Nidhi Srinivas | The New School University (original) (raw)

Nidhi Srinivas is Associate Professor of Management. He joined the New School in 2001, after serving as a Lecturer of Management at the University of Essex, in the United Kingdom.

Srinivas' thesis was on the strategy formation of NGOs, and was written under the supervision of Henry Mintzberg and Jan Jorgensen in McGill University in the Faculty of Management. He defended his thesis in 2001. Much of Srinivas' conceptual orientation regarding management is shaped by his years at McGill University, which remain an enduring influence, notably in terms of Mintzberg's processual understanding of management decisions, a commitment to historical sensitivity, an understanding of societal responsibilities of work organizations and a profound respect and empathy for the work of managing.

In the first stage of research past his thesis defense Srinivas focused on two questions: what were the processes through which management knowledge was transferred historically to postcolonial settings such as of India? what were the processes through which management knowledge was being transferred from corporate settings to settings of non-governmental organizations? In researching these questions Srinivas shifted from an initial commitment to Eliasian historical sociology to an interest in critical theory, notably in terms of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the philosophy of Michel Foucault, and an assessment of the consistent concerns with instrumental rationality of the Frankfurt School. This shift towards critical theory, the second stage, was shaped profoundly by the conceptual priorities within the New School's Graduate Faculty, which houses its departments of the humanities and social sciences. An interest in politics and conceptualizing the links between organizations and political action, a commitment to assessing early and later Marx programs of class struggle and trajectories of capitalism, bridging phenomenological and deconstructive views of ethics, all emerged during this stage. This shift led to a third and contemporary stage of research where the original questions return, but in a rephrased form: what are the processes through which subject formation occurs in managers, and what are postcolonial traces and ramifications? what are the forms of accommodation that occur between development policies, managerial practices within organizations, and the spheres of civil society? This current stage has led to research that focuses on critical geneologies of social innovation, civil resistance to urban mega-events, identity work in postcolonial Indian organizations, and the continued work on his book project "Against NGOs".

Typically management research is bounded by the expectations of "business schools". Even critical management theorists tend to refract and play against dominant views of business organizations and their practices. Srinivas' interest is in larger and wider social processes, such as in terms of non-business organizations (non-profits, community boards, NGOs) and unconventional managers (women who are lent micro-credit loans, villagers harvesting water, small scale vendors, political activists); his interest is especially in terms of larger questions that are hard to bound and tether under the term "management" though they do certainly overlap, such as politics, ethics, technocracy, democracy, constitutionalism, subjectivities, and professions. For these reasons his research fits well in the growing overlap of management with international affairs, and with design.

Consistent across these themes of research remains a commitment to the subaltern, not in an historical and static sense, as much as in a contemporary and shifting sense. In short less in terms of simplifying the subaltern as a distinct group, and more in terms of complicating the term, as part of a larger acknowledgement, of the ways in which contemporary capitalist forces fracture identities and require therefore a sensibility to the multiple and inchoate forms of knowledge and politics within which our globe functions. Across the research Srinivas remains committed to tracking the ways class and professional power grow naturalized, and the ways to unearth such power and challenge it. Therefore an important aspect of his research is to consider vernacular forms of managing, that are elided or endangered by professional discourses of management and the manager.
Address: Department of Management
72 Fifth Avenue, Room 602
The New School
New York City 10011

less