BCICS Welcomes New Director

Dr. Ana María Peredo
photo credit: UVic Photo Services

The BC Institute for Co-operative Studies is pleased to welcome our new director. Dr. Ana María Peredo, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, Sustainability and International Business in the Faculty of Business at the University of Victoria has been appointed as director of the BCICS. Ana María is a long time associate of the British Columbia Institute for Co-operative Studies. Indeed she reports that one of the attractions of coming to UVic was the presence of the BCICS and one of the first people she met at UVic was Ian MacPherson.

Ana María’s research explores the role of business in fostering sustainable communities, especially among poor and disadvantages peoples. Dr. Peredo’s pioneering work introduced the concept of community-based enterprise to the academic business literature. Her article in the top business journal, Academy of Management Review, is a seminal piece that elaborates this approach to entrepreneurship and the generation and regeneration of economic activity in otherwise-impoverished communities around the world. Her publications there and elsewhere on this subject have had a large impact, including new sessions dedicated to “communitybased enterprise” in major academic business meetings as well as special issues devoted to the subject announced by leading business journals.

Ana María’s commitment to engaging business educators in thinking about management education in relation to the problems of poverty was recognized in her invitation to be guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of Management Education. She was asked to assemble an issue on the subject of management education in the context of poverty: a subject not prominent in the business literature.

Dr. Peredo’s active scholarly life has not replaced her lively involvement in the disadvantaged communities she writes about. Early in 2007 under a dissemination grant with the BCIC Institute she re-visited several of the Andean communities in which her work began, not only to continue her observation of the unique form of enterprising that goes on there but also to report to them on what she has learned from her experience with them and from other rural communities in British Columbia.

Dr. Peredo has been successful in attracting several grants to promote research into the potential role of enterprise among impoverished indigenous as well as non-indigenous peoples. She has been recognized on a global scale for her scholarship and has already won a number of prizes for her work: a Faculty of Business Research Award at UVic, The Western Academy of Management Ascendant Scholar Award, and a Visiting Fellowship at the Global Poverty Research Group at the University of Oxford.

This trajectory of scholarship has been closely paralleled by Dr. Peredo’s development as a teacher. Her signature course, “Global Sustainability and Local Communities”, builds on the idea that business people cannot disassociate themselves from their role as citizens. She explores with her students a variety of business models, including co-operatives, rooted in a diversity of social, ecological and cultural settings. Her aim is to sensitize students to the complex and dynamic relationship between businesses and the societies in which they operate, working with a rich conception of sustainability that incorporates social, environmental and economic elements.

Learn more about Dr. Peredo >>