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Dr. Paul Shrivastava

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Professor and Director
David O’Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise
John Molson School of Business
Telephone: 514-848-2424 ext. 2367
E-mail: pshrivas@jmsb.concordia.ca

Dr. Paul Shrivastava knows personally what a crisis feels like. In December 1984, a Union Carbide Corporation pesticide plant accident killed over five thousand people in Bhopal, India, where Dr. Shrivastava was born and resided for 26 years. At that time, he was studying technological decision-making and innovation at New York University, where it came as a huge shock that technology - the source of so many benefits to our society - could have such a devastating impact on people, communities and the environment.

The experience left a lasting mark on his professional career and personal life: “I am an engineer by training; I used to think like an engineer ready to do technical problem solving. But the Bhopal crisis taught me the importance of the ethical, economic, social and cultural context in which technologies are embedded. Solving problems is not sufficient, it is important to choose the right problems and to solve them both with technical proficiency and ethical and social effectiveness,” Dr. Shrivastava says.

Since then, he has looked at the world through a crisis lens: seeing the current world as a “crisis society” in which all major systems (financial, climate, social and psychological) are in crisis and in need of restructuring. As well, Dr Shrivastava believes the solutions to crises lie in developing new models of wealth creation that are ecologically, socially and economically sustainable.

Dr. Shrivastava recently joined Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business as Director and Distinguished Professor of the David O’Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise. With the Centre, he hopes to develop an interdisciplinary research agenda and programs on sustainable enterprise, believing it critical to involve economists, sociologists, political scientists, sustainability scientists and many others in developing solutions. He is also keen on engaging Concordia students and staff in the O’Brien Centre’s research, as well as local community members and corporations in Montreal, and sustainability scholars from surrounding areas.