Department of Management, Society and Communication

Inaugural Lecture by Professor Lindsay Whitfield

On Friday 29 April, Professor Lindsay Whitfield gave her Inaugural Lecture at MSC with a lecture titled ‘Is Industrialization still possible in the 21st century?’.

In her lecture, Lindsay Whitfield focused on the clothing industry, today largely located in the Global South, and asked whether this industry can still drive industrialization in the 21st century, as it did in England during the industrial revolution. Low-income countries that are still in the process of industrializing are encouraged to start apparel industries through foreign direct investment and export through global production networks. However, global production networks fragment the industrial processes that historically underpinned industrialization and resulted in wealth and a higher standard of living, and the proliferation of countries producing clothing has saturated global markets.

Lindsay Whitfield is Professor of Business and Development at MSC and Co-Director of the Centre for Business and Development Studies, located at MSC. She is a political economist whose research focuses on contemporary challenges to economic development. Her research combines theories within development economics with political science and economic history and emphasizes how processes of economic development take place within, and cannot be understood separate from, the global economy.

Lindsay joined CBS after ten years at Roskilde University and worked previously at the Danish Institute for International Studies and the University of Oxford. Currently, she leads the research project Decent Work and Global Value Chain-based Industrialization in Ethiopia and Kenya (2020-2025), funded by the Danish Development Research Council (FFU), which continues research pioneered in her previous project African-owned Firms Building Capabilities in Global Value Chains (2016-2019), funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (FSE). Her books include Economies after Colonialism: Ghana and the Struggle for Power (2018), The Politics of African Industrial Policy: A Comparative Perspective (2015), and The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors (2009).

For further information, please contact Lindsay Whitfield, lwh.msc@cbs.dk.

MSC contribution to the Sixth IPCC Assessment Report on Climate Change

MSC Associate Professor Maria Figueroa has contributed as lead author to the third part of the Sixth Assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The third part of the report was released on 4 April 2022.

Maria Figueroa explains that the Working Group III report on Mitigation of Climate Change, “looks at how nations and individuals can limit and prevent carbon emissions responsible for climate change”.  As Lead Author, she worked specifically on one chapter assessing “the data and literature that serves to understand the drivers of carbon emissions and helps to update the assessment of progress on global climate action in relation to long-term emissions goals”.

Read more about Maria Figueroa’s work on the report in an interview with her in this CBS News item, which also points out that the “key messages from the IPCC Working Group III sixth assessment report are that greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming, are at their highest levels in human history (54% higher than in 1990); and that we are not on track to limit warming to 1.5°C”.

Concurrently, Maria adds, there are options available now in every sector (industry, transport, buildings, agriculture, cities) that can at least halve emissions by 2030. In particular, the report sheds new light into assessing the demand for services and social aspects of mitigation highlighting how a transformation facilitated by behavioural, socio-cultural and institutional drivers and social practices through demand-side strategies have a great emissions reduction potential.

This newly published third part completes the Sixth Assessment Report which has been under way since 2017. It consists of contributions from each of the three Working Groups and a Synthesis Report.  Read more about the work here.

Find the Working Group III report on the IPCC website. For further information, please contact Maria Figueroa, mfi.msc@cbs.dk.

The Department of Management, Society and Communication

The department came into existence on 1 January 2017 as a result of the merger of the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management and the Department of International Business Communication. Read about MSC's research profile here.

MSC moved into its new premises in Dalgas Have in August 2017. As one of CBS' largest department, it occupies most of the second floor of the building.