How did historically marginalized groups learn to become professional managers? This paper studies the identity work of a manager in a colonial work setting, focusing specifically on the aspirational quality of professional identity, and on the forms of subordination enmeshed in organizational work, through a close reading of an autobiography. Beyond Punjab describes the career of Prakash Tandon in the multinational Lever Brothers India. He eventually became its first Indian Chief Executive and a respected public figure. Studies of such colonial work settings can seem indebted to existing research within postcolonial studies in management. But I argue that the dominant attention of postcolonial studies in management has not been on identity work and practices, but the historical enduring force of representations. Therefore this paper offers a complementary engagement, developing Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus for a fuller understanding of how managerial identity was constituted in colonial work settings. Implications for contemporary organizations and professional identity in postcolonial societies such as India are discussed.
AlcadipaniR.KhanF. R.GantmanE.NkomoS. (2012). Southern voices in management and organization knowledge. Organization, 19, 131–143.
2.
AlvessonM.WillmottH. (2002). Identity regulation as organizational control: Producing the appropriate individual. Journal of Management Studies39, 619–644.
3.
BahlV. (2000). Situating and rethinking subaltern studies for writing working-class history. In DirlikA.BahlV.GranP. (Eds.) History after the three worlds: post-Eurocentric historiographies (pp. 85–124). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
4.
BenjaminW. (1968). Illuminations: essays and reflections. New York: Schocken.
5.
BhabhaH. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.
6.
BourdieuP. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7.
BrownA. D.LewisM. A. (2011). Identities, discipline and routines. Organization Studies, 32, 871–895.
8.
BrubakerR. (2004). Rethinking classical theory: The sociological vision of Pierre Bourdieu. In SwartzDavid L.ZolbergVera L. (Eds.), After Bourdieu: influence, critique, elaboration (pp. 25–64). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.
9.
BrunerJ. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
10.
BrunerJ. (1993). The autobiographical process. In FolkenflikRobert (Ed.) The culture of autobiography Constructions of self representation: 38-56. Stanford: Stanford University.
11.
BrussE. (1976). Autobiographical acts: the changing situation of a literary genre. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
12.
BurkeT. (1996). Marketing, colonial knowledge and the female subject in Zimbabwe. Gender & History, 8, 393–415.
13.
ButtigiegJ. A. (1992). Introduction. Prison notebooks, GramsciAntoniovol. 1. Trans. ButtigiegJ.CallariA.New York: Columbia University Press.
14.
CalhounC. (1995). Critical social theory: culture, history and the challenge of difference. Oxford: Blackwell.
15.
ChakrabartyD. (1983). On deifying and defying authority: Managers and workers in the jute mills of Bengal circa 1890–1940. Past and Present, 100, 124–146.
16.
ChandavarkarR. (1997). ‘The making of the working class’: E. P. Thompson and Indian history. History Workshop Journal, 43, 177–196.
17.
ChatterjeeP. (1993). The nation and its fragments: colonial and postcolonial histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
18.
ChaturvediV. (2007). A critical theory of Subalternity: Rethinking class in Indian historiography. Left History, 12(1), 9–28.
19.
CookeB. (1999). Writing the Left out of Management Theory: The Historiography of the management of change. Organization, 6-1: 81–105.
20.
CookeB. (2004). Managing of the (Third) World. Organization, 11, 603–629.
21.
CookeB.DharS. (Eds.) (2008). Unorganizing development: anti-management critiques of development and globalization. London: Zed Books.
22.
DamodaranH. (2008). India’s new capitalists: caste, business and industry in a modern nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
23.
DasG. (2002). India unbound: the social and economic revolution from independence to the global information age. New York: Anchor.
24.
Das & Dharwadkar (2009). Cultural mimicry and hybridity: on the work of identity in international call centers in India. In BanerjeeS. B.ChioV. C. M.MirR. (Eds.) Organizations, Markets and Imperial Formations: Towards an Anthropology of Globalization: 181-197. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
25.
EvettsJ. (2003). The sociological analysis of professionalism: Occupational change in the modern world. International Sociology, 18, 395–415.
26.
FergusonJ. G. (2002). Of mimicry and membership: Africans and the “New World Society”. Cultural Anthropology17(4): 551–569.
27.
FournierV. (1999). The appeal to “professionalism” as a disciplinary mechanism. Social Review, 47, 280–307.
28.
FrenkelM. (2008). The MNC as a third space: Rethinking international management discourse on knowledge transfer through Homi Bhabha. Academy of Management Review, 33(4), 00–00.
29.
FrenkelM.ShenhavY. (2003). From Americanization to colonization: The diffusion of productivity models revisited. Organization Studies, 24, 1537–1561.
30.
FrenkelM.ShenhavY. (2006). From binarism back to hybridity: A postcolonial reading of management and organization studies. Organization Studies, 27, 855–876.
31.
GandhiL. (1998). Postcolonial theory: a critical introduction. New York: Columbia University Press.
32.
GandhiL. (2006). Affective communities: anticolonial thought, fin-de-siècle radicalism, and the politics of friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
33.
GopalP. (2004). Reading subaltern history. In LazarusN. (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to postcolonial literary studies (pp. 139–161). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
34.
GramsciA. (1929/1992). Prison notebooksvol. 1. Trans. ButtigiegJ. A.CallariA.New York: Columbia University Press.
35.
GramsciA. (1932/1996). Prison notebooksvol. 2. Trans. ButtigiegJ. A.New York: Columbia University Press.
36.
GramsciA. (1934/2010). The history of the subaltern groups: Rome and the Middle Ages in Italy. International Gramsci Journal, 2, 14–20.
37.
GreenM. (2002). Gramsci cannot speak: Presentations and interpretations of Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern. Rethinking Marxism, 14(3), 1–24.
38.
GreenM. (2011). Rethinking the subaltern and the question of censorship in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Postcolonial Studies, 14, 387–404.
39.
GuhaR. (1988). Preface. In GuhaR.SpivakG. C. (Eds.), Selected subaltern studies. New York: Oxford University Press.
40.
HardimanD. (2007). Histories for the subordinated. New York: Seagull Books.
41.
HaynesD. (2011). Masculinity, advertising and the reproduction of the middle-class family in Western India, 1918–1940. In DonnerH. (Ed.), Being middle-class in India: a way of life (pp. 23–46). New York: Routledge.
42.
HenryE.PeneH. (2001). Kaupapa Maori: Locating indigenous ontology, epistemology and methodology in the Academy. Organization8(2): 234–42.
43.
JackG.WestwoodR.SrinivasN.SardarZ. (2011). Deepening, broadening and re-asserting a postcolonial interrogative space in organization studies. Organization, 18, 275–302.
44.
JeffreyC. (2010). Kicking away the ladder: Student politics and the making of an Indian Middle Class. Internationales Asienforum, 41, No.1–2: 5–31.
45.
JonesG. (2005). Renewing Unilever: transformation and tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
46.
KaushikK. V.DattaK. (2012). India means business: how the elephant earned its stripes. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
47.
KhanI. (2004). First professional manager of India. The Tribune, 28September2004.
48.
KhuranaR. (2007). From higher aims to hired hands: the social transformation of American business schools and the unfulfilled promise of management as a profession. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
49.
KidambiP. (2007). The making of an Indian metropolis: colonial governance and public culture in Bombay, 1890–1920. Aldershot: Ashgate.
50.
KudaisyaM. M. (2012). The Oxford India anthology of business history. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
51.
KuhnT. (2006). A ‘Demented Work Ethic’ and a ‘Lifestyle Firm’: Discourse, identity, and workplace time commitments. Organization Studies27: 1339.
52.
LazarusN. (1999). Nationalism and cultural practice in the postcolonial world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LöwyM. (2006). Fire alarm: reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the concept of history”. New York: Verso.
55.
LuddenD. (2002). A brief history of subalternity. In LuddenD. (Ed.), Reading Subaltern studies: critical history, contested meaning and the globalization of South Asia (pp. 1–39). London: Anthem.
56.
Lutgen-SandvikP. (2008). Intensive remedial identity work: Responses to workplace bullying trauma and stigmatization. Organization, 15, 97–119.
57.
MallonF. (1994). The promise and dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American history. American Historical Review, December, 1491–1515.
58.
MasaniZ. (1987). Indian tales of the Raj. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
59.
MirchandaniK. (2004). Practices of global capital: Gaps, cracks and ironies in transnational call centres in India. Global Networks, 4, 355–373.
60.
MirchandaniK. (2012). Phone clones: Authenticity work in the transnational service economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
61.
MisraM. (1999). Business, race and politics in British India c. 1850–1960. Oxford: Clarendon.
62.
MoreraE. (1990). Gramsci’s historicism. New York: Routledge.
NadeemS. (2009). Macaulay’s (cyber) children: The cultural politics of outsourcing in India. Cultural Sociology, 3, 102–122.
65.
NandyA. (1983). The intimate enemy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
66.
NandyA. (1995). The savage Freud and other essays on possible and retrievable selves. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
67.
NevilleP. (2004). True Punjabi. The Sunday Tribune, 24October2004.
68.
NicoliniD.GherardiS.YanowS. (2003). Introduction. In NicoliniD.GherardiS.YanowD. (Eds.) Knowing in organizations: a practice-based approach (pp. 3–31). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
69.
NökelS. (2006). Micropolitics of Muslim women in Germany. In GöleNilüferAmmannLudwig (Eds.), Islam in public: Turkey, Iran and Europe (pp. 395–440). Istanbul: Bilgi University Press.
70.
O’HanlonR. (2002). Recovering the subject: Subaltern Studies and histories of resistance in colonial South Asia. In LuddenD. (Ed.), Reading Subaltern studies: critical history, contested meaning and the globalization of South Asia (pp. 135–186). London: Anthem.
71.
Özkazanç-PanB. (2008). International management research meets ‘the rest of the world’. Academy of Management Review, 33, 964–974.
72.
PalM.BuzzanellP. (2008). The Indian call centre experience: A case study in changing discourses of identity, identification, and career in a global context. Journal of Business Communication, 45, 31–60.
73.
PamukO. (2005). Istanbul: memories and the city. Trans. FreelyMaureen. New York: Knopf.
74.
PandeyG. (2009). Can there be a subaltern middle class? Notes on African American and Dalit history. Public Culture, 21, 321–342.
75.
PandeyG. (2012). Un-archived histories: The ‘mad’ and the ‘trifling’. Economic & Political Weekly, xlvii(1), 37–41.
76.
ParryB. (2004). The institutionalization of postcolonial studies. In LazarusN. (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to postcolonial literary studies (pp. 66–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
77.
PaulleB.van HeerikhuizenB.EmirbayerM. (2012). Elias and Bourdieu. Journal of Classical Sociology, 12, 69–93.
78.
PrasadA. (2003). The gaze of the other: Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis. In PrasadA. (Ed.), Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis: a critical engagement (pp. 3–43). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
79.
RamK. (2007). Anthropology as ‘Ananthropology’: L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861-1937), colonial anthropology, and the ‘native anthropologist’ as pioneer. In UberoiP.SundarN.DeshpandeS. (Eds.) Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian sociology and anthropology: 64–105. London: Seagull.
80.
RaoS. L. (2004). Original manager: Prakash Tandon stood for the best in professional management. The Telegraph, 25October2004.
81.
RodríguezI. (2002). Reading subalterns across texts, disciplines, and theories: From representation to recognition. In RodríguezI. (Ed.), The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (pp. 1–32). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
82.
RoyT. (2002). Subaltern studies: Questioning the basics. Economic and Political Weekly, 8June: 2223–2228.
83.
RudnyckyjD. (2011). Circulating tears and managing hearts: Governing through affect in an Indonesian steel factory. Anthropological Theory, 11, 63–87.
84.
RudolphL.RudolphS. (2003). Engaging subjective knowledge: How Amar Singh’s diary narratives of and by the self explain identity formation. Perspectives on Politics, 1, 681–694.
85.
SaidE. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Penguin.
86.
SaidE. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage.
87.
SaidE. (2003). Always on top. London Review of Books, 20March.
88.
SarkarS. (2002). Beyond nationalist frames: postmodernism, Hindu fundamentalism, history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
89.
SchleefD. J. (2006). Managing elites: professional socialization in law and business schools. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
90.
ShenhavY. (1999). Manufacturing rationality: the engineering foundations of the managerial revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
91.
ShenhavY. (2006). The Arab Jews: a postcolonial reading of nationalism, religion, and ethnicity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
92.
SinhaS. (2004). First professional management guru. Business World, 11October2004.
93.
SomersM. R.GibsonGloria D. (1994). Reclaiming the epistemological ‘other’: Narrative and the social constitution of identity. In CalhounC. (Ed.) Social theory and the politics of identity: 37–99. Oxford: Blackwell.
94.
SpivakG. C. (1985). The Rani of Sirmur: An essay in reading the archives. History and Theory, 24, 247–272.
95.
SpivakG. C. (1988a). Subaltern studies: Deconstructing historiography. In GuhaR.SpivakG. C. (Eds.), Selected subaltern studies (pp. 3–32). New York: Oxford University Press.
96.
SpivakG. C. (1988b/2010). Can the subaltern speak? In MorrisR. (Ed.), Can the subaltern speak? (pp. 237–291). New York: Columbia University Press.
97.
SpivakG. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
98.
SrinivasN. (1997). Management education and motivation in developing societies: Looking in, looking out. In WarnerM. (Ed.), Comparative management: critical perspectives on business and managementVolume IV (pp. 1250–1263). London: Routledge.
99.
SrinivasN. (2009). Mimicry and revival: The transfer and transformation of management knowledge to India. International Studies of Management and Organization, 338(4), 38–57.
100.
SrinivasN. (2012a). Epistemic and performative quests for authentic management in India. Organization, 19, 145.
101.
SrinivasN. (2012b). The possibilities of the past: Two routes to a past and what they tell us about professional power. Management & Organizational History, 7, 237–249.
102.
SrivastavaS. (1998). Constructing post-colonial India: national character and the Doon school. London: Routledge.
103.
SturdyA.BrocklehurstM.WinstanleyD.LittlejohnsM. (2006). Management as a (self) confidence trick: Management ideas, education and identity work. Organization, 13, 841–860.
104.
SturdyA.SchwarzM.SpicerA. (2006). Guess who’s coming to dinner? Structures and uses of liminality in strategic management consultancy. Human Relations, 59, 929–960.
105.
SwartzD. (1997). Culture and power: the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
106.
SweetmanP. (2003). Twenty-first century dis-ease? Habitual reflexivity or the reflexive habitus. Sociological Review, 50, 528–549.
107.
TandonP. (1968). Punjabi century: 1857–1947. Berkeley: University of California.
108.
TandonP. (1971). Beyond Punjab, 1937–1960. Berkeley: University of California.
109.
TandonP. (1980). Return to Punjab: 1961–1975. New Delhi: Vikas.
110.
TandonP. (1984). Professional management in India. In NigamR. K. (Ed.), The management philosophy of Prakash Tandon. New Delhi: Documentation Centre for Corporate and Business Policy Research.
111.
ThapanM.LardinoisR. (2006). The uses of Bourdieu’s social theory: An interdisciplinary perspective. In ThapanM.LardinoisR. (Eds.), Reading Pierre Bourdieu in a dual context: essays from India and France (pp. 1–55). London: Routledge.
112.
ThomasT. (2004). Prakash Tandon: A pioneer. Business Standard, 24September2004.
113.
TrouillotM. (1995). Silencing the past: power and the production of history. Boston, MA: Beacon.
114.
VincentJ. (2004). The sociologist and the Republic: Pierre Bourdieu and the virtues of social history. History Workshop Journal, 58, 129–148.
115.
WatsonT. J. (2008). Managing identity: identity work, personal predicaments and structural circumstances. Organization, 15, 121–143.
116.
WestwoodR. I.JackG. (2007). Manifesto for a post-colonial international business and management studies: A provocation. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 3, 246–265.
117.
WhitemanG.CooperW.H. (2000). Ecological embeddedness. Academy of Management Journal43: 1265–82.
118.
WielandS. M. B. (2010). Ideal selves as resources for the situated practice of identity. Management Communication Quarterly, 24, 503–528.
119.
YanowD. (2004). Translating local knowledge at organizational peripheries. British Journal of Management, 15, S9–S25.
120.
YoungR. J. C. (2001). Postcolonialism: an historical introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
121.
YuleH.BurnellA. C. (1886/1996). Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian dictionary. Ware, UK: Wordsworth.
