Rashedur Chowdhury

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.

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 most 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 (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.

Rashedur’s Ph.D. (obtained from Judge Business School, University of Cambridge) 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 to joining EBS as Full 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.