Debjyoti Chakravorty

About

Overview

Debjyoti Chakravorty is a PhD Fellow in Management (Organization Theory) at Bayes Business School, City St. George’s, University of London.

Deb’s research interests lie in social movements, collective action framing, narratives, time and temporality, future-making, imaginaries, and memory work. Drawing on the literatures on future-making for social mobilization and memory work, Deb explores the role of the past and collective remembering of colonial legacy and history in the construction of imaginaries of desirable futures. His research is supervised by Itziar Castello and Joelle Evans, and funded by a Bayes Doctoral Fellowship.

Deb has been studying marginalized tea plantation workers in Darjeeling, India – mostly women from the minoritized Gorkha community. Through sustained multi-stakeholder engagement for 3.5+ years, Deb conducted 130+ in-depth interviews with workers and union members across 25+ tea estates, politicians, tea companies, state and central governments, and NGOs. He carried out extensive ethnographic participant observation of workers’ lived experiences of rights deprivation and collective activism, including union meetings, worker movements, and political campaigns across Darjeeling. Additionally, Deb collected archival data on worker movements from the early 1900s to 2024.

Deb's research findings show that workers collectively embellished the past to construct imaginaries of a better future. By selectively remembering favourable events, imbuing the events with affect, and appropriating them, workers crafted surprisingly positive narratives of their deprived recent and colonial past. Despite poor living and working conditions, they presented themselves as proud generational custodians of the tea estates and skilled producers of the globally reputed Darjeeling tea, building legitimacy and worth to demand land rights and fair wages. Workers also drew on imaginaries of a socially reconstructed colonial past, claiming that better conditions had existed under British planters to resist companies’ present-day deprivation. By building on an embellished past, workers articulated imaginaries of, and advocated for, a better future – with higher wages, land ownership in a separate state of "Gorkhaland" carved out of West Bengal, and companies from abroad as their employers.

This research, co-authored with his supervisors, was presented at the Academy of Management (AOM) and the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) conferences in July 2025, and recently secured ‘revise and resubmit’ from the Journal of Management Studies.

Qualifications

• Research Master MSc (Research) in Business & Management (Strategy), Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2018 - September 2020
• MSc in Banking & Finance (Distinction, top 4% of cohort), School of Economics & Finance, Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom, September 2013 - December 2014
• BCom Honours in Accounting & Finance, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata, India, July 2009 - December 2012
• PhD Fellow in Management (Organization Theory), Bayes Business School, City St. George's, University of London, United Kingdom, September 2020

Employment

• Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA), Department of Management, Bayes Business School, City St. George's, University of London, United Kingdom, October 2021 - present
• Research Assistant, Department of Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship, Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, September 2019 - November 2020
• Consultant, Finance Transformation (Strategy & Operations Consulting), Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP, India, September 2015 - September 2017
• Associate, Deals & Consulting (M&A Advisory), PwC Service Delivery Centre (Kolkata), India, India, May - September 2015

Memberships of professional organisations

• PhD Fellow, Bayes Business School ETHOS: The Centre for Responsible Enterprise, November 2022 - present
• PhD Fellow, Bayes Business School Centre for Professional Service Firms, September 2020 - present

Awards

• Bayes Business School, City St. George's, University of London (2025). Research Grants for Fieldwork and Conference Travel
  £3,600 in fieldwork and conference travel grants
• Bayes Business School, City St. George's, University of London (2020). 4.5-year Doctoral Fellowship, PhD in Management
• Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University Rotterdam (2018). Full Doctoral Scholarship, MSc (Research) in Business & Management (Value €45,500)

Languages

Bengali (can read, write, speak, understand spoken), English (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review) and Hindi (can read, write, speak, understand spoken)

Expertise

Primary topics

• Organizational Behaviour
• Industrial Relations/Labour Studies
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Business Ethics
• Equality, Diversity & Inclusion
• Gender & Diversity Management
• Organization Theory
• Business History

Additional topics

• Mergers & Acquisitions
• Organizational Culture
• Knowledge & Learning
• Change Management

Industries

• manufacturing
• agribusiness
• food & drink
• consumer goods
• professional services

Geographic Areas

• Europe - Western
• Asia - Southeast

Research

Research topics

Professional activities