Inaugural Lecture by Professor Lindsay Whitfield

On Friday 29 April, Professor Lindsay Whitfield gave her Inaugural Lecture at MSC with a lecture titled ‘Is Industrialization still possible in the 21st century?’.

In her lecture, Lindsay Whitfield focused on the clothing industry, today largely located in the Global South, and asked whether this industry can still drive industrialization in the 21st century, as it did in England during the industrial revolution. Low-income countries that are still in the process of industrializing are encouraged to start apparel industries through foreign direct investment and export through global production networks. However, global production networks fragment the industrial processes that historically underpinned industrialization and resulted in wealth and a higher standard of living, and the proliferation of countries producing clothing has saturated global markets.

Lindsay Whitfield is Professor of Business and Development at MSC and Co-Director of the Centre for Business and Development Studies, located at MSC. She is a political economist whose research focuses on contemporary challenges to economic development. Her research combines theories within development economics with political science and economic history and emphasizes how processes of economic development take place within, and cannot be understood separate from, the global economy.

Lindsay joined CBS after ten years at Roskilde University and worked previously at the Danish Institute for International Studies and the University of Oxford. Currently, she leads the research project Decent Work and Global Value Chain-based Industrialization in Ethiopia and Kenya (2020-2025), funded by the Danish Development Research Council (FFU), which continues research pioneered in her previous project African-owned Firms Building Capabilities in Global Value Chains (2016-2019), funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (FSE). Her books include Economies after Colonialism: Ghana and the Struggle for Power (2018), The Politics of African Industrial Policy: A Comparative Perspective (2015), and The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors (2009).

For further information, please contact Lindsay Whitfield, lwh.msc@cbs.dk.