Dr Arun Kumar
Lecturer in International Management

Profile

Biography

Arun Kumar is a lecturer in International Management.

Previously trained in architecture and development management, he worked for a number of years as an independent researcher and consultant/advisor with leading aid agencies, NGOs, independent research centres, policy think-tanks, and human rights activists in South Asia. Tired of travelling and writing reports, he returned to academia in 2012. After completing his PhD at the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology at Lancaster University and working, briefly, in France, he joined the University of York in 2016 as a lecturer. He is also involved with the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre at York.

Research

Overview

I research the role of international businesses and management in global development, and have a particular interest in business elites’ philanthropy. 

My book Philanthropy and the Development of Modern India: In the Name of Nation (Oxford University Press) will be out in September, 2021. Drawing on extensive archival research on the history of Indian business elites’ philanthropy from the late-19th c. onwards, it plots the careers of development and its entanglements with colonialism, capital, modernity, and nationalism. In an innovative reading of socio-economic reform from the first half of the 20th c. alongside modernization from the second half, In the name of nation uncovers the lineages of several of our contemporary ideas of development. 

As an interdisciplinary scholar of management and development studies, my research has been published in field leading journals such as Academy of Management Learning & Education, Development & Change, Disability Studies Quarterly, Economy & Society, Enterprise & Society, and Journal of Business Ethics. In 2016, my research was awarded the Best Critical Management Education Paper at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, USA. I was also one of the five finalists for the prestigious, all-Academy William H Newman Award in the same year.

I am currently researching development management, caste and management education, history of Indian steel during the Cold War, and philanthropoids. I am also co-editing an Encyclopaedia of Critical Management Studies.

Publications

Selected publications

Selected publications only

Kumar A (In press) Philanthropy and the Development of Modern India: In the Name of Nation. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kumar A, Bapuji H and Mir R (2021) “Educate, agitate, organize”: Inequality and Ethics in the writings of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Journal of Business Ethics, published ahead of print: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04770-y (ABS 3*; FT50).

Kumar A and Brooks S (2021) Bridges, platforms, and satellites: theorizing the power of global philanthropy in international development. Economy and Society  50(2): 1-24 (ABS 3*)

Cooke B and Kumar A (2020) US philanthropy’s shaping of management education in the 20th century: Towards a periodization of history. Academy of Management Learning & Education 19(1): 21-39 (ABS 4*).

Kumar A (2019) From Henley to Harvard, at Hyderabad?: (Post- and neo-) colonialism in management education in India. Enterprise and Society 20(2): 366-400 (ABS 3*) 

Kumar A (2018) Pragmatic and paradoxical philanthropy: Tatas’ gift-giving and scientific development in India. Development and Change 49(6): 1422-1446 (ABS 3*).

Book Chapters

Kumar A and Kothiyal N (2018) Dis/ability at work?: Media representations, CSR, and diversity. In: Ghai A (ed) Disability in South Asia. New Delhi: Sage, pp. 359-79.

Kumar A (2013) Serv(ic)ing the country?: Critical reflections on youth development and citizenship education. In: Azzopardi A (ed) Youth: Responding to lives. Rotterdam: Brill, pp. 27-43.

Book Reviews

Kumar A (2015) Rosalind Eyben's International Aid and the Making of a Better World. Management Learning, 46(3): 363-366.

Kumar A (2013) Pushpa Sundar's Business and Community: The Story of Corporate Social Responsibility in India. Management Learning, 44(5): 563-566.

Proceedings

Kumar A (2016) ‘Making History: Archives, Historiography, and Their Silences’. Best Paper, CMS Division, Proceedings of Academy of Management.

Full publications list

Compositions

Recordings