022 - present)

Other academic

• Director, Centre for Inclusive and Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of Southampton (9/2021 - 7/2022)

• Deputy Chair, Social Science Faculty Research Ethics Committee, University of Southampton (6/2021 - 7/2022)