Rashedur Chowdhury

University of Essex

Bangladesh 'Box Ticking' not Enough: Professor Rashedur Chowdhury's interview on Rana Plaza collapse/aftermath published by David Styles, Ecotextile Magazine

The neglect of marginalized stakeholders is a colossal problem in both stakeholder and entrepreneurship streams of literature. To address this problem, we offer a theory of marginalized stakeholder-centric entrepreneurship. We conceptualize how firms can utilize marginalized stakeholder input actualization through which firms should process a varie...

I argue that meta-ignorance and meta-insensitivity are the key sources influencing the reoccurrence of the (un)conscious misrepresentation of marginalized groups in management and organization research; such misrepresentation, in effect, perpetuates epistemic neocolonialism. Meta-ignorance describes incorrect epistemic attitudes, which render resea...

Current incentive structures are more favorably aligned with the world’s problems than with their solutions. We conceptualize this as the paradox of incentives to argue the need for new thinking and restructuring of incentives to break the paradox during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, and create new opportunities for societal transformation.

We adopt and extend the concept of ‘noncooperative space’ to analyze how (aspirant) black women intellectual activists attempt to sustain their efforts within settings that publicly endorse racial equality, while, in practice, the contexts remain deeply racist. Noncooperative spaces reflect institutional, organizational, and social environments por...

By drawing from Gayatri Spivak's works on the subaltern, we argue that marginalized people, are still suffering from silencing. This silencing occurs due to the powerful coalition of elite NGOs, academia, and corporations that perpetuate neocolonial mechanisms in developing countries. This condition pushes the subaltern out of the public sphere and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought overwhelming challenges to developing countries which are already resource-constrained and lack adequate social safety nets. Specifically, lockdown has adversely impacted marginalized communities (e.g., labourer, fish wholesaler and small business owner) and informal sector employees who rely on meager daily wages...

Drawing on the autobiography of an immigrant Black African female scholar, we introduce and conceptualize the notion of dual structural advantages that racism potentially affords elite White male academics. These hegemonic scholars enjoy two types of possible advantage. First, as gatekeepers to a racist academic system, powerful White male scholars...

During recent years, we have witnessed growing scholarly interest in, and attention to, grassroots organizations (GROs) and the strategies that they use to gain voice and influence. This has largely been at odds with mainstream management literature which tends to examine larger actors such as multinational firms and prominent international nongove...

We explore how black female intellectual activists cope in a ‘non-cooperative space’ while seeking racial equality. Our analysis adopts and extends the concept of non-cooperative space’ as an organizational and social environment portrayed by powerful white agents as victim-friendly and protective, yet, in reality, one that is perilous for individu...

Through rare, independent access to the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh we conducted an in-depth survey to examine how marginalized actors create and maintain their business activities in a highly restrictive environment. In so doing, we extend conventional notions of bricolage to the specificities of what we define as noncooperative spaces. M...

Based on my study of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, I develop a rejectionist perspective by identifying the understanding and mobilization of epistemic disobedience as the core premise of such a perspective. Embedded in this contextual perspective, epistemic disobedience refers to the decolonization of the self and a fight against colonial legacies...

Why do the majority of (white) academics within management and organization studies (MOS) endorse discourses of equality, diversity and inclusion on the one hand yet ignore the epistemic injustice suffered by black scholars on the other? We demonstrate how white supremacy within a historically racist academia marginalizes non-white bodies from know...

I address an interesting puzzle of how marginalized groups gain self-representation and influence firms’ strategies. Accordingly, I examine the case of access to low cost HIV/AIDS drugs in South Africa by integrating W.E.B. Du Bois’s work into stakeholder theory. Du Bois’s scholarly work, most notably his founding contribution to Black scholarship,...

During 2017, almost 750,000 Rohingya refugees entered Cox’s Bazar and now more than one million of them reside in Bangladesh. Rohingya refugees are subject to life‐long statelessness and severe physical and psychological violence, as the Myanmar government denies their citizenship and any fundamental rights. I had rare, unrestricted access to Rohin...

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I challenge key assumptions in the mainstream entrepreneurship literature that individuals have the capability to change their fate through entrepreneurial activities wherever in the world they may be. I advance the concept of a coordinated and regulative cooperative market to argue that the rebalancing of power between marginalized actors such as...

Firms may commit aspects of violence in a sophisticated way. To this end, I argue that, as firms and their influential agents (e.g. government bodies and NGOs that often work as third parties and claim neutrality) participate in designing and performing violent activities under an influence of ideological beliefs, certain aspects of violence are di...

Workplace innovation and community-based entrepreneurship (CBE) constitute a powerful combination which, if leveraged, could potentially solve society’s most pressing problems. This case study illustrates how an entrepreneur, Philip Wilson combined these two elements to pursue the ambitious goal of taking clean water to one million families in Guat...

Fringe stakeholders with limited resources, such as grassroots organizations (GROs), are often ignored in business and society literature. We develop a conceptual framework and a set of propositions detailing how GROs strategically gain legitimacy and influence over time. We argue that GROs encounter specific paradoxes over the emergence, developme...

Based on an interview with academic-activist Professor Anu Muhammad, this edited transcript illuminates the corporatization of nongovernmental organizations, with specific reference to perpetuating the negative effects of neoliberal microcredit practices in developing countries. It focuses upon how such corporatization is contributing to corruption...

Firms are increasingly being considered a central actor in both causing the underlying problems of grand challenges, such as global climate change, as well as facilitating efforts to potential solutions. Through their commitment to various stakeholder groups, firms may create different types of value, not just monetary, in appeasing expectations. R...

The Rana Plaza collapse, which took place in Bangladesh in 2013, killed and injured at least 1135 and 2500 people respectively. Although the structural fault with the building had been identified before the collapse, the owner of the building and five garment factories housed in Rana Plaza had forced workers to continue production for 31 Western mu...

This article explores the fight against corruption through the eyes of Anna Hazare, a renowned social activist from India, who spent more than 35 years of his life fighting corruption. Anna Hazare provides a detailed description of the anti-corruption movement he has led, provides his views on the World Bank guidelines to lower corruption, and high...

Our stakeholder-centric entrepreneurship framework offers a perspective on how to combine entrepreneurial opportunities as means and stakeholder capability as ends so that firms can address critical social problems while remaining innovative and competitive. When firms adopt marginalized stakeholders capability development, firms provide stakeholde...

In corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature, grassroots organizations (GROs) are often perceived as non-strategic actors who in the case of a conflict are dependent upon corporations, governments and mainstream nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to gain salience for their issue. Political CSR theorists aim to resolve this power imbalance...