MY RESEARCH INTEREST

I am interested in processes of social change and in understanding how individuals, workers, and organisations enact, negotiate, and sustain change through different forms of agency, often in creative, contested, and sometimes unintended ways.
 
I am particularly interested in the agency of marginalised individuals in developing economies, namely, how people facing inequality, stigma, precarity, or limited organisational power nevertheless find ways to create some change, even if limited, for themselves and for others. At the same time, I examine the tensions, risks, and unintended consequences that can emerge as they engage in these efforts.
 
A central motivation behind my research is the need to broaden where and from whom we build management and organisation theory. The experiences and perspectives of workers and communities in emerging economies have too often remained peripheral to mainstream theorising. I believe these actors should not simply be treated as populations to which existing theories are applied. Their experiences can challenge our assumptions, reveal phenomena that existing theories struggle to explain, and provide the basis for developing new theoretical insights.
 
Grounded primarily in a social constructivist epistemology and informed by a postmodern orientation, my research therefore advocates more inclusive and bottom-up forms of theorising that begin with the struggles, practices, relationships, and change efforts of individuals whose voices and experiences have historically remained at the margins of management research. I am currently working on two projects, that I briefly present in this website:

1) Social responsibility from workers in production countries (Worker rights)
2) Overcoming marginalisation through work (Inclusion)
 
Embodiment as part of agency in organisations
 
More recently, my interest in agency has increasingly brought me to the body as previously theorised in sociology. I am fascinated by the idea that organisational agency does not reside only in what people say, decide, or formally control, but also in what they can do with and through their bodies.
 
This has led me to study embodied processes through which individuals use their bodies to navigate organisational challenges and influence the social environments around them. In my recent research, I am interested, for example, in how workers use their bodies to exercise political agency under conditions of organisational control; how marginalised entrepreneurs work on and through their bodies to manage visible stigma; and how bodily capacities developed through difficult past experiences can be redirected towards new organisational purposes.
 
What particularly interests me is that the body is rarely simply a resource or simply a constraint. The same body that exposes someone to surveillance, stigma, vulnerability, or exclusion can also create possibilities for action. Understanding this tension opens up a different way of thinking about agency, especially among people who may possess relatively little formal authority or access to conventional organisational resources.