Department of Management, Society and Communication

I specialize in the broad field of corporate social responsibility and sustainability in the global South (with a regional focus on South Asia). In particular, I am interested in how the organization of transnational industries and local industrial clusters affect the economic, social, and environmental upgrading/downgrading of firms, workers, and environment.  

With post-graduate degrees in business and development studies (from CBS, Denmark), environment and development (University of Cambridge, UK) and peace and development studies (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) I use an interdisciplinary approach that takes its point of departure in critical development studies. Thus, I seek to advance theorizing and empirical studies on economic, social, and environmental upgrading/downgrading by combining insights from literatures related to global production networks/global value chains, feminist political economy, political ecology, and the labor process. These theoretical perspectives are linked to my interest in critical realism as a philosophy of science approach.   

I believe that the uniqueness of place, history, and in-depth knowledge of particular industries through longitudinal studies are critical to understanding economic, social, and environmental upgrading/downgrading processes in the global South. In the last twenty years, I have therefore undertaken several in-depth studies on the football manufacturing, leather tanning, garment, textile, and bamboo industries in South Asia.  This includes ongoing work on the formulation, implementation, and the impacts of the multi-stakeholder initiative, the Better Cotton Initiative, in India and Pakistan with support from Danish Social Science Research Council. At present, I am also involved in an in-depth study of women’s entrepreneurship and the labor process in the bamboo value chains of India in the states of Assam, Odisha, Meghalaya, and Madhya Pradesh with support from the EU Switch Asia program. From 2021-2025 I am the lead investigator in a research project, Global Value Chains and Climate Change in Bangladesh, supported by Danida. I have previously served as Co-Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor of the journal, Competition and Change (Sage Publications). 

In addition, I am deeply committed to interaction with practitioners, academics, and students with the aim of increasing awareness of the diversity of perspectives that exist on CSR/sustainability including buyer, supplier, and worker perspectives on these topics. Improving theorizing, policy, and practice in these areas require increased North-South dialogue so that we may obtain a better understanding of each other’s perspectives.    

My work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A, Business & Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Development and Change, Global Networks, and Ecological Economics. Recently, I published a monograph titled Rethinking CSR in Global Value Chains in the Age of COVID-19 (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), and I have recently signed a book contract with Cambridge University Press and delivered a manuscript on sustainable value chains (w. Rachel Alexander as the lead author) for publication in late 2022/early 2023.