We are delighted to invite you to join our first online seminar which will be provided by Dr Jagannadha Pawan Tamvada, Associate Professor at Southampton Business School. This seminar will be presented via Teams, a link will be provided following your registration.

Capitalism can lead to an extreme concentration of wealth. The resulting inequities have the potential to threaten social order even in advanced economies. In line with the emerging body of scholarship underscoring the need to rethink capitalism (Mazzucato, Mason, Piketty, Fleming), and yet offering a new approach, this paper focuses on the role of identity and its conceptualisation in shaping modern institutions of capitalism. This paper argues that neoclassical economics has normalised a particular form of human behaviour as rational while treating all human identities on this assumption. Although scholars have contested this homo economicus view of individuals, its influence has widely persisted. In this context, the paper discusses an alternative approach to identity, as advanced by ancient Indian thought, to examine if this reconstrued view can offer new directions for resolving compelling issues facing capitalistic societies in a post-Covid world.

Speaker Profile

Dr Jagannadha Pawan Tamvada is an Associate Professor at the Southampton Business School specialising in interdisciplinary entrepreneurship and strategy research. He is also Deputy Director for Impact and Collaboration at the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership and co-founder of iPowerz, a social enterprise that aims to support grassroots entrepreneurs and innovators. He has a PhD from the University of Goettingen and the Max Planck Institute for Economics. For his doctoral thesis on entrepreneurship in developing countries, he was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society and the Inaugural Best Dissertation Award of the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (DRUID). He won the Kaufman Foundation Best Paper Award at Academy of Management meetings in 2011, and was nominated twice for Vice-Chancellor awards at Southampton. He is committed to advancing societal wellbeing through his endeavours and is a founding trustee of the Indian Cultural Association of Dorset, a registered charity in England.

Who am I? Rethinking Identity and Capitalism in a Post-Covid World