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Abstract

It is perhaps a truism that modern organizational theory has tended to objectify the colonized nations, and the subjects of imperialism. Even the critical traditions in OT tend to be mired in Eurocentric assumptions, and many of the issues that affected the ‘victims of globalization’ simply did not figure in OT debates till the 1980s. In the 1990s, when organizational theorists focusing on workers and subjects from the poorer South began expressly to ‘write back’, i.e. theorize eloquently on how they could restore their own agency in organizational life, they found a contingent ally in Organization. Not that the Journal did not have its blind spots in this regard, but since its inception in 1994, it has published a number of articles that sought to give voice to those who decentred OT’s Eurocentric assumptions. In this brief essay, we attempt to chart that partnership, and speak about a possible role for Organization in furthering this quest.

Keywords

Eurocentrism international Latin America postcolonial South

As we started to write the first draft of this article, the March 2012 issue of Organization reached our mailbox. It was especially apropos, a special issue on ‘Knowledge from the South’. Dripping with irony, the editorial declared: ‘there is life beyond Northern academia, both in terms of managerial theoretical concepts and in terms of organizational practices’ (Alcadipani et al., 2012: 131). The five articles in the special issue dealt variously with countries like India, Brazil, China and Zimbabwe, epistemic spaces like Islam and the global South, newer organizational realms like the kukiya-favela organization and newer concepts like anthropophagy. It would consume too much space to provide an explanation of how these terms interact in a single issue of the Journal; we would leave it to interested readers to go on that delightful treasure hunt on their own. But it is admittedly remarkable and exciting to encounter all these in a journal of organizational theory, much less in a single issue.

The March 2012 issue propelled our minds to a similar moment in 1994, when as doctoral students, we had encountered the second ever issue of Organization. It had contained what was billed as a ‘thematic section on globalization’, where we were privileged to read for the first time in a journal of organizational theory, a critique of postmodernism from the perspective of poorer nations (Radhakrishnan, 1994). This article proved especially important in our research, for two reasons. First, it provided an unusual and unique way in which ideas from literary theory could be deployed to make sense of economic concepts such as the international division of labour and translate them into the firm-level dynamics that guided our empirical doctoral research. Second, it legitimized, in many ways, the use of postcolonial theory as a lens that could be used to analyse the problematics of organizational theory. In the mid-1990s, we were able to justify our own tentative attempts to use those non-traditional theories in our work, by referring to a published article in a journal devoted to organizational studies. Herein lies the immeasurable symbolic and institutional value of Organization. As we speak, a doctoral student laboring in an intellectual environment that is passively hostile to critique is becoming emboldened to using anthropophagic culture as a lens to analyse organizational phenomena. When quizzed about it, (s)he will defend such a deployment on the grounds that it has been deployed before by management scholars (Islam, 2012), and published in reputed journals such as Organization.

In this review article, we wish to embark upon a survey of the articles in Organization that have over the years focused on concerns beyond the developed nations of North America and Europe, and questioned the ideological formulations that naturalized the concerns of the global North into an unreflective ‘organizational theory’. Our experience is that the Journal has helped immeasurably in breaking the stranglehold of the West in circumscribing what gets to be theorized, and what gets represented as being beyond the scope of formal discussion. The bulk of this article is devoted to a prosaic recording of some of the articles and special issues in this Journal that sought to locate themselves, geographically and epistemologically, outside the ideological formulation of West-centred discourses. It is not our intention to summarize them but rather to enumerate them, in the hope that the interested reader might be enticed to (re)visit their ideas. We intersperse our descriptive narrative occasionally to consolidate some ideas, and occasionally to step back and view some of the presented articles streams in a ‘sea of stories’ (Rushdie, 1990). These streams have the potential to irrigate the field of an alternative organizational theory, one that resists the mimetic and coercive pull of orientalism, but simultaneously eschews nativism in the quest for a more organic inclusivity.

The beginning: 1994–1997

Organization began with a bold assertion that in opposition to Jeffrey Pfeffer’s popular call for paradigmatic consensus within the field of organizational studies (Pfeffer, 1993), the new journal sought ‘a return to a different “original story”, where multiplicity and fragmentation—the road not taken by the “founding fathers”—enrich organizational analysis’ (Reed et al., 1994: 9). There was also an explicit assertion that Organization would redefine international inclusivity in the field. There was much promise in the inaugural editorial, which awaited fulfillment.

As we have briefly alluded, it was really in its second issue that Organization that began rendering its internationalist ethos explicit. Marta Calás’ introduction to the thematic section on globalization, appropriately titled ‘Minerva’s Owl’, questioned the universalist assumptions that underlay business and economic discourses. It expressed the hope that ‘the construction of neodisciplinary spaces for what we might call “global” will become enhanced’ (Calás, 1994: 248). The articles in that thematic section broke new ground in organizational theory. For example, Mari Patricia Fernandez Kelly used the Latin American experience to highlight the role of gender as a force in the production, appropriation and distribution of social capital in a global economy. Using the case of Mexican maquiladoras, she demonstrated how ‘the recasting of women in the global economy is occurring in consonance with the shifts in the structure of production’ (Fernandez Kelly, 1994: 270). Using a very different theoretical approach, Hirst and Thompson analysed the FDI flows across the world, problematizing the institutional arrangements (GATT, WTO) that circumscribed capital flows, and reproduced structures of inequality. Their analysis critiqued those that were ‘optimistic about the success of an unregulated international economy’ (Hirst and Thompson, 1994: 301–302), seeking to move beyond such simplistic formulations. Nakiye Boyacigiller used the format of a personal reflection on what globalization meant to her in her ‘various roles as a teacher, an organizational researcher and citizen’ (Boyacigiller, 1994: 316). Other articles in the thematic section problematized globalization in multiple ways, but arguably the most magisterial piece in the volume belonged to Radhakrishnan, who produced arguably the first exposure to postcolonial theory in a journal devoted to organizational theory. Positioning his argument as a critique of postmodernism, Radhakrishnan sought to ‘separate out the emancipatory possibilities of postmodernism from its colonizing potentialities, and to articulate coalitions between East and West, between First and Third Worlds … [and] to argue that the valence of postmodernism cannot be decided upon without reference to the accountability of postmodernism to the rest of the world’ (Radhakrishnan, 1994: 331). If one were to substitute the word ‘capitalism’ for ‘postmodernism’ in this passage, it would be equally resonant, calling the avant-garde theoretical formulations of the late 20th century into damning question.

In 1995, Miguel Ramirez chose Organization to analyse the political economy of Mexican privatization. This was especially important, for in the aftermath of the passage of NAFTA, organizational theory was in dire need of analysis that explained how multinational corporations would play a greater role in the dynamics of distribution in poorer nations. Ramirez suggested that ‘the debt crisis and its aftermath became a valuable instrument for reducing the economic and political autonomy of the Mexican state, thus enabling powerful factions of the international financial and banking community to impose a growth strategy that further inserts the Mexican economy in a dependent and subordinate fashion into the global economy’ (Ramirez, 1995: 87). Subsequent theorists have used Ramirez’s work to uncover the ideological foundations of organizational downsizing (e.g. McKinley et al., 1998).

In 1996, the Journal published a special issue on Gender, Race, Class and Organization, edited by Marta Calás and Linda Smircich. The contributors included Evangelina Holvino, who problematized the discipline of organizational development from the perspective of marginalized subjectivities such as women of color. Through critical readings of standard OD texts, Holvino demonstrated how the discipline upheld ‘the same classed, raced and gendered structures’ that the social movements of the time were challenging (Holvino, 1994: 526). Coupled with JK Gibson-Graham’s introduction to queer theory in the same volume (Gibson-Graham, 1996) and Helene Safa’s Latin America-centred critical analysis of the UN conference on Women held at Beijing in 1995 (Safa, 1996), the entire special issue accomplished two very significant tasks. First, it offered a performative counterpoint to mainstream organizational theories. While the dominant paradigms in organizational theory were busy casting their disempowered subjects into specific tropes, such articles brought to the fore the fact that ground realities were far more chaotic, heterogeneous and contested. By dignifying the actions of marginal actors in the academic/theoretical realm, these authors were able to provide the building block of alternative theories of organization and organizing. Second, by inserting the ‘exogenous’ categories such as the racially diverse subject into theoretical discussions, these authors were able to expand the limits of the ‘theorizable’, in effect laying a groundwork of precedents for future critical researchers to build on. Safa’s analysis for instance made a case that Latin American and Carribean women were not only placed by default outside the boundaries of the discussion at the UN conference, but an articulation of their specific problems and perspectives was in effect, legitimate and theorizable.

In effect, the early issues of Organization are even more important in hindsight. They prised open some firmly shut theoretical doors, which later theorists used to gain entry into the mainstream. To analyse this multi-step phenomenon a little more, consider Deborah Litvin’s article written in May 1997, subjecting the discourse of diversity to critical scrutiny, and uncovering its sociobiological assumptions. In Litvin’s words, her article sought to reveal ‘the essentialist assumptions upon which contemporary diversity discourse is based … and demonstrate how these essentialist assumptions structure the conceptualizations of workforce diversity’ (Litvin, 1997: 187). In that article, she also analysed the approaches to diversity as manifested in a few recent published OB textbooks. That article has remained important not only for its own insights, but also for its ability to inspire and inform a variety of critiques of diversity management over the years. To map its impact, we tried to follow the manner in which the article has been cited. Google Scholar reports that as of July 2012, the article has been cited 114 times, a middling number. However, when we see the list of articles citing Litvin’s work, we find that it has been especially useful for scholars who have examined the racial foundations of organizational studies (e.g. Ashcraft and Allen, 2003), for those who advocate for minority employees left behind in diversity initiatives (e.g. Zanoni and Janssens, 2007) and those who studied immigration (Forsander, 2002). Be it school-teachers in South Africa (Heystek and Lumby, 2011), Muslim students in Montana, USA (Omar, 2010) or new immigrants in Sweden (Kalonaityte, 2010), scholars have used Litvin’s pioneering work to call out the mainstream diversity paradigms as being deterministic, sociobiological or plainly discriminatory. If one uses this article as an exemplar of what the Journal accomplished, it would be accolade enough. One could argue that in 1997, Organization was the only journal that published such articles on a routine basis, and even solicited them with no regard to compulsions of journal rankings, and without denaturing them through paradigmatically tight peer-review protocols.

In November 1997, Organization published a special issue on Latin America ‘as a region of the world where unique organizational knowledges and activities are emerging; a place that needs to and should be understood in its own specificity’ (Arias et al., 1997: 467). The several articles in the special issue re-introduced theorists and teachers to the possibilities of deploying Paolo Freire’s pedagogies (Kinsey, 1997), provided genealogical accounts of how Western management practices had become dominant in the region (Caldas and Wood, 1997) and addressed the issue of the co-existence of multiple forms of work and organization in societies that struggle with the power-inflected incursions of modernity into their lives (Lizaur, 1997). The thematic idea here was new; Organization was again stretching the conventions of traditional organizational theory, by contending that the study of specific geographical regions was legitimate in a discipline the mainstreams of which had begun to distance themselves from the problematics of history and spatial heterogeneity. It is only in the past few years that organizational theorists have begun to acknowledge the limits of capitalist isomorphism, particularly through (often misguided, but still geographically bounded) analyses of Asian economies.

Overall, the first four years of Organization provided a host of possibilities for scholars seeking to analyse non-US and non-European settings. Many of the articles published on these issues were destined to be groundbreaking, not only in terms of their content but (as we can personally attest), in terms of their inspirational effect. A generation of scholars was encouraged to attempt critiques of the mainstreams of organizational theory, positioning themselves as non-Western, both spatially and epistemologically.

The middle decade: 1998–2007

Organization was developing a reputation as a serious journal, with a reputation for publishing rigorous work. It would not be till the mid 2000s that it finally cemented a reputation as a desirable outlet for quality research, but indications were that it was well on its way. Simultaneously, it began to move ahead with greater confidence in its quest for theoretical heterogeneity. However, the output of articles pertaining to non-Western subjectivities flagged off a bit in the middle decade. One can choose to read this decline in a few different ways. First, and perhaps most plausible, is the possibility that the Journal became the ‘go-to’ outlet for so many critical traditions that space limitations curtailed the publication of too many articles of a particular type. Second, it is also possible that the reduction of non-Western themes in the pages of the Journal related to the slow emergence of theorists who worked in these areas in organizational studies. The ones that did such work now found their research being accepted by other outlets as well. Finally, one must consider the possibility that the ethnocentric tendencies of mainstream management theory had not been scrubbed clean from the Journal’s psyche. Be that as it may, the bare facts suggest that non-Western theorizing became a little scarce in the pages of the Journal in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A few non-West focused articles did find their way into its pages, including the 2001 special issue on the future of the university, where scholars analysed the new regulation technologies that affected universities in Mexico and Argentina (Grantman and Contreras, 2001; Ibarra Colada, 2001), and also called for the decolonization of management knowledge (Jaya, 2001). 2001 also saw the publication of two back-to-back articles on issues pertaining to social imbalances across global spaces. Jennifer Mendez and Diane Wolf discussed some of the performative problematics of feminist organizations, through an analysis of a US-based organization that operated with an expressly feminist agenda. They concluded that a commitment to feminism did not necessarily rid the organization of deep-rooted prejudices related to class and national origin. Their work highlighted ‘the need for new theoretical perspectives that take into account power differences that exist along various axes—including axes of domination among women’ (Mendez and Wolf, 2001: 723). Transnational processes, they argued, exacerbated power differentials even more. Their work exemplified a further attribute of Organization, as a place where critical traditions could be also subjected to scrutiny.

The next article by Banerjee and Linstead took critique way further, subjecting the constructs of globalization and multiculturalism to trenchant critique. In their words, ‘the notions of diversity and multiculturalism, and the successful management of diversity, presented as the new prerequisite for sustainable competitive advantage, effectively continues global colonialism’ (Banerjee and Linstead, 2001: 683). The authors concluded that ‘globalization works overwhelmingly in favor of the expansion of the interests of capital’ (p. 716), with the costs being borne disproportionately by the poor in the Global South. They further ask: ‘the key question we as practitioners and educators need to ask ourselves is whether management and organization theory is helping to address these problems or whether it is helping to improve and sophisticate those ideological processes which manage the masking of these problems’ (p. 716). It is fair to say that most non-Organization reviewers would have dismissed these statements as being too polemical to be published in academic outlets. Yet, here it is now, in the public realm. Is it being cited? To check on that, just as we had done with Deborah Litvin’s article, we examined Google Scholar to track citations of this article. For variety, this time, rather than look at the content of the citing articles, we searched for the types of journals in which this was cited. We found that this article has been cited 137 times by July 2012. The citing articles not only included respectable management journals such as Academy of Management Review (e.g. Brannen, 2004; Özkazanç-Pan, 2008), Journal of Management Studies (e.g. Levy, 2005), Human Relations (e.g. Vaara et al., 2003) and several others, but also in a variety of non-organizational journals such as Geographic Research (Coombes, 2007), Canadian Journal of Applied Sciences (Follett, 2010) and even Journal of Sports and Social Issues (Falcous, 2007). It is clear that these articles are serving to expand the boundaries of the ‘discussable’ when dealing with the assumptions that undergird their representations of the global poor.

The period from 2001–2007 marked a relatively thin, but hardly fallow period for discussions relevant to the global poor in the pages of Organization. Periodically, we saw articles that examined the imperialist biases of mainstream theory, such as Bill Cooke’s analysis of ‘the relationship between management, a First World discipline, and the Third World’ (Cooke, 2004: 603). A special issue on ‘Organization Studies and Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America’ in July 2006 produced another set in the ongoing series of Latin America-centred articles (Duarte, 2006; Dussel and Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Hodge and Coronado, 2006; Ibarra-Colado, 2006). The same issue also carried Rebecca Gill’s essay on Global Feminism, which we include to highlight Organization’s role as place for serious reviews of books that traditional organizational theorists may not pay attention to. Gill’s essay reviewed nine books that examined various facets of global feminism, in an attempt to ‘plant the seeds for economic, political, organizational, and social participation for both women and men in global society’ (Gill, 2006: 597).

Reaching the present: 2008–2012

By 2008, the traditions of critical management studies (CMS) were slowly gaining acceptance in organizational theory. The CMS interest group at the Academy of Management was now scaled up to a full-fledged division. CMS conferences in Europe and North America were full-house affairs, and a variety of critical journals were emerging in the field. At the same time, disaffection with CMS was burgeoning, primarily among those who saw it as being coopted by empty high-theory and its inability to locate itself in the terrain of practice. There were others (ourselves included) who found it a tad Eurocentric. In response to a crisis of confidence in the CMS tradition, Organization organized a forum titled ‘Speaking Out on the Future of Critical Management Studies’ in 2008. Several of the responses made implicit and explicit recommendations that the discipline needed to look beyond the West. For instance, Hugh Willmott suggested that CMS scholars consider incorporating issues of global justice into their analysis: ‘there is the potential to develop closer institutional links—for example, by making connections between struggles for Global Justice and insights of CMS research into the operation of global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, G8, and the World Trade Organization’ (Willmott, 2008: 929). Eduardo Ibarra Colado weighed in on issues pertaining to Latin America, contending that ‘when we consider Management Studies and how they have been developed in Latin America, it is essential to discuss the function of knowledge as a mechanism of colonization’ (Ibarra Colado, 2008: 932).

The time seemed ripe for empirical analyses that uncovered the racist and colonialist paradigms of neoliberalism. To that end, in 2009, Özen and Özen analysed a standoff between protesters, an MNC and Turkish government agents on an environmental issue in Bergama, Turkey. They contended that ‘the emergent literature that integrates the neo-institutional and social movement theories for a better understanding of institutional change offers a partial picture concerning the roles of the state and society in institutional wars due to its preoccupation with the liberal polities prevalent in the Anglo-Saxon countries’ (Özen and Özen, 2009: 547), and offered an alternative conceptualization of institutionalization. Likewise, in 2010, Victorija Kalonaityte studied diversity management initiatives at a Swedish municipal school for adults, and analysed them through a postcolonial lens. Her work provided ‘a conceptual framework based on postcolonial theory in order to theorize how an essentialist notion of national culture contributes to the construction of ethnical minorities as culturally inferior’ (Kalonaityte, 2010: 31)

In 2011, Organization produced a long-awaited special issue on postcolonialism. The guest editors Gavin Jack, Robert Westwood, Nidhi Srinivas and Ziauddin Sardar offered a nuanced and detailed map of how postcolonial theorizing has touched organizational theory. Their conclusions were circumspect; suggesting that postcolonialism ‘is still a somewhat quiet and tentative voice around the margins of orthodox MOS’ (Jack et al., 2011: 275). In their considered opinion, ‘MOS remains a field of study focused on and concerned with the actions and interests of large corporations and their leaders located in the Global North’ (p. 295). However, they were encouraged by ‘the significant promise of a productive interrogation of organization studies by the resources afforded by postcolonialism’ (p. 294). Indeed, this promise was eminently visible in the issue, which began with an explicitly non-Western piece. Locating their ideas in a literary tradition, Farzad Rafi Khan and Basit Bilal Khoshul analysed a poem by the Pakistani poet Mohammed Iqbal. The authors used the poem as an exemplar of ‘an alternative critical narrative on Western capitalism that is characterized by theocentrism and embodied love’ (Khan and Khoshul, 2011: 303). Critiquing the provincial nature character of CMS, they sought to ‘add to the postcolonial CMS theoretical oeuvre a critical narrative from the Global Muslim South shaping resistance and alternatives to Western capitalism without reducing that narrative to the existing theoretical categories in post- colonial CMS’ (p. 318). One could argue that this is a groundbreaking article, whose potential influence only time will tell. Other articles in the special issue spoke of the manner in which mainstream organizational theory was being coopted by extractive industries to justify large scale regimes of accumulation-by-dispossession (Banerjee, 2011); an attempt to offer a distinct Latin America-centred postcolonial organizational theory (Misoczky, 2011); an amalgamation of postcolonial (Said/Spivak/Bhabha) and anticolonial (Fanon/Césaire /Senghor) narratives within an African context (Nkomo, 2011) and an attempt to uncover the neocolonial assumptions that underlay responses of North American business leaders to the emergence of economic powers in Asia. The issue went beyond a mere accounting of postcoloniality into a pushing of its boundaries, challenging postcolonial theorists of organizational studies to avoid the traps of empty theorizing that remained unconnected to lived organizational experience and to examine their more latent and more insidious Eurocentric assumptions. Stella Nkomo’s article in particular represented this aspect most evocatively; her Africa-oriented approach broke completely new ground in organizational studies, and hopefully will inform other social sciences in the long run as well.

The March 2012 issue of organization continued, in a sense, the work that the special issue on postcolonialism had commenced. The articles in this issue again continued to break ground that the mainstream organizational theorists would find almost undecipherable. Be it an account of the futility of searching for ‘authentic indigenous knowledge’ in a world interpellated within the logic of global capitalism (Srinivas, 2012) or an analysis of the cannibalistic appropriation of indigenous culture in Brazil (Islam, 2012) the articles in this special issue examined issues that seem new, exciting and simultaneously relevant and opaque. Interesting analyses of South-South connections abounded, from a critical look at the emerging China-Africa geopolitical dynamic (Jackson, 2012) to an attempt to link the experiences of poor people in Zimbabwe and Brazil, through what Miguel Imas and Alia Weston termed the ‘kukiya-favela’ organization (Imas and Weston, 2012). Shoaib ul-Haq and Robert Westwood argued for a better representation of Islamic management and organizational knowledge in organizational theory, in a sense building upon the theoretical work that Khan and Khoshul had begun in the postcolonialism issue (Ul-Haq and Westwood, 2012). Despite the broadness and heterogeneity of the term ‘Global South’, the special issue did begin some valuable discussion on the possibility of theorizing and contributing to praxis in a space where the poor countries participated unmediated by Western referent.

Beyond the Present

As a coda to this analysis, we must invoke the reflective piece by Martin Parker and Robyn Thomas titled ‘What is a Critical Journal’, which they wrote in their capacity as the Journal’s editors. They suggested that ‘Organization must not cultivate consensus, and should work against its own institutionalization—de-institutionalizing where it can in order to open the space for something new’ (Parker and Thomas, 2009: 426). Theorists of non-Western ideas must have taken heart.

Having said that, there is still a lot that needs to be accomplished. By way of critique, one may note that most of the hard-hitting and theoretically complex articles about the global South have appeared in curated special issues. In other words, the leadership of the journal must engage in introspection as to why theorists from non-US and non-European locations as well as those who work as imperialism’s interlocutors do not find the invitation from Organization as welcoming as say the Foucauldians or the actor-networkers. By way of concrete advice, we would suggest that the editors actively solicit articles on perspective related to the failure of global environmentalism and their impact on the global poor (the cooptation of the Rio+20 by corporation provides a stunning takeoff point). Islamophobia is another arena that is ripe for discussion, as is the impact of the economic crisis on non-corporate actors. The Journal needs active African champions, to build on Nkomo’s impressive article which appeared in the 2011 issue. Newer theoretical formulations in the broader social sciences now offer interesting possibilities of a theory-praxis engagement. We would especially encourage an attempt to explore the concept of ‘political society’, a new formulation that has emerged in the poorer nations as a polar opposite of ‘civil society’ (Chatterjee, 2005). Global approaches to energy are very significant to organizational analysis, and of course, may we suggest a special issue circa 2017 marking the impact of Capital on the poor of the world, to mark its 150th year.

The journey that began in 1994 continues. Attempts like ours to step back and pull some theoretically distinct articles out of a nearly 20-year corpus of work are destined to produce fragmentation in an organic narrative. For many of the articles we have not mentioned here are also significant participants in the movement to decentre Western ideology. Can we ever talk about anti-imperialism without invoking Marx? Can we separate Said from Foucault, Bhabha from Lacan? Should we ever read peasant resistance without referring to Gramsci? Perhaps not, and one needs to acknowledge the mutuality of different critical theories, as well as the primacy of class solidarities above all forms of socio-cultural groupings. Nevertheless, there is merit in articulating an expressly anti-imperialist, anti-Eurocentric and anti-colonial-narrative, one where non-Western subjectivities lie at the centre and Occidental ideas are moved to the periphery. And in organizational theory, such ideas have found space within the pages of Organization. That is something worth celebrating.

Footnotes

Biographies

Raza Mir is Professor of Management in the College of Business at William Paterson University, and an Associate Editor of Organization. His research mainly concerns the transfer of knowledge across national boundaries in multinational corporations and issues relating to power and resistance in organizations. He has co-edited “Organizations, Markets and Imperial Formations: Towards an Anthropology of Globalization” (Edward Elgar, 2009), and is the co-author of “Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry” (Roli Books, 2006). He currently serves as the Program Chair of the CMS Division at the Academy of Management. Address: William Paterson University, 72 Fern Road, East Brunswick, NJ 08816, USA.

Ali Mir is a Professor of Management at William Paterson University. He has published on a wide range of topics including the changing nature of work in late capitalism, the international division of labour, knowledge transfer, migration, offshoring, postcolonialsm, secularism, radical poetry and Indian cinema. His work has appeared in such inter-disciplinary journals as Cultural Dynamics, Critical Perspectives on International Business, and Organizational Research Methods. He is the co-author of Anthems of Resistance, a book about progressive Urdu poetry in the Indian subcontinent. Address: William Paterson University, 1600 Valley Road, Wayne, NJ 07470, USA.

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The colony writes back: Organization as an early champion of non-Western organizational theory

Abstract

Keywords

The beginning: 1994–1997

The middle decade: 1998–2007

Reaching the present: 2008–2012

Beyond the Present

Footnotes

Biographies

References