Speaker: Professor Bobby Banerjee (Bayes Business School)
Co-hosted by: University of Liverpool Management School's Work, Organisation and Management Group and Centre for Organisational and Employee WellBeing
Date: Tuesday 16 January 2024
Time: 5-7pm
Place: International Slavery Museum, Liverpool L3 4AQ
The event
In this lecture Professor Bobby Banerjee will address the legacies of slavery and colonialism in business and management, and more specifically the silences and erasures of these histories in the curriculum of top business schools in the UK and worldwide.
One hundred and ninety years after slavery was abolished in the UK, there are now more slaves in the world than when slavery was legal. Modern slavery, far from being an aberration, is a logical outcome of the way our political economic system, with its historical origins in the colonial enterprise, is organized.
Slavery and colonialism were constituent of capitalism and their legacies continue to inform contemporary social relations. Colonial legacies also underlie the production and dissemination of knowledge in universities and most teaching in business schools helps nourish and extend this logic.
In recent years there have been calls across the UK to decolonize university curricula as a first step in addressing the harmful legacies of colonialism.
In his talk Bobby will explore the prospects and challenges posed by decolonization. In particular, he will focus on histories of racial capitalism, stakeholder colonialism and highlight the dangers of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) policies that are being developed at a rapid pace across universities, which he argues can seriously undermine the decolonization process.
Bobby will conclude his talk by proposing a manifesto for decolonizing management studies.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
Speaker
Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Sustainability at Bayes Business School (formerly Cass). He was the Associate Dean of Research & Enterprise from 2018-2022 and was also Director of the Executive PhD program from 2013 to 2019.
His primary research interests are in the areas of corporate social (ir)responsibility, (un)sustainability, climate change and decolonial resistance movements. He has published extensively in leading scholarly journals and is the author of two books: Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and the co-edited volume Organizations, Markets and Imperial Formations: Towards an Anthropology of Globalization.
He was a Senior Editor at Organization Studies from 2007 to 2019 and is currently Associate Editor at Business & Society. He is also a cofounder of ETHOS: The Centre for Responsible Enterprise at Bayes Business School.
Before becoming an academic Bobby was a real person and worked as sales manager for US and European multinational corporations in the chemicals industry, where he was responsible for overseeing the selling and import of chemicals that were banned in the US and Europe to developing countries.
In the little spare time he has these days Bobby dreams of destroying global neoliberal capitalism.
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