(Ir) resistable and (Dis) reputable Empire:
Racialized Capitalism and the Tainting of Brand U.S.A.
The U.S.A. as a force for
both good and evil is an ever-present theme on the global stage. While its
identification with democracy and economic enterprise contributes immensely to
its positive face, its engagement in a particular form of racialized capitalism has
simultaneously tainted its global image. The lecture will explore these dual
tendencies with a view to understanding the profound ambivalence that
characterizes Brand U.S.A. in the world’s imagination.
The annual Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture highlights compelling, original research in scholarly and creative work, and is the highest honor the Skidmore faculty can confer upon one of their peers.
Pushkala Prasad is the Arthur Zankel Chair Professor of Management and Liberal Arts at Skidmore College where she teaches in the Management & Business Department and the International Affairs Program. Before coming to
Skidmore, she was on the faculty at Clarkson University, the University of
Calgary and Lund University in Sweden where she held the E-on Chair
Professorship in Corporate Social Responsibility. Professor Prasad has an
undergraduate degree in history from the University of Madras, an MBA from
Xavier Institute in Jamshedpur, India and a Ph.D in Management from the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is a prolific scholar whose
research has looked at resistance to technological change, the dynamics of
workplace diversity, corporate social irresponsibility and the changing
contours of global capitalism. Her work has been published in such pinnacle
journals as the Academy of Management
Journal, Organization Science, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and the Journal of Management Studies. She is the author of Crafting Qualitative Research
(Routledge) and co-editor of Managing the
Organizational Melting Pot (Sage Publications) and the Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies. Dr. Prasad’s
research has been consistently funded by such agencies as the Alberta Energy
Corporation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the
Swedish Quality of Worklife Foundation and the Jan Wallander Foundation of the
Bank of Commerce of Sweden. At Skidmore, Pushkala Prasad teaches International
Environments of Business, Diversity and Discrimination in the American Workplace
and Faces and Phases of Global Capitalism. She is currently working on a book
on the limits of liberalism in the context of new diversity tensions in the workplace.