My friend and former colleague László Czabán, who has died suddenly aged 62, was a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester’s Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS). An intellectual of the first rank and a dedicated scholar and teacher, he arrived from Hungary in 1993 to take a post at Manchester.
I and a colleague, Richard Whitley, recruited him to work with us – at the then Manchester Business School – on a research project on economic transformation in post-socialist Hungary. Working with him was an extraordinary intellectual and social experience. Among other things, it rapidly became clear that he was no “mere” economist: rather, his knowledge ranged across the social sciences and embraced philosophy and the humanities more generally.
Acquiring the skills of an economic sociologist and ethnographic researcher, László was a sine qua non for the success of the project and the research papers produced from it. Indeed, his book Recurring Crises: Macroeconomic Transformation in Hungary (2008) may well be the best single analysis of Hungarian economic change in the 1990s, and it didn’t get the recognition it deserved.
László went on to teach for two years at Leeds University Business School, where, among other things, he researched economic transformation in Estonia and Ukraine. He subsequently returned to take a permanent lectureship at Manchester in 1998 and was promoted to senior lecturer in organisational analysis and international management.
Back at Manchester, he threw himself into teaching and programme development. In particular, from 2007 to 2023 he developed and directed AMBS’s flagship MSc degree in business analysis and strategic management. There are now thousands of students from across the world who have benefited enormously from the intellectual robustness of the programme László inspired and helped sustain.
Born in Budapest to working-class parents, Ilona (nee Varga) and László Czabán, he studied economics and finance at the Karl Marx University of Economics (now Corvinus University) in the city. After graduate studies there, László taught at the Budapest University of Technology and, after the end of state socialism in 1989, worked as an economic adviser for the EU delegation to Hungary. In 1990, on an EU-funded visit to Liverpool Polytechnic (now Liverpool John Moores University), he met Dolores James, whom he married in 1994.
Throughout his life in Britain, László lived in Liverpool. He was a warm and generous human being to all he encountered.
He was devoted to Dolores, as well as to his stepdaughter, Natalie, and to her sons Aidan and Elliot. They and his brother, Attila, survive him.
