Ester Barinaga

Ester Barinaga (born 1972) is a professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Lund University (Sweden) and a professor (with special responsibilities) in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy (MPP) at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Copenhagen (Denmark). She works primarily in the areas of social innovation and social entrepreneurship, with a particular emphasis on those initiatives addressing ethnic marginalization and stigmatization in our societies. Ester Barinaga was born in Spain, naturalized Swedish in 2004 and currently lives in Malmö, Sweden.

Barinaga received a Master in Business Administration (MBA) in 1995 and a master's degree in International Management from ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, in 1996 where she later would work as a Coordinator in the International Academic Affairs office.

From 1998 to 2002, Barinaga conducted her Ph.D. studies in Business Administration at the Stockholm School of Economics (HHS), Sweden. Her doctoral thesis was an ethnographic-inspired study of an international project group. Her doctoral thesis was awarded a three years post-doctoral scholarship from the Jan Wallanders and Tom Hedelius Foundation. The title of her Ph.D. was “Levelling Vagueness: A study of cultural diversity in an international project group”.

In 2002-2006, Barinaga worked at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. During those years, she conducted an ethnographic study of the digital divide as it plays out in the Kista science region. This work was presented, among others, in her book “Powerful Dichotomies: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Information Society” (EFI).

Barinaga has been a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Management at University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia in 2000, as well as at SCANCOR, Scandinavian Center for Organizational Research, in Stanford University, USA, in 2007-2008. In 2009, Barinaga became Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Copenhagen, Denmark, at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy (MPP), and in 2013, she became Professor (with special responsibilities) in the same department, where she still works.

Apart from her academic career, Ester Barinaga founded in 2010 the non-profit organization Förorten i Centrum, an initiative that uses the collective production of public art to change the stigmatized images of the so-called “immigrant suburbs” of Stockholm.

• Barinaga, E. 2014. “Micro-finance in a developed welfare state: A hybrid technology for the government of the outcast.” Geoforum, 51:27–36.
• Barinaga, E. 2014. Social Entrepreneurship: Cases and Concepts. Studentlitteratur.
• Barinaga, E. 2013. “Politicising Social Entrepreneurship: Three Social Entrepreneurial Rationalities towards Social Change.” Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 4(3): 347–372.
• Barinaga, E. 2013. “The Psychic Life of Resistance: The Ethnic Subject in a High-Tech Region.” Ethnicities, 13(5):625–644.
• Barinaga, E. 2007. “’Cultural diversity’ at work: ‘National culture’ as a discourse organizing an international project group.” Human Relations, 60 (2): 315–340.