Dr Sylvia D'souza

International Lecturer in Business Management

Research Overview

My key research interests include ethics, phronesis, embodiment, and difference. I adopt a highly interdisciplinary approach in my work, drawing from influences in philosophy and sociology. My main aim in simple terms is to embed what are generally seen as universal categories (e.g., ethics) into embodied and culturally specific categories through a practice-based lens.

My interest in practice necessitates taking a complex view of phenomena. It has led me to interrogate how macro-social and meso-organisational aspects interact, shape, modify, and orient individual embodied stances towards choice and action—particularly the ethical dimension—in diverse social worlds. This links to my concern with organisational technologies such as performance management, which have the power to reconfigure local modes of being by rewiring goals, values, interests, and so on to an instrumental logic in market-driven economies.

The broader goal of my work is to surface culturally situated modes of being, seeing, knowing, and in this sense, reclaim these modes from the universalising logic of dominant epistemologies and representations. This is also to say that I have an interest in the question of difference/otherness, and the performativities that go into the production and maintenance of difference/otherness (including the underlying politics).

My research approach is qualitative, and I am interested in the innovative use of qualitative research methods including arts-based methods to express embodied/affective experience.

Journal of Business Ethics (Journal)
Editorial activity

2024 Warwick Summer School on Practice and Process Studies
Participation in conference - Academic

British Journal of Management (Journal)
Editorial activity

Organization (Journal)
Editorial activity

Culture and Organization (Journal)
Editorial activity

British Academy of Management (BAM) Conference 2022
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

EASST2018
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

European Academy of Management (EURAM) Conference 2018
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience

  • Centre for Technological Futures
  • Pentland Centre