Chris is the Sinyi Professor at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and the author of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socialize Costs. His earlier books include the award-winning Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism and Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise, which was a Financial Times Best Book of 2022.

Chris is passionate about how academic research can help people around the world address our most significant challenges. He examines how some of the biggest crises of our day — including climate change, inequality, and discrimination — are intimately connected to how our current economic and societal systems prioritize accumulating and concentrating wealth for the few over the concerns and needs of everyone and everything else. His research and writing focus on the need to rebalance the interactions between corporations, governments, and civil society to deliver socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes to all.

A second set of his research examines entrepreneurship and market development in China, and how China has developed an economic system that is profoundly different from the West. As a result, it has been difficult for Western leaders to effectively engage with China in business and political affairs, and many problematic policies and strategies have resulted. Through his work, Chris outlines the need to fundamentally rethink assumptions about China’s political economy from the ground up to create the opportunity for better cooperation and competition.

Prior to joining Cambridge, Chris was the Samuel C. Johnson Professor in Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell University, and before that spent 10 years as a professor at Harvard Business School and he also worked for 18 months at Harvard Kennedy School as a Professor of Social Innovation and Public Policy. Chris received a PhD in Sociology and Business Administration from the University of Michigan, and since then has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed academic articles and more than 50 Harvard business cases on topics related to social innovation, sustainable business, and doing business in China. Before returning to academia, he was a Vice President and Technology Manager at JP Morgan Chase.