Decolonizing Arab organizational Knowledge: “Fahlawa” as a Research Practice

Abstract

This article draws attention to how management scholars “the outsiders within” who are structurally positioned within the academies of dominant powers might negotiate the complexities of producing a locally rooted and meaningful knowledge, emancipated from the U.S. hegemony while carrying organization studies in Arab countries. Drawing upon my different ethnographic journeys as a researcher, brought up in an Arab country with a Francophone intellectual mindset and studying Arab management practices, I will discuss both the potential for and the difficulties of critical engagement with a decolonizing management research agenda. Then, and building on critical border thinking tradition, I will propose the Egyptian term “Fahlawa” as a metaphor for better describing the challenges of a decolonizing research practice that privileges contestation and perpetual bricolage over formal and universal design. Finally, I will conclude by highlighting the potential of “Fahlawa” as a survival/resistance practice to theorize what is unthought and invisible in management literature and to build situated knowledge less organized by U.S. domination.

Introduction

The colonial process of conquests, massacres, and destruction of diverse forms of social, economic, and political organizations, which occurred during the so-called “modern” era—one characterized by different modalities and temporalities—is still ongoing. Under the guise of “universal rationality,” it seeks to silence and delegitimize the worldviews and practices of those who have been historically physically crushed and/or enslaved. The intellectual domination of modern European thought, coupled with the economic, political, and epistemic violence that accompanied European imperialism and colonialism, has been exercised by constructing radical alterities and refusing to recognize as humans those who were simply different. Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives as a series of places, authors, and conjunctures, in relation to different time periods and geographical orientations, have offered a relevant critique of the effects of the colonial heritage, which was subsequently addressed and displaced by the question of the relationship between the challenges of decolonization and the tasks of political, economic, and intellectual emancipation of countries of the Global South (Bhambra, 2014).

When applied to management and organizational knowledge (MOK), proponents of decolonial and postcolonial perspectives perceive globalization with the hegemony of the U.S. management model as a colonization of knowledge and of the representation of what constitutes good management. They are interested in the way in which Western epistemology has guided and constrained knowledge production in organization theory by colonizing the depictions of organizational practices in non-Western countries (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Banerjee and Prasad, 2008; Cooke, 2004; Faria et al., 2010; Gantman et al., 2015; Murphy and Zhu, 2012; Prasad, 2003; Westwood and Jack, 2007). To decolonize MOK, there is growing interest in and a resurgence of indigenous worldviews and customary organizational practices that could open up new modes of inquiry and knowing which would contest and “go beyond” hegemonic structures of control and discipline (Connell, 2007; Dar, 2018; Jack and Westwood, 2006; Ruggunan, 2016; Yousfi, 2013).

Yet, for these efforts to succeed, decolonization of knowledge as a project “requires border thinking as a method” (Mignolo, 2006, p. 485). Border thinking is an epistemological position that contributes to a shift in the forms of knowing in which the world is considered from “the concrete incarnated experiences of colonial differences and the wounds left” (Icaza, 2017, p.42). However, as rightly pointed out by Faria (2013, p.283), “there is a virtual absence of accounts on the deployment of such methods in general and, in particular, on how individual border thinkers manage to change social relations across the colonial difference.” The main challenge is to imagine how subaltern groups and scholars can have a stake in the knowledge they produce (Al-Hardan, 2014; Barros and Wanderley, 2020; Jammulamadaka, 2020; Murphy and Zhu, 2012).

That issue is even more acute and hardly tackled when these power relations are encountered differently by those who, like me, are structurally positioned as Collins (1986, 2009) calls the “outsiders within” or the “colonized within.” They are named so because they, by nature of their gender, ethnicity, and other factors, are relegated to the margins of society, but possess the privilege of status and training that allows them to occupy and traverse various spaces and collect insider knowledge and resources. Considering the fact that the intellectual project of decolonizing research has to set out ways to proceed through a colonizing world and that a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of thought than simply the Western canon raises the following question: How might management scholars, “the colonized within” who are structurally positioned within the academies of imperial powers, negotiate the complexities of producing locally-rooted and meaningful knowledge, emancipated from the U.S. hegemony when carrying out management research in the Global South?

To answer this question, this article aims to critically explore the potential and challenges of a decolonial research practice by providing insights from my experience as a Tunisian researcher with a francophone intellectual background, affiliated with a French university, and studying management practices in Arab countries. My research project was conceptualized, initiated, and unfolded between a French institution, a former/current colonial and imperial power, and the Arab countries, current sites of ongoing colonial wars and neo-liberal offensive reforms. This highlights the need for me to consider deeply the following question: From the formulation of the research question to the choice of theoretical frameworks and methodologies, which research practice(s) could be adopted that would help me recover local subjugated knowledge and produce meaningful knowledge?

In what follows, after a brief digression to discuss some decolonial experiences/traditions of “border thinking,” I will examine the intersection between the ongoing coloniality of the management discipline and of power in Arab countries as they impact management and organization knowledge. Then, following the invitation of the editors of this special issue to consider the challenges of the production, translations, and contestations of “global” management knowledge as well as its organizational practices, I will discuss the theoretical and methodological challenges to progress a decolonial research agenda as an “outsider within” in Arab countries. To do that, I will detail the perpetual bricolage process that is constitutive of my research practice—from the formulation of the research question to the writing of my ethnographic journeys. This process is better described by the Arab term fahlawa, which means cleverness, shrewdness, and resourcefulness; it is the strategy of survival, adapting oneself to circumstances and power asymmetries in a pragmatic way, and managing difficult situations using skills and stratagem. Fahlawa, as a constant dialog in my research practice between different intellectual traditions and sensorial experiences, is a specific “embodied experience of border thinking” essential to questioning and redefining words, categories, and methodologies imposed by European modernity.

Finally, I will conclude by highlighting the potential of fahlawa in relation to other traditions of “border thinking” to theorize what is unthought and invisible in management literature and to build situated knowledge outside of U.S. domination. With the awareness that the decolonization of knowledge on Arab management is a much larger task at hand, it is not my purpose to develop either a universal perspective or an “Arab perspective.” This article is a limited attempt to “research back,” akin to the practice of “writing back” (Al-Hardan, 2014; Mir and Mir, 2013; Smith, 2012) and an endeavor to imagine what a decolonizing research practice in Arab countries led by an “outsider within” may begin to look like.

“Border thinking” or “other thought”? A strategic tool for decolonizing research agenda

The notion of global coloniality of power used by decolonial perspectives refers to the complex and dynamic intertwining of economic phenomena and the socio-cultural and political processes produced by patriarchal reproduction, colonialism, capitalism, and globalization (Grosfoguel, 2011, 2012; Lugones, 2010; Mignolo, 2012; Mohanty, 2003; Simpson, 2014; Smith, 2012). The decolonial perspective intends to develop ways of living and thinking about the world that put all people on an equal footing and rejects those which claim to be based on an abstract, eurocentric, and excluding universalism.

By emphasizing the ongoing coloniality of the power/knowledge nexus, decolonial research calls for the recognition of epistemic diversity through the rehabilitation of “subaltern thinkers,” conceived as the central component of global modern/colonial decolonization, leading toward what the philosopher of Latin-American liberation, Dussel (2000) calls “transmodernity.”

However, one cannot approach the theoretical-practical productions of oppressed people as a doctrinal collection sheltered from the epistemic and ontological violence of colonization. The challenge is to make visible the process through which individuals and collectives committed to the liberating praxis and the subversion of the dominant ontology resist and think inside a colonized existence while simultaneously trying to build some degree of agency (Faria, 2013). This process is better described by the concept of “border thinking,” which was first used by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) in her book, “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” and has subsequently been developed by decolonial thinkers, most prominently by Walter Mignolo. It is based on the idea that one sits in an embodied consciousness to show how the corporeal and, material existence of bodies is deeply embedded in political relations including coloniality (Icaza, 2017, Icaza and Vázquez, 2016; Lugones, 2010).

While in Eurocentric Western thought, the notion of “border” (geographic, ontological, cultural, etc.) is constituted as a limit between identity and difference, decolonial thought such as “border thinking” proposes a new economy of the difference that calls into question the alleged exteriority of cultural productions in relation to the colonial relationship. As such, border thinking is seen as an embodied consciousness in which dualities and vulnerability are central to the decolonization of how we think about the geo- and body politics of knowledge, political economy, and, of course, gender (Lugones, 1992, 2010). Border thinking implies the idea that knowledge production is always located and anchored in specific bodies, territories, and local histories, in contrast to the disembodied, abstract, universalist knowledge that generates global designs (Mignolo, 2009).

Drawing upon Khatibi’s concept of “other thought,” and other Black and indigenous intellectuals Walsh (2007) explores the ways in which such a project of pensamiento propio could open the possibility of a different universalization of radical and subversive character. This dialog between different decolonial perspectives from the South, despite the heterogeneous conceptions of decoloniality, has been particularly relevant in South–South strategies of affirmation or what the Arab intellectual Khatibi (2001) calls a “complot of ‘other’ thought.” Thus, “other thought” becomes a strategical tool “in the struggle to confront non-existence, dominated existence and dehumanization- key referents, it seems, in rethinking critical thought or critical knowledges from other spaces and places-spaces and places that modernity or intellectuals like Horkheimer never could never have and cannot imagine, but also from other subjects—the damnés or “wretched of the earth” of Fanon” (Walsh, 2007, p. 232).

Similarly, there is growing interest in exploring the challenges that authors from different post-colonial contexts face in writing and conducting research in management and organization studies (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Prasad, 2012). As an illustration, Jammulamadaka (2020) suggests jugaad philosophy of understanding and sharing knowledge to deal with the challenges of innovation and flexibility in method use with argumentation; translating and theorizing. Using the concepts of transmodernity, pluriversality, and border thinking, Faria (2013) explored the tensions and challenges faced in co-creating decolonial management studies (DMS) and in building agency grounded in a liberating project from the colonial difference. However, more accounts on the deployment of how “individual border thinkers” manage to change social relations across the colonial difference are needed. Moreover, one can notice the virtual absence of accounts from the “outsiders within,” a particular type of “border thinkers” who could carry a specific praxical perspective of decoloniality (Al-Hardan, 2014).

Even though the conceptualization of decolonial perspectives is relatively new, it is important to bear in mind that ever since white men set foot in different geographies, there were practices that contested the political, economic, and cultural transformation processes this colonization entailed. What follows is therefore an engagement with the “border thinking” dialog using fahlawa as a specific practice that provides a way of deciphering the U.S. “self-ascribed” epistemic privileges of interpretation and representation in MOK as well as the state of vulnerability/agency that implies unlearning and refusing to accept them as the only possibilities to think/sense local organizational practices.

To accomplish this, I will start by introducing the intersection between the ongoing coloniality of the management discipline and the ongoing coloniality of power in the Arab region as they impact management and organizational knowledge.

Management and organizational knowledge in Arab countries: Identifying the challenges of using a decolonial research agenda

Although the Arab region is culturally, ethnically, politically, and economically diverse, I defend, following Hanieh (2013), that nation-states in the Arab region must be thought of as interdependent political and economic entities that share—beyond a collective history, culture, and language—not only a specific set of economic and political relationships but also most importantly a community of common destiny. Imposed by the Sykes-Picot agreements of May 16, 1916, national borders in Arab countries correspond less to the emancipatory aspirations of their peoples than to the distribution of influence and natural resources between European colonial powers in the region. Two economic structures have been superimposed on the post-independence Arab States. First, the capitalist-type structure, introduced by the colonial powers, prevails in the industrial sector, having been transferred to the new ruling elite. Second, local structure characterized by relations of production that were traditionally founded in the world of the peasantry or handicrafts, regulated by community membership, and located outside the official economy (El Mouhoub, 2011). Thus, capitalist employer-employee relations based on salaried work became intertwined with pre-existing economic and social relations organized by local communities. The hegemony of the Western management model and colonial history are two characteristics that have largely constituted both the history of the emergence of organizations and institutions in the Arab region and the blockages encountered (Yousfi, 2013).

In this context, the influence of Western management—particularly the French model in North Africa and the British one in the Middle East—continued after independence. This enduring influence was then coupled with the introduction of the U.S. management model through successive plans of structural reforms starting in the seventies (Yousfi, 2013). Perhaps the most obvious evidence of this Western influence is the widespread adoption of international accounting standards in all countries in the region (Kamla, 2007). To better understand the challenges faced by Arab management practices, a twofold perspective can be adopted. On the one hand, the history of state formation and management practices developed in the region cannot be understood without tracing the impact of colonial histories on the movements of people across and within national borders (Yousfi, 2020a). On the other hand, it is crucial to highlight the impact of the systematic external weakening of Arab states caused by both wars and/or the various structural reforms imposed by international organizations and how these have transformed the political economy of the region as well as its management practices (Hanieh, 2013; Murphy and Jammulamadaka, 2017). These processes need to be considered simultaneously if a full picture of the changes in the structures of Arab management practices is to be grasped.

With few exceptions (Ali, 1995; Yousfi, 2013; Kamla, 2007; Karam et al., 2015; Sidani, 2008; Zghal, 1994), management scholars interested in the Arab region, regardless of whether they are Westerners or natives, have produced studies about Arab management practices using Western perspectives rather than studies with and from Arab perspectives. Such scholars whether they have implicitly internalized the superiority of Western management paradigm or were motivated by the need to be recognized by the dominant establishment, have produced knowledge consistent with the expectations of the global management community and mainstream literature. Even efforts to rehabilitate some Arab key thinkers such as Ibn Khaldun and his concept of assabiya (social cohesion) were met by a continuing and meticulous strategy of re-appropriation to fit the essentializing dominant discourse about deficiency, corruption, and backwardness of Arab management practices (Yousfi, 2010b; Sidani, 2008). This resonates with Said’s (1978: 7) seminal work, “Orientalism,” in which he argues that “Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the orient” (Said, 1978: 3). Said also detailed how scholars belonging to Britain, France, and the U.S. colonial powers have approached the Arab societies of North Africa and Middle East from the 18th century to the present (i.e. 1978) and criticized the reductive and simplifying representations of the “other” (non-Western) used to legitimize the colonial domination.

As a Tunisian scholar working in a French university, I was dissatisfied with the epistemic consequences of the domination of U.S. management ideology in both French and Arab academia that have largely, and despite different resistance spaces, undermined the goal of producing subsequent studies based on alternative epistemologies and methodologies critical to theorize the unthought and the invisible in the Arab region. In practices of how knowledge is produced, the unfortunate conclusion is that U.S.-centric MOK is dominant in Arab countries, which is perceived as being all-encompassing. Although decolonization matters, we also require new answers for the recurring query: what is to be done?

Two concerns guided my work. The first is theoretical and is meant to analyze the way in which national culture shapes the functioning of organizations, with a particular focus on the existing links between dynamics of domination/resistance, cultures, and economic development issues. The second is political; it aims to develop a reflection around research conditions that allow the production of locally-anchored knowledge, meaningful for local populations emancipated from the U.S. dominance observed in organization studies. This requires me to develop specific theoretical frameworks and methodological tools that can grasp the complexity of management challenges in this region of the world while also firmly anchoring it in its historical, political, and cultural context. The goal of my work is thus not so much to lead to a unified theoretical construction or to rehabilitate indigenous authors or methodologies, but to sketch a certain number of guidelines that help to account for the empirical phenomena observed. To do that, I had to answer three important questions:

First, what theoretical framework could help me explore how national culture influences management practices?

Second, how can we adapt the methodology of data collection to the Arab cultural context, which is largely different from the French or U.S. context?

Third, how can I restore the richness of material collected in the Arabic language by avoiding the bias that could be caused by the use of foreign analysis categories that may occur due to my intellectual formation in the Francophone tradition?

Given that language and content are dialectically linked, how can one remain faithful to the originality of the material collected while complying with the injunctions imposed by the U.S. dominant methodologies in the study of organizations?

In what follows, I will introduce the term fahlawa to describe the way I answered these questions. Then, I will detail the process of bricolage at stake in my research practice; from the formulation of the research question to the choice of theoretical frameworks and methodologies.

Fahlawa as a research practice for “embodied border thinking”

The major challenge when conducting research on organizational issues in Arab countries is to resist the dominant assumptions, theorize the unthought (as well as the invisible), and contextualize both the emergence of organized collective action and its impact. A commitment to decolonizing research agenda means paying attention to the power dynamics mechanisms embedded in the academy that guard and reinforce colonizing epistemologies that presume an unmarked universal position that is oppressive for the subaltern regions we set out to research.

The sphere of the academy itself, in my case the French academy rather than the communities/organizations that I set out to research, is the first place where my research becomes entangled in the coloniality of power/knowledge, impacting its conceptualization, formulation, and eventually, the kinds of knowledge I must produce.

Khatibi’s (1983, 2001) the “other thought” concept anchored in Arab realities could be a source of inspiration to explore these challenges. The double subversion inherent to his definition of decolonization entails the subversion of both Western metaphysics and what he calls the Arab–Islamic theological-nationalist project (Ben Yakoub, 2018). While I concur with Khatibi in advocating for an ontological plurality, especially for an internal critique of colonized societies that illuminates various erasures, hierarchies, and forms of marginality, I question his oversimplistic equivalence/symmetry between colonial violence and internal hierarchies.

Instead, I find the Fanonian idea of   the colonial checkpoint used in “L ‘an V,” where the white man can pass and not the Arab, most appropriate to describe my research practice. That image can work here as a trope that testifies exactly to the limits of certain geopolitics of knowledge. The experience of the racialized person is that of living in the same world as the white man, but not living in the same world as him. That is to say, the social and political institutions that racialized people deal with will not behave with them in the same way as they do with white men. We live in the same world, but this world does not speak the same language to all of us (Maldonado-Torres, 2007).

Therefore, to face what Edward Said characterized as systematic epistemic and material oppression, I was soon confronted with two fundamental tensions or two fundamental “checkpoints” to borrow the Fanonian metaphor. The first concerned the material and symbolic difficulty associated with several centuries of economic, political, and intellectual colonization preventing subaltern and indigenous people from speaking for themselves (Seremani and Clegg, 2016). Apart from the intellectuals of the diaspora living in the North, very few authors affiliated with Arab institutions are cited in organizational studies, including critical perspectives. This absence can be explained by not only the ethnocentrism of the assessment frameworks used by the dominant Western journals in the management field but also by the lack of financial means crucial for knowledge production and dissemination in Arab countries. Consequently, it is not surprising to observe that decolonial/postcolonial perspectives in management have flourished in Brazil, India, and South Africa, relatively more powerful economically and politically (Yousfi, 2020b).

The second tension relates to the difficulty of constructing adequate criteria for identifying so-called “indigenous” sites and/or methodologies in a world where traces of the hegemonic undertaking of globalization are ubiquitous. The central question raised in the postcolonial and decolonial school of thought becomes: How can one recognize cultural roots while avoiding essentialism; and, how can one take into account the cultural mélange/mixture, without imposing colonial categories when considering various ways of organizing and working and different trajectories to construct an identity in the countries of the South? (Yousfi, 2020b; Islam, 2012; Nkomo, 2011).

Faced with these tensions along with the absence of institutional referents of intellectual production in the Arab countries due to historical, political, and economic factors normalizing the research protocols on the one hand, and the desire for emancipation from the dominant methodological canons on the other, I find no clear recipes or procedures for a decolonizing research practice. At best, there are tips to help decide how to grasp the terrain, based on the specific context of the study. More than a toolbox of methods and concepts that need to be adjusted and adapted to a specific context, a perpetual process of bricolage has marked my fieldwork, namely the process of creating or manufacturing from a varied range of things available (Lévi-Strauss, 1958). The challenge is to “be there,” be open to surprises, experiment with data collection and analysis processes in response to intuitions from the field, and engage in the process of interpretation while trying to survive or overcome the myopia that could have been imposed by the internalization of French intellectual framework.

This process required continuous experimentation in the field involving the adaptation of research methods to the phenomena I was studying. Therefore, while the essential skills of observation and the ability to decode the dynamics at work in the field remain relevant, I was required to understand a very complex region. The metaphor that seems most relevant to me for describing this form of reasoning and research is that of fahlawa, a vernacular Egyptian term that means cleverness, shrewdness, and resourcefulness during times of crises. The word fahlawa is derived from a Persian word, pahlavi, which refers to those who are distinguished by courage and resourcefulness, having been used initially by Arabs to qualify those who could resist the colonial rule. It is the art of adapting oneself to difficult circumstances in a pragmatic way and managing complex situations using skills and stratagems. While Fahlawa borrows features from the term metis (what the Greeks call practical intelligence), as discussed by Detienne and Vernant (1993), or could be similar to the innovation and flexibility inherent to the jugaad philosophy of sharing knowledge, it differs from the two by its core dimension of “survival.” Fahlawa proposes innumerable possible theoretical and relational inferences, which certainly do not obey the rules of the formal deduction but allow us to produce relevant “embodied critical thinking” central to surviving different tensions and “checkpoints,” appropriate to my aim of decolonizing knowledge.

Fahlawa is an expression I have already used to describe organizational practices in Arab countries; practices that seek less to obtain a slow normative agreement or transcendent regulation mechanism rather than the construction of practical compromises between particular interests while avoiding offense or direct confrontation and privileging continuous dialog. As an illustration, an Egyptian entrepreneur explained in one of my interviews:

“I could have all the necessary papers to open a business and while I’m waiting for an answer other people are opening businesses without having to do anything. “Fahlawa” is the only way to survive. . . There is an issue of trust. We are scared of everything. We place our trust in people and not in laws” (Yousfi, 2008).

In the same vein, a Tunisian executive commented:

If you want to apply all the formal rules, you should immediately close your company and stop working. Well, if nothing is done about the formal rules, you should also immediately close your company and stop working too; in general, the rules are beneficial and we can work with these rules. Yet, you should keep in mind that there are exceptions where someone has to make the decision to break with the rules because he knows that the context compels him to do so and that, you need to continuously adjust to unanticipated constraints (Yousfi, 2005).

Fahlawa, as a practice of navigating across agitated waters, also allowed me (from a methodological point of view) to favor inventiveness, which makes it possible to answer the methodological difficulties without radically questioning the existing ones. It enables me to navigate between several cultural, epistemological, and political references that mark the intellectual production of this region of the world while exploring the effects of this power dynamics on my research objects. It is a “border strategy” that echoes in a certain way what Mignolo (2000) calls “critical border thinking” and helps go beyond the Eurocentric versus authentic dilemma.

Instead of rejecting block western methodologies and epistemologies, my task was rather to select, through fahlawa, the ones that would be reappropriated and adjusted to provide a redefinition of the liberation project from the lens, practices, and locations of the subaltern; in my case, the Arabs. In what follows, I will detail how the process of bricolage inherent to fahlawa manifests from the research conception to the data collection and restitution.

Research conception: Articulating a decolonial/postcolonial perspective with cultural analysis

Most of my research has been in a particular cultural context—that of the Arab countries—and is based on ethnographic journeys and qualitative empirical surveys of widely diverse organizations; both from the point of view of the organizational configuration and the purpose of the collective action. My research project aimed to explore the way in which national culture shapes the functioning of organized collective action with a particular focus on the existing links between dynamics of domination/resistance, cultures, and economic development issues. The diversity of the organizational configurations I have studied in different Arab contexts was an excellent laboratory to explore not only the conditions for the establishment of effective organizations but also viable democratic institutions. That said, I was soon confronted with the important question of how to produce useful and grounded knowledge in Arab countries and with what research methodologies and analysis concepts. To what extent can critical approaches, in particular decolonial/postcolonial approaches, compete with approaches using Western models of epistemology as referents?

While I was convinced of the importance of using a decolonial/postcolonial perspective to explore the dynamics of domination/resistance in Arab organizations and to reveal the implicit assumptions and political impact of the dominant intellectual production, I was less persuaded by the shared postulate of critical poststructuralist tradition, according to which the researcher could uncover the causes of domination and help the actors emancipate themselves. This entreprise could be highly problematic if we ask ourselves the cultural anchoring of both the researcher and the judgment criteria used to evaluate different situations of domination. The main assumptions and fundamental sets of beliefs about the world held by researchers shape the research they conduct (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Morgan and Smircich, 1980).

For example, I was met with resistance when I submitted a paper explaining that Jordanian workers resisted to the hegemony of a French multinational through mobilizing a vision of adalaa and moussawat (equality and justice) rooted in Islamic references (Yousfi, 2007). One of the reviewers interpreted the findings as an interesting story of workers’ manipulation. He/she argued that reference to Islam is a “an ideological mechanism of control” simply pressed into service as “fig leaves or rhetorical devices” to pave the way for Western techniques. To address this resistance, I explained that no one could concretely assess whether and to what extent the workers were manipulated. Then, I showed that more than a simple outcome of a cultural manipulation, the specific reference to Islamic reference, adala and moussawat, has provided a shared ideal of a good working relationship against which the imposed management practices were assessed and transformed.

More generally, if the goal is to emancipate the dominated, who can determine if, when, and how it should be done—based on the assumption that the same objective situation can be interpreted in one culture as “egalitarian” and completely “alienating” in another? Political analysis from a decolonial/postcolonial tradition raises the question of the researcher’s ability to uncover the sacred local expectations of what constitutes fair and equal treatment in society and in a particular cultural context that constitutes the grounds on which resistance and domination should be assessed. It also questions the conventional secular understanding of resistance and domination in critical management studies (Khan and Koshul, 2011).

Having said that, I cannot be content with the dominant cultural approaches that distinguish societies in terms of values and attitudes and reduce the cultural analysis to a translation operation (Hofstede, 2001). When, without knowing it, we do not attribute the same meaning to the same words, understanding does not arise spontaneously from dialog. I felt the need to nurture methods for knowledge generation from local cultural contexts in order to lay the foundations for better-situated management studies. To that end, I selected the interpretative approach developed by d’Iribarne (2009), inspired by symbolic anthropology (Geertz, 1973), which looks at culture as a framework of meaning, a specific combination of reference points and interpretation guidelines where the diversity of practices makes sense. For instance, d’Iribarne (1989) shows that the omnipresent reference points in France concerning the rights and duties associated with a specific profession with the rank associated with this position define how to recognize an “acceptable” way of working. This can be regarded as reflective of a society whose governance relies on a conception of freedom attached to rights and obligations specific to a given social position. This conception is linked to the nobility and status prevailing in French society (Tocqueville, 1856).

In contrast with Swidler (1986), who argues that culture influences action by shaping a repertoire or “tool kit” of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct “strategies of action,” d’Iribarne’s conceptualization of culture points to the more stable implicit framework of meaning that casts the worldview of members in a given society and shapes the matrix according to which the habits, skills, styles, and practices evolve and change. This vision, far from locking actors into immutable beliefs and routines or reducing their behavior to an exclusive pursuit of self-interest, leaves many more options for understanding the functioning of Arab organizations. Thus, the decoding of a culture, such as the mastery of a language, can be significantly useful for understanding other’s knowledge as well as for deciphering organizational challenges.

Therefore, articulating this cultural analysis with a decolonial lens provides a global approach to the guiding principles of the organizational realities that it interprets. The goal is to decipher the meaning of actions and, institutions anchored in specific social, political, historical, and cultural processes. To do this, I had to examine not only the influence of colonial models in each context but also its encounter with the pre-existing organizational configurations that precede the colonial enterprise and influence the local expectations of what a good management should be. Combining cultural analysis with decolonial analysis to explore Arab organizational contexts has given me the opportunity to explore the interweaving of the dynamics of power at play with cultural references, shaping the reading of domination situations, and at the same time offering symbolic resources to negotiate with and resist them (Rees and Gatenby, 2014).

If I take the example of the Poulina case study (Yousfi, 2013), shared references such as the code of honor, the figure of the artisan, or the metaphor of the family influenced the reception of an American management model by Tunisians and the adaptations that were concretely made to it. However, the link between the two critical and cultural analyses made it possible to see that by expressing their reluctance to adopt management by individual objectives, my interlocutors not only described their resistance toward the American model but implicitly testified to their conception of what should be a fair assessment prevalent in the Tunisian context. This provided both the grammar of adopted resistance strategies and the basis of adaptations by producing an evaluation system based on collective objectives. Combining critical and cultural analysis makes it easier to grasp the interplay between the negotiation processes underlying the power/resistance dynamics and the implicit cultural references that together shape this process of hybridization (Yousfi, 2013).

Such an approach can help envision a new way of looking more realistically and effectively at organizational challenges in Arab countries. It allows the exploration of the construction of possible alternative organizations in line with the local expectations in each context of what constitutes a “well-ordered society.” Deciphering the cultural roots of commitment to self-help in Lebanon (Yousfi, 2010a) or the historical anchoring of consensus as a mechanism for conflict regulation in Tunisia (Yousfi, 2017) is more likely to devise concrete solutions to build alternative and sustainable organizations.

This theoretical framework does not really rely on “indigenous methods and concepts,” but reexamines and articulates some available methodologies from different places. This crafting process has helped me develop ways of exploration that combine an understanding of the historical context of global dynamics and how these shape management practices, as well as scholarship in the region. In particular, reclaiming the importance of understanding the global-local dynamics of control and resistance in their relation to Arab management practices is a critical aspect of the decolonization process as it fosters more relevant, culturally nuanced knowledge. The encounters with the academy’s web of power relations and the implications that these encounters have on my research agenda are further compounded by my encounters in the communities I set out to research, and thus, of the very conditions that make knowledge production possible. In the following section, I will detail the challenges inherent to data collection when pursuing a decolonial research agenda.

Data collection: Ethnography as a decolonial epistemic position

I have borrowed the tools of a critical ethnography, defined as “conventional ethnography with a political purpose” (Thomas, 1993: 4), whose ethical responsibility is to address social injustice in a particular area (Madison, 2005). The collection of ethnographic data allows me to not only reveal in a conventional, descriptive, and interpretative approach the cultural references that mark the observed organizational phenomena, but also answer other purely political questions. Therefore, the purpose of the methodological approach adopted is to account for the dialectical relationship between the structural social and political structures that weigh on individuals and the autonomy they have to resist or even emancipate themselves from them (Anderson, 1989). More than a specific method of research, I consider ethnography, following my work, as a decolonial epistemic position; it is a way of knowing how to adapt in practice and the type of knowledge that results from the problems of understanding the challenges of “organizing” in Arab countries.

First, ethnography in my practice consists of rendering the perspective of others intelligible by considering their context and practices as much as the words they speak. This helps to explain how the experiences of actors represent a “network of meanings” (Geertz, 1973) and the “cultural understandings” of situations that people experience. Moreover, in line with Rees and Gatenby’s (2014) argument, ethnography is not merely a method of data collection but rather a sociological practice of linking observed accounts to context and explaining, rather than merely describing, social phenomena. The data gathered is then interpreted in its historical and economic social contexts, as well as through local cultural understandings. However, to grasp the weight of the circumstances and the structuring forces of the field that have materialized through the dominant discourses is henceforth indispensable to identify the influence of the hegemonic political and economic regimes on the management of the field as well as on the production of knowledge. Their effect on the ethnographic experience is such that the ethnographer, as my experience indicates, has to use fahlawa as a way to devise unforeseen strategies for conducting this investigation.

The interaction between the methodology and knowledge of the field, and the critical reflexivity of the ethnographer on his/her method and field conditions reveals the particular methodological strategies deployed in order to cope with impasses or uncertainties, and thus unblocks particular forms of knowledge from the spatial, material, discursive/rhetorical, and emotional registers of the explored field. Therefore, the purpose of this analysis is to join the ongoing discussion on the challenges of knowledge production in Arab countries, using ethnography as both a practical, descriptive, and ultimately theoretical enterprise, as well as a mode of analytic attention (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Kanafani and Sawaf, 2017; Nader, 2011, Dresch, 2000).

By situating the intellectual enterprise within Arab countries in both a contextual and global time of crisis, the contexts of ethnography are relevant clues to the political and ethical contours within which research is taking place; which in turn lead to innovative forms of sensitivity, analytical attention, and self-critical awareness in the conduct of social science research (Hage, 2012: 294). This concern, consistent with the goal of my research, aims to refine the imported/imposed canons of knowledge and toolkits of ethnographic practice and examine how they can be (as much as the artifacts under exploration) readjusted in order to respond ethically and politically to the challenges posed to the organizational and economic contexts studied.

Positionality and representation: Can I source “myself”?

As a woman growing up in Tunisia, a country under an authoritarian regime whose main characteristic was to destroy any possibility of organized collective action, I have acquired a special sensitivity to the conditions that limit the emergence of alternative organizations able to meet the economic and political challenges in this region of the world. In addition, the particular attention paid in my work to the cultural question arose from an observation that I made very early in my studies in management of a gap between the so-called universal management courses provided in business schools and the daily reality of Tunisian business organizations (Karam et al., 2015; Mullin, 2017; Zghal, 1994). Given my French mindset, my awareness of the U.S. hegemony on Arab management academia and, to a certain extent, on the French management academia, when conducting field studies in Arab countries, I spent much time wondering on which side of the divide I would fall given all these influences. I also wondered whether my political commitment to challenge the power dynamics in terms of knowledge production would be sufficient to conduct my research project and how my affiliation with a French university would impact my conversations with actors in the countries in which I conducted my research.

Yet, I came to learn through my different journeys that even though I identify myself as Tunisian and Arab, it had little influence on the way I was perceived by the research participants in the field. Some would selectively position me as an insider, while others positioned me as an outsider—strategies that served to address the unequal power relations that were inherent in my arrival from a powerful center: France. This selective positioning takes place within the context of the coloniality of the historical and political relationships between the “center” and the “peripheries,” but intersects with other parameters such as class, gender, and age that come to constitute my relationships with my interlocutors. For instance, while I was perceived by the francophone elite in Lebanon as “French,” and as “Arab” by the low-skilled employees, regardless of the way they positioned me, all requested that I make their voice heard in the French context. This directly impacted the kind of conversation that I could have in these places and this conversation’s subsequent translation into an academic product back in France.

This specific relationship shapes the way I see the issues of positionality and representation in two ways:

First, one of the goals of a decolonizing research agenda is to stop claiming epistemological authority over “the Other” by suggesting that they must be represented and to challenge the western narratives about objectivity set to control mind and body (Said, 1978 ; Spivak, 1988); yet in my case, I see myself as part of and not separate from my research (Al-Hardan, 2014; Haraway, 1988). While actively trying to decenter my position of power as a scholar affiliated with a French university, I see my research work as a place for conversation with people from my community rather than a means of discovery of an “Other.” In this politically critical ethnographic approach, the “scientific” point of view position that legitimizes the status of the “field” researcher is not so much linked to his/her allegedly “distanced” stand but actually results from a conversation that assumes a partial perspective as the only way to access objective vision. Instead of a quest for “transcendental truth,” fahlawa is again useful because it allows us to become answerable for what we learn and what we see while seeking marginalized perspectives that can never be known in advance. The objectivity I am seeking is what Haraway (1988) described as “limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object,” requiring nothing more than “passionate detachment.”

The second challenge relates to the intellectual formation and culture of the researcher. The observed reality may be interpreted according to the cultural reading grid or filtered according to the codes of the intellectual training of the researcher, which may make it difficult to access the cultural framework of the interviewees. If the good level of familiarity (as in my case with the cultural universes explored) can offer the possibility of greater richness in the data collected, the analysis work requires systematic efforts to become aware of one’s own cultural references, codes of intellectual training, and to take a step back from them. The risk is the fact that we know a priori the explanatory principle of any phenomenon or rather that we think we know it. Therefore, it is tempting and always possible to produce an explanation consistent with the existing interpretation. However, when the researcher is from a culture other than those whose differences he/she seeks to explore, having a third cultural marker has the advantage of introducing a certain balance into the examination device. The outward look toward two different cultures and the reflective one on the researcher’s own culture makes it possible to have an interesting comparative triangle, helping reduce to a certain extent the uncertainty of the setting in perspective. Thus, the object of research, while systematically viewed and compared in a confrontation between two interacting frameworks of meaning, must implicitly be approached from the socio-cultural position of the researcher.

Sensory experiences and knowledge production

From self-awareness in reflective work at the beginning of my research, my interest shifted to the sensory experiences specific to fieldwork (Yousfi and Abdallah, 2020). This brought me to routine encounters with fear, suspicion, discomfort, doubt, and misanthropy, as well as friendship, solidarity, affinity, and affection. However, what kind of critical knowledge, then, can be produced by the attention given to these aspects of the ethnographic encounter, and what methodological adaptations result from it?

First, these encounters have allowed me to recognize the effects of the ethnographer’s subjectivity on the influence of the patriarchal and colonial regimes of knowledge and domination of which they are or are not conscious. In Arab countries, when the researcher encounters untranslatable terms or when they are obliged to adopt their methodological strategies in the context of the field, which is noticeably different from Western countries, they inevitably produce an original and alternative contribution more in touch with the social realities that he/she explores.

Secondly, it leads to ethnography paying attention to the ethnographer’s subjective physical sensual experience while avoiding the trap of turning subjective experiences into ritualized symbolic gestures, or worse, into “ready-to-wear products” of the ethnographer, a postmodern identity politics that tends to universally dominate (Lugones, 2010; Robertson, 2002). Faced with the trap of “self-centrism” or the quest for authenticity on the one hand and the risk of falling into the dominant multicultural liberalism dominating some social science research on the other, the attention to the intersubjective and emotional landscape of research retains ethnography as a central tool for a critical exploration of the world around us.

Third, Bourdieu (2003) argues that revealing the conditions of possibility, by which the researcher tries to make a social reality objective, is imperative to produce useful knowledge, especially by emphasizing the training of the ethnographer and his or her social field where intellectual prejudices take shape. However, theoretical challenges shift as changes in economic and political regimes and demanding political and practical (violent and perilous in some places) considerations in countries in the Global South combine to stifle the researcher and prevent them from being able to respect the conditions on the ground and restore the voice of the respondents in their “own words” (Alcadipani and Hodgson, 2009). Insofar as the subjective experience of the researcher in contact with the field continues to shape ethnographic knowledge, the sensory, ethical, spatial, cognitive, and political registers of work put into perspective in my analyses become the material of the ground, and the ground itself is seen as an extension of everyday life (Davies and Spencer, 2010; Jackson, 2010). Therefore, the conditions of ethnographic work not only impact the critical ethnographic practice I am engaged in but also the ways of doing and thinking about the organizational challenges in Arab countries.

As an illustration, during my work on the role of the UGTT in the Tunisian revolution, the fear of an uncertain future was felt in different narratives. This emotion enabled me to build bridges between different temporalities (the present moment, memories of past violence, and shared fears about the future) and created an intimacy of shared experiences between the research participants and myself. The experience of dictatorship and/or the revolution is cumulative: it imprints its marks on the bodies and souls of its subjects, but its effects vary for each individual at different moments of life. This experience is also intergenerational; the trauma is not only carried for oneself but for former generations while conditioning the expectations of future generations regarding what a “legitimate and acceptable political regime” and “legitimate ways of organizing” should be (Yousfi and Abdallah, 2020).

The challenge of the translating/sharing knowledge

If the implicit consideration when reflecting on knowledge production and sharing is

“What it is for and whose end does it serve?” (Jackson, 2013: 27; Jammulamadaka, 2020; ÖzkazançPan, 2008), my experience forces me to add another question: “How should knowledge production/sharing be done, given all the power structures I have to deal with?”

First, I was concerned with the classic challenges of language translation from Arabic to French, and then from French/Arabic to English. If ethnography is based on writing, it is always conveyed by a language, whether the ethnographer chooses it or has it imposed by various institutional constraints. Ethnography is a method whose ultimate goal is to convey meaning, but which can never ignore the medium by which this meaning travels, that is, the “language” used. According to Anderson (1989), language is never transparent, it is translucent. Every word is uttered to signify and make sense; therefore, it carries a precise content and a particular emotion in the language in which it takes shape (Abdallah, 2017; Hagège, 2014; Mejri, 2000). Its transfer into another language is supposed to preserve this content during its translation. However, the reality is quite different: it can lend itself to approximations, unsuccessful attempts, and various hesitations.

Indeed, it is often difficult to translate the richness of meaning conveyed by certain expressions in the original language (Chanlat, 2014; Tréguer-Felten, 2018). There are two terms or “equivalents” that are available in both languages. Nevertheless, if we consider the relationship between these terms and the rest of the framework of meaning, we realize how the conceptual contents conveyed by the two terms are both important and different. At the same time, even when interlocutors speak the same language, the meaning of words used is not always the same. The French and Swiss will not define the word “quality” in the same way even if they use the same language (Chevrier, 2009). The same is true of the Quebecois and French (Segal, 1998) or other French speakers (Yousfi, 2006).

To limit the translation bias, analysis work must be conducted on the interviews in the original language, with translation only occurring in the final drafting phase, while keeping in mind that the original’s polysemic breadth and semantic depth would be significantly compromised when translated. Notably, it is only after a long way that we can grasp the precise meaning and the emotional/sacred dimension of the words in which the taken for granted assumptions structure the actors’ perceptions and reading of the cooperation situation. Nevertheless, the translation exercise will systematically add another level of interpretation and will regularly pose the inevitable and classic issue of fidelity and betrayal issues to the interpretations proposed by the actors (Ricoeur, 2013).

Second, the interpretation challenge is further complicated when associated with the difficult task of translating the subjugated knowledge of those from below in publishable academic writing. While engaging in knowledge sharing with the research participants and the local institutions I had to work with, in Arab countries, was relatively easy and done mainly through formal and informal meetings, technical reports, and teachings; it was far more complicated for me to translate my work in Western contexts. Given that the nature of the knowledge produced has political connotations and implications, I spent much time wondering how to be faithful to the perspectives of the marginalized, while I must write their thoughts in a specific language with specific universal categories imposed by both dominant and critical perspectives. While acknowledging that the marginalized perspectives are neither easily learned nor unproblematic and that their positioning is also political, I was confronted again with the power asymmetries that structure the academy.

Translating knowledge goes well beyond the traditional notion of research dissemination. It counters the imposed liberal standard according to which good research should be published in a peer-reviewed journal. As my understanding of a decolonial research practice is to share with a larger audience subjugated knowledge emanating from lived experiences of those who are marginalized (Stanley and Wise, 1993 ), I was systematically and ironically asked to “source” and “prove” the reported narratives, including those related to my own lived histories and experiences. It was difficult to make these narratives accepted on their own terms and not be reduced to the existing categories of the dominant secular modes of theorizing whether critical or mainstream (Khan and Koshul, 2011).

When I explain, for example, the role of wasta (intermediary) in the Egyptian context and how this metaphor was used to give meaning and reappropriate reforms imposed by the World Bank, I was not only asked to prove my analysis by detailing the methodologies used but also frequently asked to confront my interpretations through the reviewing process as to what the academic gate-keepers already know about the region, regardless of its relevance. It was then difficult to cope with the temptation of homogenizing differences with conventional understandings of what constitutes “proper” theory, where it is precisely such differences that can provide the resources for critical reflection and decolonial knowledge (Al-Hardan, 2014; Jammulamadaka, 2020; Khan and Koshul, 2011).

Convinced that challenging the power asymmetries should be done by also occupying a place in the power centers, I needed fahlawa to survive the bricolage/negotiation process required to ensure other alternative voices from that region were heard. For this to happen, it was important to have categories such as wasta present in their authentic forms in my papers, accompanied with a note explaining in English the meaning of the original words. Again, fahlawa was therefore crucial to explore the links between language and the power structures that shape both the representation of knowledge and lived social realities, and the negotiations and resistances that emerge from it (Parker and Burman, 1993).

However, is fahlawa sufficient to produce truly meaningful and situated knowledge? Certainly, we still need to free ourselves from the burden of having to submit our methods or our analytical approaches to the modes of judgment derived from dominant U.S. approaches. It also requires more productive engagement with an established critical style of theorizing, largely provided that scholars from this tradition accept hearing other voices. We must not only think of producing alternative criteria for judging what constitutes good research but also simultaneously reflect on alternative strategies that can help us construct alternative spaces for debate and solidarity in line with our political struggles.

Concluding remarks

Aligned with an acknowledgment of the global coloniality of power and its impact on the local/global ways of working and organizing, I attempted to critically reflect on the possibilities of producing meaningful and situated knowledge in Arab countries. This was done by further considering the implications of a decolonial epistemological critique of knowledge production. Drawing upon my research practice in Arab countries, I questioned the very processes of knowledge creation—from the formulation of my research question to the final act of translating and sharing knowledge—in order to better understand how personal, interpersonal, and contextual factors influence what is said and done.

These methodological reflections were aimed at highlighting the most sensitive aspect of a researcher’s journey, namely his/her conception of research and the imposed constraints, as applicable also to a researcher like me from an Arab country with a Francophone intellectual mindset whose intellectual project is to produce alternative and situated knowledge based on subjugated perspectives for and about the countries studied. This journey required me to first acknowledge the specificity of power dynamics that structure the field in Arab countries, but also to have the will to navigate between different tensions, “checkpoints,” and paradoxes, to remain open to surprises, and consider how to survive the disorder and “bricolage” inherent in the decolonial research practice.

That said, how can we describe what is involved in producing management knowledge and writing in colonial encounters?

First, the trajectory detailed in this paper shows that the process involved in my decolonial research practice rooted in Arab context is best described by fahlawa. Fahlawa has allowed me to ensure an “embodied experience of border thinking” in my ongoing process of theoretical development; between the intentional reasoning and my political goal inherent in my knowledge project (the intelligible representation of the challenges of organized collective action in Arab countries) on one hand, and the social/political structures that condition the positioning of the research participants as well as the academic field, on the other hand.

While Fahlawa could echo other traditions of “border thinking” initiated by different decolonial research traditions (Faria, 2013; Jammulamadaka, 2020), it differs in its core dimension of survival inherent to the ongoing colonial context prevailing in Arab countries. In contrast with what Colombian intellectual Manuel Zapata Olivella (1989) once affirmed, “The chains are not on our feet, but on our minds.” The Arab context is still a classic colonial context where the struggle is against the chains both “on our minds and on our feet.” More than a simple “complot” of other thought (Khatibi, 2001) or a strategic tool for decolonizing research agenda, fahlawa as a primary form of resistance is the art of tunneling between different material and symbolic checkpoints central to the survival of subjugated/dominated knowledge or local organizational practices.

Second, fahlawa understood as an “embodied border thinking” in the context of material and epistemic violence can also help us to understand what Ajari (2019) and Icaza and Vázquez (2016) call the limits of anti-essentialist discourses that praise the performativity of identity or culture as holding the only possibilities for resistance and liberation. To Homi Bhabha’s celebrated claim that “the way we conceptualize difference is important,” Ajari (2019) responds that it is the daily reality of death experienced by subaltern groups that produce the black person or the Arab, not the sociological conceptualizations and essentializing discourse.

In contrast to the anti-essentialist position, represented by Arab thinkers such as Kahtibi, Fatma Mernsisi, or Edward Said, my research practice lead me to share with Ajari (2019) the limitations of the theoretical and radical anti-essentialism, opened up by French philosophy in the latter part of the 20th century (Derrida, Foucault, and Deluze) and developed through a variety of theoretical initiatives under the labels of “poststructuralism,” “deconstruction,” or “postmodernity.” Therefore, Fahlawa is a process that helped me to maintain the tonicity between different competing intellectual traditions while orienting my senses toward the past. By closely considering the material piled debris of the colonial devastations and catastrophes of the last two centuries in the Arab region, fahlawa was crucial to face the current spectacle of both mutilated bodies and minds.

Third, the socially constructed character of race or identity, broadly established and admitted both in poststructuralist, postcolonial, and decolonial critiques, ignores the fact that although cultures change over time, the stability of some shared and sacred local references, as demonstrated earlier in this paper, are for the actors themselves; the matrices of ethical values shaping the way they perceive and resist domination. From this viewpoint, the challenge is to substitute for the fluidity and malleability of culture the more complex question of the enduring coexistence of a number of different temporalities and subjectivities stemming from political, economic, and epistemic violence in the colonial encounter.

From a political perspective, fahlawa as a resistance strategy helps me to better understand the complex relationship that links “the border” and the “oppressed bodies.” The border as experienced in my research practice is neither a line of separation nor one of contact; it is a constituent genetic of the oppressed and mutilated bodies and minds. The subject of decolonial production is therefore not a subject of the beyond, a subject of the outside. It is a subject that lies within the border of the division between the inside and the outside, between the identical and the different. The border as a structural impediment reveals that the challenge is not to deconstruct the lines of separation but rather to tackle the question certainly riskier for the dominant power of how to build border guards enabling individuals, groups, and people, who were long and methodically oppressed and exploited, to recover both their dignity and sovereignty.