Parijat Chakrabarti

I am Parijat Chakrabarti, a multidisciplinary scholar-practitioner whose research and practice examines how to organize economic life and design innovation systems for social and ecological well-being.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Erb Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, having previously completed my PhD in Sociology from Princeton University. Drawing on 24 months of fieldwork in Kenya and blending multi-sited ethnography, in-depth interviews, original survey data, and analysis of large-scale platform log data, my doctoral work documents how efforts to digitize Nairobi’s markets transformed the social-ecological system of moving food from farm to table in unexpected ways. This body of work has won several major awards including National Science Foundation grants and two Best Dissertation Paper Awards from the Academy of Management. See my research page for more details.

My doctoral work led me to become interested in the strategies that we use to tackle complex social and environmental problems (such as driving food systems change or connecting available climate funding with the programs and projects that need it most). Even when well-meaning, standard management approaches are often inadequate for making sense of and managing "wicked" problems with complex interdependencies. 

Open and critical questions include: How can mission-driven funders, innovators, and organizations build, sustain, and coordinate relationships across institutional silos in effective service of broader goals? How can we design market and innovation systems to be responsive to emergent or localized needs, sometimes ignored as firms pursue scale? How can organizations direct action while managing the fundamental uncertainties inherent to complex systems?

Connecting research with practice, I work with mission-driven practitioners (e.g. INGOs, public agencies, foundations, development organizations, and innovation hubs) to address these questions and to design effective, robust, and resilient market systems. Clients and partners have included global financial institutions, development and innovation agencies, and academic institutes. See my practice page for more details.

Beyond research, I am interested in art and photography as a way of communicating.