3 Postcolonialism and decolonising management research

I’m Emma Bell, and I work at The Open University in the UK. And I’m going to be talking about post-colonial and indigenous management research.

The objectives of the talk are to explain the post-colonial argument for decolonising social scientific knowledge. I’m also going to be sharing the findings from a research project involving Indian management scholars as research participants related to language and meaning and research mimicry. Then I’m going to consider the purpose of indigenous management research. And finally, I want to ask how we can decolonise management knowledge.

So first, the post-colonial argument for colonising social science knowledge. Social science research is based on a European and North American project of domination and subordination. And this imperialist and colonialist legacy dates back centuries.

So in relation to the production of knowledge, this involves a desire to understand the other, a process of constructing Western subjectivities as normal and those in the global south as somehow unusual or strange. So this concept of othering is crucial in post-colonial research.

What this means for research is that the process of doing research is a project of extracting knowledge about those others, those who are different from ourselves. And this process of extraction involves the use of methods that have been developed in the West.

So research is seen as a process of extraction and a means of progressing towards truth. And this notion of truth is founded on the legacy of the Enlightenment and the idea of modernism: the idea that through processes and practises of scientific knowledge production, we can develop better ways of managing and organising.

The problem with this, as Raewyn Connell argues, is that it assumes that all societies are knowable and that they are knowable in the same way and from the same point of view. So to sum up, these methods and methodologies of producing knowledge are tacitly assumed to be universal. They are exported from the West to the rest.

So this process of methodological colonising involves training researchers in Western universities in Western methods, exporting textbooks and research literatures to the rest of the world from the West. And it sets up a relation of inequality.

So how has this colonising logic informed management research? Well, two researchers, Jack and Westwood, in a paper in 2006 looked at this in relation to the subfield of international business. They argue that researchers in international business, including those who use qualitative methods, tend to be prone to ontological universalism, where they assume that knowledge applies independently of context.

They also found that researchers were slow to acknowledge the political nature of knowledge production. What this means is that collecting data in a country in the global south is often done in an extractive way, going out and collecting the data in contexts where the desire is to know how the business and management culture operates in order to be able to translate that knowledge to Western audiences and enable those contexts to be more effectively managed. So a power relation is at work here.

They argue that a hierarchical system of binaries is constructed in a way which positions Western management thought and Western managers as superior to those in the global south. And this is a practice of othering.

So what do international business researchers need to do in order to address these problems? Jack and Westwood recommend that the research reflects on the historical and cultural location, writing and thinking about themselves as well as those whom they are studying. They also encourage much greater reflection on the location of research participants.

They recommend that the researcher considers their own identity, including their cultural and historical location. They also encourage much greater consideration of the cultural and historical context where research participants are located. This includes thinking about the motives of the study and the different stakeholders who would be affected by the outcomes and thinking also about how they will be affected.

A further recommendation concerns local forms of representation working with researchers who are based locally in the context of study. And finally, Jack and Westwood encourage researchers to question their own authority in their writing and to think hard about the ways in which they presume that authority.

To explain how these dynamics unfold, I want to share with you a research project that I was involved in with Nivedita Kothiyal, which involved an interview study of Indian management scholars. The first theme concerns language and meaning. Boussebaa and Brown talk about the process of ‘Englishisation’, whereby business schools, in order to position themselves as international and world class, are increasingly moving towards English as the language of teaching and research. As these scholars have also observed, writing in Indian English is deemed less pure in this context.

This act of subordination has material effects on Indian management scholars as they work in business schools. So what many Indian scholars told us is that because of the pressure to publish, they are driven towards adopting positivist quantitative methods because they’re much easier to write up. Statistical tables and hypotheses that can be tested are easier to write up in a standardised form of language, which is less difficult to accomplish.

Another of these effects is that it encourages the study of research participants who speak English. So what Indian scholars told us is that because of the challenges in accessing and translating meanings from one language to another in a multilingual society such as India, so what Indian scholars told us is that this encouraged them to access research populations that spoke English as a way of dealing with the challenges in a multilingual society like India where issues of meaning and translation are highly complex by confining their studies to often elite, small groups of people who represent the colonial legacy. They were confining their questions and their pursuit of knowledge.

A final effect concerns the relationship between language and thought. Some students I have supervised in PhDs have told me that the way in which they think is framed by the language they’re educated in. So even when they’re studying a context in which they are native speakers, because the language of instruction, the language of education, the language of research is English, they find it difficult to think in their native language for their PhD.

This is something that Indian scholars also spoke about. For example, Dipanker, who is a professor in an Indian university, told us, we only see what our language allows us to see. Our thinking is limited by our exposure and socialisation into English. What this means is that Indian management scholars, including those working in anglophone contexts, are in a situation where they are constructed as the native who is trying to be white in Homi Bhabha’s terms. Almost the same, but not quite.

The second theme that I want to share with you from this research project concerns mimicry in research. Bhabha talks about mimicry as the product of an asymmetric relationship between colonisers and colonised. A narcissistic demand is placed on the colonised subject to emulate the practises, the habits and the culture of the coloniser.

So how does this translate into management research? Indian management scholars spoke about how they were encouraged to emulate Western research practises. As Amrit, a professor, told us, ‘We do whatever the West is doing. Our whole nature of questioning and issues of methodology are being framed elsewhere. That’s how I look at it. We’ve been trained to toe the line.’

And yet, at the same time, scholars told us about their experience of being positioned as not quite good enough in these contexts. So, as Bhabha tells us, mimicry can never be fully realised. The colonial subject is always positioned as a partial presence.

So to think about how some of these problems might be addressed, I want to introduce the concept of indigenous management research. Indigenous research seeks to empower people who have survived imperialism and colonialism, and recognises their right to take control of their own forms of knowledge and their processes of producing knowledge.

An example of this can be found in Warner and Grint’s study of indigenous leadership. This focused on Native American concepts of what a leader is and sought to challenge the norms of Western scholarship, which have produced a very singular concept of what leadership is, which reflects a concept of white masculinity in many cases.

But one of the challenges involved in doing this is a linguistic one. So what the researchers found is that in these contexts, when they were talking to Native American groups, their words for leadership could not be translated into English. So the problem of translation of meaning is a major one in indigenous research.

So in Native American communities, there are numerous terms for leadership, which the researchers found very difficult to translate into English while still preserving the cultural meaning that was embedded in the context. And so what this example highlights is one of the challenges of indigenous research.

We also need to be cautious in using a term like in indigenous because of the possibility of representing a romanticised and singular notion of subjectivity, which actually reproduces a colonising logic. Denzin puts this very well: ‘Indigenous knowledges too often are turned into objects of study. Treated as if they were instances of quaint folk theory held by members of a primitive culture.’ The decolonising project reverses this equation, making Western systems of knowledge the object of inquiry.

So indigenous methodology needs to be combined with a decolonising approach to the production of knowledge, which not only draws attention to alternative ways of knowing within different cultures, but problematises and specifies the cultural embedded of Western management thought.

So how can we try to decolonise management knowledge? What we argue in the paper is that this involves exploring the concept of hybridity as a way of encouraging the flourishing of diverse ways of knowing and producing knowledge, rather than a singular, universal approach. It also involves encouraging more embodied forms of knowing, first-person knowing rather than third-person speaking.

It’s about knowing as sensing, including sensing things that cannot be directly observed. And that involves beliefs, including belief systems, religions and spirituality. Indigenous knowledge has the potential also to enable us, often through these belief systems, to move beyond a human-centric approach to the world and to think about ourselves much more relationally in the context of other matter, including the environment and other living beings.

I’ve not been subject to the same colonising experiences as many. I am a relatively privileged, white, Western researcher. And so what is my role in relation to decolonising knowledge? Some researchers talk about bicultural research where non-Western and Western researchers work together to try to reclaim and foreground non-Western voices and methodologies.

The concept of bicultural research encourages researchers from indigenous cultures and the global South to work together with those in the West in ways that foreground these different perspectives that are enabled by indigenous research. And this could be one possibility for how we might work collaboratively to decolonise management knowledge.

But there are others. And the purpose of this talk has been to problematise some established ways of knowing in management research and to encourage you to think about how things might be different.

Why do we need to talk about colonising knowledge? Let me just show you a few slides which show where authors, editors and reviewers come from in management journals. In 2012, we have the results, very interesting results, published in Organisation, written by Murphy and Zhu. And as you can see here, [with] the question, ‘Where is knowledge management produced?’, the great majority – they did the results looking at top-tier journals – and the great majority of authors come from the US and the UK. And from these slides, you can see that there are entire parts of the world like Africa, which are not even present, and India as well.

So this is the authors. But maybe it’s different from the editors? No, if we look [at] the editor’s affiliation, we have a very similar picture. The great majority of them comes from the US and the UK. And there again, we have entire parts of the world that are completely absent.

There is an interesting cartogram which represents their world following these figures. And you can see that Latin America and Africa are almost inexistent. So this is a picture of where does management knowledge come from. And this is also important – I lied – that not only authors and editors come from the US, from the US and the UK especially, but also the organisations that they study are mainly based in the West. So management knowledge is predominantly a Western discipline.

Have things changed in the last few years? We had a few last year, another report published by Publons [based] on the web science database and other data. And, again, here you can see that as the distribution across the world of editors and, again, of editors and of reviewers. And, again, you can see that US and UK and the global north in general, they play definitely a dominant position.

So on the basis of this data, and also more in general, we can if we talk in general about management knowledge, we face three main problems, if we talk about management knowledge and the global south. One is absence. Because, as we have just seen, management knowledge is produced mainly in the West and looking especially [at] Western organisations.

But there are other two key problems that we face when we talk about when we are concerned about the colonising management knowledge. And one is about these pervasive dimensions of orientalism and occidentalism in management and organisation studies. And another pervasive dimension is that of misrepresentations. What do I mean with these three key concepts?

Orientalism, you might be familiar with the work of Edward Said and of many other African scholars, such as Mudimbe, Kebede, which have analysed especially in [an] anthropology context how African and, more in general, the global south, were represented. And what emerged was a binary Manichian thinking according to which there was on one pole, the superior West, and on the other pole, there was the inferior global south, the inferior colonies. And the representations of Africans and [the] South Asian population were mainly developed along this binary thinking where the second pole, that of the colonised, made reference in a sense only with reference to the former. They did not have independent conceptual existence.

Have things changed in management, knowledge management and organisation studies? According to many scholars, not. In management and organisation studies currently, we still find that those dimensions of orientalism and misrepresentation that were part of the anthropology context at the beginning of the century. And on the basis of this, for instance, Prasad talks about the Westocentric nature of management organisation studies, which continues to assume the West as the norm and the lens to which study organisations and workers across the world.

And the interesting part of orientalism is that if a non-Western – or if an organisation in the global south deploys some practice that is not known in Western management, it is considered traditional, backwards, and in absolute need of modernisation. While if some practice that is taken for granted and widespread in the West is not present in organisations in the global south, then they need training, capacity-building.

My background is in development studies. And so I did a lot of studies regarding capacity-building of organisations and institutions in the global south. And this dimension is very much present. But it is also interesting to see that together with orientalism, management studies also suffers of what is being called occidentalism, which means that despite the fact that management and organisation studies mainly ignores the rest of the world, Western management knowledge is considered universal and valid everywhere in the West – everywhere in the world.

My way of seeing decolonised knowledge is knowledge it is meaningful in the context with where it is produced and that is meaningful for the person and the citizens and the communities that are involved in the knowledge production process. Is it indigenous knowledge, is it Western knowledge? I don’t know. This is not the relevant question for me.

What I try to do in my research is to produce knowledge that is first of all relevant and meaningful for that context where the research takes place. And in focusing on the local context does not mean escaping or neglecting macrodynamics of power, does not mean ignoring what is happening outside our small context of the research. It’s more a way to think continuously between the micro level where the research takes place and the macro level of knowledge production and what can we use – the macro global political economic frameworks to understand what we are observing the fears, but also to use what we are observing the fears to understand what is happening at a more global level.

So with regard to this question, ‘What is decolonised knowledge?’ On the basis of my experience, what I use as a normative principle for my research is that decolonised knowledge is a knowledge that is meaningful for the people I’m working with. And this is the first – one of the first steps. It is also very important to focus on the unit of analysis of the place where we are working.

Because this also helps us to overcome one of the key features of the colonial thinking in management knowledge, which is what we mentioned before, orientalism, and this attitude of studying non-Western organisations through the comparative lens using the West as a norm and the local organisation – to use the West as the lens to study a local organisation. To focus on radical contextuality helps us to go beyond orientalism. Because it helps us to go beyond these comparative lenses. And it helps us to give independent conceptual value to the reality that we have in front of us.

How do we decolonise management knowledge? Through which processes we can decolonise management knowledge? One of the key principles that I try to follow in my research is that of embracing an open-ended stance, which means liberating as much as possible the research from predefined frameworks, or paradigms, or approaches.

It’s something linked to dropping that tool that was mentioned in the opening talk. And this is really important. Because when I started my research, I did my PhD in Uganda. And I started with the aim of doing a critical, participatory action research.

And only through the field, through the work in the field, I have realised how much constraint I was putting on my participants. Because I wanted to have meetings and the cycles of action and reflections, because I wanted to focus on our questions. And it was an enormous constraint on the research setting.

And that was even if I was starting from a participatory critical approach, I was setting the agenda. I was leading the research process. So I had to learn slowly to leave, to really leave the stick and also to sit down and observe and also spend days just participating in meetings, some observing what my colleagues were doing.

And renounced the first few weeks, I tried to organise reflective meetings. But I was the only person interested in those reflexive meetings. They were not important for my colleagues. So this open-ended stance, I think, is a way that might help us to identify ways of working and to identify ways of doing research, which may be innovative and beyond the Western canons.

Another key principle of my methodological approach is what I would call activist research methodologies, which really based recognise negotiation, participation, interaction with the research participants as an epistemological position; which recognise that in order for us to be able to decolonise management knowledge, we need to open the voices and we need to engage with meanings, perspectives that are outside our frameworks. And these can only be done through research settings that leaves the space for the research participants in whatever forms, including resistance to the research process itself. And I will return on this point in a second.

The third point, which I think is really, really important, is in terms of how do we do our research – is that of a political engagement? As we were saying before, value and politics is part of the research. Any research project will serve specific interests. Are we aware of who is benefiting from our research? How are we aware of which interests our research is serving? There is not any level of neutrality or suprapolitical objectivity. All research [has] a political agenda. And, for me, decolonising management knowledge means also making this political agenda clear, making this political agenda and stance of the research process itself, and making it clear who I would like first and foremost to benefit from my research.