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 at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). She works primarily in the areas of social innovation and social entrepreneurship, with a particular emphasis on those initiatives aiming to build more inclusive and sustainable cities.

Personal life and education

Barinaga was born in Spain, naturalized Swedish in 2004 and currently lives in Malmö, Sweden. She received a Master in business administration (MBA) in 1995 and a master's degree in international management (1996) from ESADE Business School in Barcelona. From 1998 to 2002, Barinaga conducted her Ph.D studies in business administration at the Stockholm School of Economics (HHS). 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”.

Career

Between 2002 and 2006 Barinaga worked at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm where she conducted an ethnographic study of the digital divide as it plays out in the Kista science region. She published her findings in “Powerful dichotomies: Inclusion and exclusion in the information society” (2010).

Barinaga was a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Management at University of Queensland, Brisbane in 2000, as well as at the Scandinavian Center for Organizational Research at Stanford University from 2007 to 2008.

In 2009, Barinaga became associate professor at Copenhagen Business School in the department of management, politics and philosophy, becoming professor (with special responsibilities) in 2013. In 2019, she moved to Lund University School of Economics and Management for a professorship of social innovation and entrepreneurship.

Förorten i Centrum

Barinaga founded the non-profit organization Förorten i Centrum in 2010. It was an initiative that uses the collective production of public art to change the stigmatized images of the so-called “immigrant suburbs” of Stockholm. The initiative coordinated the production of murals in various Swedish cities – such as Stockholm, Landskrona, Kalmar, Örebro. Förorten i Centrum closed down in 2020. Her current work focuses on community currencies as a method to build more resilient communities and more inclusive cities.

Selected publications

Books

• Powerful dichotomies: Inclusion and exclusion in the information society (2010) Pub. EFI
• Remaking Money for a Sustainable Future (2024) Pub. Bristol University Press

Articles

• Barinaga, E. 2007. ’Cultural diversity’ at work: ‘National culture’ as a discourse organizing an international project group. Human Relations, 60 (2): 315–340.
• Barinaga, E. 2013. The Psychic Life of Resistance: The Ethnic Subject in a High-Tech Region. Ethnicities, 13(5):625–644.
• Barinaga, E. 2013. Politicising Social Entrepreneurship: Three Social Entrepreneurial Rationalities towards Social Change. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 4(3): 347–372.
• Barinaga, E. 2014. Social Entrepreneurship: Cases and Concepts. Studentlitteratur.
• 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. 2020. Coopted! Mission-drift in a social entrepreneurial initiative engaged in a cross-sectoral partnership. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 31(2), 437-449
• Barinaga, E. 2020. A route to commons-based democratic monies? Embedding the production of money in traditional communal institutions. Frontiers in Blockchain. Here.