Decolonizing Special Issue 2021

1020463
research-article2021
ORG0010.1177/13505084211020463OrganizationJammulamadaka et al.
Special Issue: Decolonising Management and Organisational Knowledge
Organization
Decolonising management
2021, Vol. 28(5) 717–740
© The Author(s) 2021
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and organisational knowledge sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13505084211020463
https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084211020463
(MOK): Praxistical theorising journals.sagepub.com/home/org
for potential worlds
Nimruji Jammulamadaka
IIM Calcutta, India
Alex Faria
FGV-EBAPE, Brazil
Gavin Jack
Monash University, Australia
Shaun Ruggunan
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Abstract
This special issue (SI) editorial contributes to ongoing efforts worldwide to decolonise
management and organisational knowledge (MOK). A robust pluriversal discussion on the how
and why of decolonisation is vital. Yet to date, most business and management schools are on the
periphery of debates about decolonising higher education, even as Business Schools in diverse
locations function as contested sites of neocolonialism and expansion of Western neoliberal
perspectives. This editorial and special issue is the outcome of a unique set of relationships and
processes that saw Organization host its first paper development workshop in Africa in 2019.
This editorial speaks to a radical ontological plurality that up-ends the classical division between
theory and praxis. It advocates praxistical theorising that moves beyond this binary and embraces
decolonising knowledge by moving into the realm of affect and embodied, other-oriented reflexive,
communicative praxis. It underscores the simultaneous, contested and unfinished decolonising-
recolonising doubleness of praxis and the potential of borderlands locations to work with these
dynamics. This special issue brings together a set of papers which advance different decolonising
Corresponding author:
Nimruji Jammulamadaka, IIM Calcutta, D H Road, Joka, Kolkata, WB 700104, India.
Email: nimruji@iimcal.ac.in
718 Organization 28(5)
projects and grapple with the nuances of what it means to ‘do’ decolonising in a diversity of
empirical and epistemic settings.
Keywords
Decolonising, knowledge, management education, praxis, postcolonial, souths
Introduction
This special issue (SI) aims to make a collective contribution to ongoing worldwide efforts to
decolonise management and organisational knowledge (MOK). While the SI adopts a purposefully
broad idea on forms of MOK covering theory, discourse, practice, and its asymmetrical structures
of production, distribution, consumption and appropriation, a more specific foil are the Eurocentric1
academic forms that dominate contemporary management research and education. Generally,
decolonial conversations set out to critique the ‘dominant Eurocentric academic model’ and to
‘imagine what an alternative to this model could look like’ (Mbembe, 2016: 36). Decolonial femi-
nists (Lugones, 2010; Mohanty, 2003) call for nothing less than the transformation of hetero-
patriarchal, colonial, racist, epistemic, affective, cognitive and economic structures of organisation
and power, and a non-expropriating revival of Indigenous knowledges and practices. The need for
a robust pluriversal discussion from diverse positions on the why and how of decolonisation is vital
for multiple knowledge systems to coexist. Yet to date, most business and management schools
remain on the periphery of debates about decolonising higher education, even as business schools
in diverse locations function as contested sites of neocolonialism and expansion of Western neolib-
eral perspectives.
As an ‘early champion of non-Western organization theory’ (Mir and Mir, 2013), Organization
has nourished critical scholarship about existing and new forms of coloniality, including in prior
special issues on postcolonialism (Jack et al., 2011) and Knowledge from the South (Alcadipani
et al., 2012). This special issue continues this journey. As a heterogeneous editorial team commit-
ted to understanding, advocating for and practicing decolonising and decoloniality in MOK, we
have brought together papers which, we believe, help advance different decolonising projects
across the world. Each paper grapples with nuanced complexities and contradictions of what it
means to do decolonising in diverse empirical and epistemic settings; diverse because one cannot
escape the ‘class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, racial hierarchies of modern/
colonial world’ (Grosfoguel, 2016: 3). Just as we seek to in this editorial, the papers demonstrate
the necessity and inescapability of relational reflexivity among scholars (Mignolo and Walsh,
2018) infused with respect, empathy and care towards others with whom we co-exist in border-
lands while pursuing decolonial praxis.
This SI is the outcome of a unique set of relationships and processes which led to Organization’s
first paper development workshop on decolonising management and organisational knowledge in
Africa (Durban, South Africa) in 2019. Despite the plethora of decolonisation events in South
African higher education, this paper development workshop was the first focused on business and
management. While we acknowledge the richness of the papers here, we also draw attention to the
doubleness of decolonial praxis that is, the opportunities, problematics and contradictions associ-
ated with the decolonising-recolonising dynamics of our/others’ decolonial endeavours such as this
SI. We also hope to convey some of the profound affective, intellectual and relational experiences
of decolonising praxis in MOK. Thereby we recognise decolonising as both the need for scholarly
work as well as work beyond the academic written text. Such parallel work is wide-ranging and
Jammulamadaka et al. 719
includes public intellectual work, affective work, capacity development work and critical mass
building work in diverse contexts.
The first part below approaches the decolonising of MOK through the prism of ‘colonial differ-
ence’ (Mignolo, 2012). This informs how we, and some of the papers in this volume, think about
decoloniality as a possible liberating option for all toward a pluriversal world in which many
worlds co-exist, colliding, sliding, coalescing with each other, ‘interconnected without becoming
commensurate’ (de Lima Costa, 2016: 53). In the next part, we consider why decolonising MOK
is a significant and timely necessity, relying and commenting on prior scholarly work. As a com-
mitment to relational reflexive praxis (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018), we then offer an account – a
necessarily partial one – of the production of the SI, and how far we feel we met our aspiration of
decolonial praxis in the doing of the issue itself along with the embodied struggles and insights we
gained enroute. Finally, we provide an overview of the six papers, and some important acknowl-
edgments and thank-yous.
Departing from colonial difference

Our point of departure is the notion of ‘colonial difference’ (Mignolo, 2012) put forward by deco-
lonial scholarship from Latin America and elsewhere to critique the management of difference
between the modern self and the racialised other. Colonial difference is vital for historicising,
understanding and re-appropriating decolonial thought and practice. It is central to the coterminous
operation of coloniality and/as modernity. Colonial difference enables the management of the
threat posed to the modern self by the other’s existence, and the multiple pluriversal possibilities
of otherwise she embodies and stands for. It is enacted through the discursive and material produc-
tion of her difference and through violence against her by virtue of such difference. Barbaranising,
criminalising, inferiorising, annihilating, discriminating, denying, disguising difference is the
managerial operation of colonial difference (Mignolo, 2012).
Such domestication of difference and its contested management has been the central theme of
Eurocentric colonisation in its multiple articulations worldwide at least since the “discovery” and
conquest of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492 (Dussel, 1995). While political colo-
nisation might have formally ended in many parts of the world after World War II, the internal and
external operations of managing colonial difference have not disappeared in the post-colonial era
of independent states. The West is not just in the geographic West anymore. It is everywhere in the
self-proclaimed centre and interiority of Europe, and the peripheries and exteriorities, Europe has
constituted through colonial difference. Today, around the planet, we live under arguably more
intensified operations of coloniality/modernity – economic, epistemic, political, military (Quijano,
2000). Decolonising and decoloniality is thus not a peculiarly Global South or Latin American
problem or worldview. It is about all of us, and all of us now!
This longue durée of coloniality/modernity is also the historical canvass for decolonial thought
and practice (De Sousa Santos, 2019). Decolonial thought and practice inspired by anticolonial
movements has operated concurrently with colonial difference (Maldonado-Torres, 2011) and
seeks alternatives to colonial difference. However, decolonising is not a term which is necessarily
used by those engaged in such struggles, such as Indigenous Peoples, landless farmers, workers
or those who may already propose, enact and embody alternative and/or disruptive practices of
their own for working with, not managing, difference. Despite such long histories (Bouka, 2020;
Césaire, 1955; Fanon, 1952/1967, 1961//1967; Young, 1991), and debates about decolonising
(Nandy, 1983; Wa Thiong’o, 1992), only recently have intellectuals referred to a decolonial turn
(Maldonado-Torres, 2011, 2016). Originating as a theoretical concern in area studies, cultural
studies and ethnic studies departments of the Western University, the phrase decolonial turn has
come into vogue from 2005 (Maldonado-Torres, 2011). Now, ‘the decolonizing project is back on
the agenda worldwide’ (Mbembe, 2016: 36).
The decolonial turn has come to signify an open-ended academic concept of diverse epistemic
and ontological criticisms and refusals of Eurocentric modernity and its capitalist, patriarchical
underpinnings. It expresses a principled and broader move with political, artistic, intellectual,
epistemic and other interventions against the totalitarian implications of a universal global design
championed by the white-European-masculine-heterosexual subject (Grosfoguel, 2011) and his
respective ‘cognitive empire’ (de Sousa Santos, 2018), including MOK. Decolonising is a hetero-
geneous notion and set of practices that keep resurging, insurging, in spite of contestations, at
multiple exteriorities and borders around the world (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). It is not a master
plan, nor is it a global design controlled by those who have a master key. It is ‘a diverse horizon
of liberation of colonial subjects, constructed by the colonial subjects themselves’ (Mignolo,
2018: xiv).
Such decolonising involves a praxistical epistemology2 of love, respect, life and caring for and
with, diverse locals in the world, that are ‘connected’ to each other through their knowledges, his-
tories, peoples and societies (Bhambra, 2014). We use the term praxistical to move beyond the
binary of theory-praxis, thinking-doing, such that all thinking is doing and all doing is thinking
(Anzaldúa, 2015; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Sandoval, 2000). As praxis, decolonising is a per-
petual work-in-progress that many have characterised as a contested and ‘unfinished project’
(Cusicanqui, 2020; Maldonado-Torres, 2011). It is also one in which ‘recolonising’ continuously
appropriates decolonising efforts (Bhambra et al., 2020).
Are business schools and management education embracing the

decolonial turn?
Even in a world ravaged by the COVID pandemic, business schools are carrying out neoliberal
business as usual – laying off staff, cutting down essential investments in pedagogical capacities,
chasing mythical rankings, marketising curricula, diversifying clientele, and increasing fees. This
is occurring even as fervent appeals for decolonising the university are appearing in the Global
North (e.g. London-based City University Business School’s organisation in 2020 of webinars on
decolonising the curriculum; the ongoing anti-racist work in the UK by Building the Anti-Racist
Classroom (BARC)) and Global South (decolonising university movements in Africa (Jansen,
2019; Ndofirepi and Gwaravanda, 2019), in Chile (Perez-Arrau et al., 2020), or via LAEMOS in
Latin America). Disciplines such as sociology, psychology, history and a range of other social sci-
ences and humanities are actively engaging in decolonial projects (e.g. in sociology, see Bhambra,
2014, and de Sousa Santos, 2018; in psychology, see Carolissen et al., 2017, and Fernández, 2018;
in history, see Subrahmanyam, 1997, 2005).
Yet a comparable energy and movement is missing from MOK disciplines and the predomi-
nantly Western(ised) business schools that produce it. Inevitably we have to ask: Is there something
about these schools that makes them not only privileged embodiments of coloniality but also par-
ticularly immune to decolonising engagements? Is it that Eurocentric MOK is viewed as an immu-
table truth that requires no historicising or politicising work, only conformity and complicity? Or
does it lie with the scholars working in management and business schools who are more invested
in maintaining the status quo of MOK, or who are arguably working within the colonial difference?
Or is it a reflection of the disciplinary silos, competition and complicity in which many academics
work? These silos are producing too few praxistical interactions with other social science theoreti-
cal developments and concerns. Is it a lack of awareness of decolonial literature, caused by
such silos, even if there is an intuitive feeling that something is amiss in the visible and hidden
curriculum and structures of business schools? Or, for those who have engaged with literature on
decolonisation, is its at times highly theoretical register off-putting?
One of us (Shaun) has remarked that feedback from a few workshops on decolonisation held in
South Africa has shown that many scholars find resonance to the ideas, but the language of deco-
lonial debates obtuse, alienating, fatiguing and counter-praxistical. This might be so, for example,
for a PhD student in, say, South Africa or India or Sri Lanka, who has a daily lived experience of
colonial difference and its multifaceted consequences, can articulate them all too well in everyday
thinking and doing, but fails when he/she is asked to do so in the theoretical and conceptual vocab-
ularies that govern and structure decolonial MOK debates and the Westernised university system
as a whole. These reflections preface and underscore the importance of answering two questions
from a praxistical perspective. Why is it important for us to push and broaden the decolonising
MOK project? And how far have we come along this journey?
Why decolonise MOK?

We call business school scholars to get to the forefront of decolonising conversations on the colo-
nial management of difference from a praxistical perspective rather than waiting for ideas and
practices to trickle down from other humanities and social science disciplines. Business schools
not only produce Eurocentric MOK but through a global management education system, train cur-
rent and future practitioners. Both this knowledge and its practitioners shape our lives all over the
place, even as the knowledge itself remains substantively isolated and ignorant of the many others
who are not only struggling with colonial difference but also coexisting alongside such Eurocentric
MOK. In this regard, we believe a praxistical approach to decolonising MOK is necessary for at
least three key inter-related reasons: the growth of business schools; the increasingly contested
nature of globalising Eurocentric MOK; the rise and consolidation of the neoliberal university.
Other reasons could, of course, be added.
First, notwithstanding its contribution to global life-destroying capitalist crises (Fotaki and
Prasad, 2015; Ghoshal, 2005), Eurocentric management remains a sought-after education and pro-
fession (Durand and Dameron, 2017; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002), with 69% of universities around the
world offering business degrees (Hawawini, 2016). Business schools have thus enjoyed ‘seem-
ingly limitless growth’, while other, especially humanities and social science university depart-
ments, are being shut down (Honig et al., 2017: 84). This may have made the business and
management scholarly community large and well resourced, yet insulated from the major struggles
lived by others and the alternate ways they live and manage. We believe that with such stature as a
business school scholar comes an increased co-responsibility for human well-being, something
that requires praxis beyond the boundaries of the formal curriculum and the classroom.
Secondly, Eurocentric MOK is the most strategic instance of epistemic coloniality in the last
200 years (Ibarra-Colado, 2006). The history and continuation of this epistemic coloniality is well
documented. Following World War II, the export of US management education, schools and devel-
opment models to the Rest of the World came with the goal to modernise and develop them/us.
This was to occur through the cultivation of a cadre of modern managers well trained in capitalist
extraction practices that would catalyse and assert Western dominance in response to and anticipa-
tion of Third and Fourth World counter-movements (Cooke and Alcadipani, 2015). Consequently,
a Northern global system of MOK hierarchy is in place (Jack, 2015; Prasad, 2015). This colonial-
ity, inspite of being called out in recipient locations, has been met with denial, co-optation and
appropriation-containment of materialities and practices (de Sousa Santos, 2018; Saldaña-Portillo,
2003) within the global management education system. All of this underscores the importance of
practical action and praxis to the colonising/decolonising project.
Thirdly, the neoliberal university’s (Canaan and Shumar, 2008) consolidation, characterised by
US-led academic capitalism and academic managerialism and in the pacifying guise of consumer-
ist quality assurance. Such consolidation combined with epistemic coloniality has ensured that
business schools previously exported to the Souths and even so-called locally relevant Indigenous
knowledges in the Souths, remain firmly tethered to US-led concerns and practices in a renewed,
albeit contested form of colonisation. Accreditation schemes like AACSB, or journal and business
school rankings (Vakkayil and Chatterjee, 2017) promote the devoted institutional pursuit of the
totalising version of Western management knowledge and publishing, reproducing coloniality/
modernity on a global scale. Our lived experiences tell us that many institutions of management
across regions in the Global South are running this unbridled rat race, further reproducing dynam-
ics of dependency and inequality within the global management education system (Murphy and
Zhu, 2012; Nkomo, 2015; Westwood et al., 2014). The effect of these recolonising dynamics is that
scholars are partially distracted from solidary praxis with co-existing others on locally relevant
issues: the aftermath of colonisation, racial discrimination, de- and reindustrialisation, post-politi-
cal independence rebuilding of socio-political-economic order (Bachetta et al., 2019; Boatca,
2015; Joy and Poonamallee, 2013; Kothiyal et al., 2018; Nkomo, 2011).
Decolonising MOK: Journeys to date

Against this context, the project of decolonising MOK has proceeded unevenly, heterogeneously
and within limits, chiefly under the expansive umbrella of predominantly Western critical theory-
driven critical management studies (CMS). Almost 25 years ago, in the second issue of Organization,
a brilliant critique building a case for decolonising knowledge, and decolonising critique in par-
ticular, was put forward by Radhakrishnan (1994) before the creation of the Anglo-American CMS
project. This piece talked of the neoliberal colonialist imperialism lived by southern academics
with diverse and praxistical criticalities in both Souths and Norths (see Prasad, 2015). Yet, as
recently as 2016, the The Routledge Companion To Reinventing Management Education lists
decolonising challenges as aspects to be dealt with in the future of management education. Was
2016 not the future for all those past struggles?
That said, MOK scholarship on decolonising seems to remain largely concerned with highlight-
ing the coloniality and Eurocentricity of MOK. This is important and ongoing work, for sure. Some
of these decolonising critiques rely on the particular umbrella of postcolonial theory and analysis
for inspiration and application. It is pertinent to note here that while postcoloniality and decolonial-
ity have ‘complementary trajectories with similar goals of social transformation’ (Mignolo, 2011:
xxvi), they are projects with different genealogies and possibilities3. The genesis of postcolonial
theory (specifically the Holy Trinity of Said, Bhabha, Spivak) in departments of comparative lit-
erature located in the Global North prioritised textual criticism and colonial discourse as objects of
inquiry. As such, postcolonial theory may be considered limited in furthering a more praxistical
decolonising agenda due to its Eurocentric theoretical language and limited action-orientation that
creates boundaries separating predominantly Westernised university scholars and co-existing ‘oth-
ers’ (Yousfi, 2021). Postcolonialism is sometimes also characterised by assumptions that critique
or critical MOS (as much as its mainstream foil) is universal, rather than reflective of a particular
location.
Decolonising work in MOK has also been practiced through attempts to write in other,
Indigenous philosophies (Connell, 2007; Naude, 2019; Panoho and Stablein, 2012) to move
beyond colonial-race-blind Eurocentric critiques (Nkomo, 2011). While valuable, such attempts
may miss the messiness of diverse racial and political contexts of business schools in post-
colonial locations which generate distinct decolonising challenges in the turn to Indigenous or
reflexive knowledges. For instance, the mainstreaming of a particular version of Hindu ideology
and practice in Indian socio-political and economic space (Mignolo, 2005; Nandy, 1983) and its
expansion to higher education institutions.
Decolonising is also advocated in MOK through individualistic reflexivity about the research-
er’s own positionality vis-à-vis the other. Often highlighted here are an individual’s racial and
metropolitan privileges and implication in a northern business school and the asymmetry of study-
ing peripheries and their inhabitants struggling against oppressive structures of colonisation and
expropriation. A non-extractive critical researcher subject position is advocated here, where one
does not seek to extract others’ knowledge and profit from it, but instead to represent and give it
voice (Girei, 2017; Love, 2018; Manning, 2018; Prasad, 2014). However, this perspective may
overlooks the messy recolonisation of business schools in the Souths, where colonial difference
creates dilemmas, tensions, ambivalences, challenges, resistances and backlashes for educators
and students alike even within the same societal, national context (Kothiyal et al., 2018; Siltaoja
et al., 2019). These are things which go beyond the individualistic reflexivity identified above.
Decolonial is also positioned as another theoretical tool for critical organisational analysis
and the internationalisation of critique beyond Western-centrism (Paludi et al., 2019). Such a
positioning, though, splits decolonising from its praxistical dimensions visible in broader decolo-
nial thinking (e.g., Lugones, 2010; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). Latin American management aca-
demics at the exteriorities have embraced decolonial praxis in their local languages, by reaffirming
the liberatory imagination of Latin American activist scholarship (e.g. Faria et al., 2010; Misoczky
et al., 2017) in contesting CMS’s critical theoretical orthodoxy (see Prasad et al., 2015). Yet, the
praxistical dimensions of decolonial are often omitted through framing decolonising MOK as a
theoretical approach. But praxis has not been completely ignored either! Increasing calls for
decolonising have been addressed through introduction of decolonial courses/programs in some
universities (one of the submissions we received also spoke of this). Perversely, such an approach
to managing (colonial) difference has found acceptance in the higher education market (Bhambra
et al., 2020).
The praxis dimensions of decolonising assume greater significance as key MOK institutions
undertake internationalisation efforts in the name of diversity. The Academy of Management, for
example, has undertaken initiatives to diversify its member base (currently 122 countries) and
conference participant profiles, and to set up conferences and affiliate organisations outside North
America. Arguably these developments represent a problematic ‘extension of diversity, inclusion
and representation politics’ (Nisancioglu, quoted by Bhambra et al., 2020: 3) in our discipline, a
form of managing difference hidden within the celebratory rhetoric. But does shifting location, or
changing demographics, shift mindsets? Does more demographic diversity necessarily represent
more epistemic diversity in the management academy?
These market-oriented, inclusion-speaking varieties of decentring knowledge from/at the centre
have generated their own dynamics of re-appropriation and sub-ordination, even alongside the
promise of decolonisation. Often, visitors to the centre, and diaspora, become either willing, or
inadvertent, spokespersons and conduits of packaging and marketing particular manners/practices/
beliefs/knowledges of home(s) (natal and/or adopted) in developing MOK expertise, theory or best
practice. The resulting circulation of ideas raises questions as to how far they enable the appropria-
tion of Indigenous knowledges, as well as a reverse diffusion of the modern universal. Critical
questions about the appropriation, dis-embedding, promotion and ploughing back of Indigenous
ideas/practices have been raised in the context of (South Africa’s) Ubuntu (Ruggunan, 2016),
or (India’s) yoga (Srinivas, 2012). Appropriations eventually produce discontent and backlashes
in the form of ‘who speaks for whom?’ and defensiveness implicating both the centre and the
peripheries in conflictual relationships and us versus them binary antagonisms. It can foster
discontent and failed attempts at working with differences, the protest about LAEMOS-EGOS
being one illustration.
More work is needed by researchers on key institutions such as AOM and EGOS as sites of
empirical investigation of colonising/decolonising praxis. Pending such investigation, and as a
way out of these antagonisms, we suggest that it would be more productive to imagine different
worlds from the standpoint of the borderland, rather than a centre or a periphery. It is only when we
stand on one side of this border, centre or periphery, that we sense these recolonising/decolonising
dynamics as antagonisms. Locating ourselves on the border allows us to apprehend these dynamics
for what they are, critique them and deploy them together productively for human well-being. This
means, considering AOM or EGOS as a borderland, Organization as a borderland, and manage-
ment scholars as borderland dwellers.
We take inspiration for this from Anzaldúa’s (1987) ‘la frontera’ or Borderlands. Decolonial
scholars such as Mignolo (2012) have fruitfully extended the idea of Borderlands to encompass a
decolonising praxis of border thinking-doing. Other and prior anti-racist and/or decolonial scholars
have identified this standpoint in their own ways, for instance as double consciousness (DuBois,
1903), mestiza consciousness (Anzaldúa, 2012), differential consciousness (Sandoval, 2000) or,
anticipatory consciousness (Cusicanqui, 2020). Whatever the name, such decolonial thinking-
doing is primarily a modality of praxistical consciousness otherwise (Faria, 2013). It is that cogni-
tive-affective location where the person, by virtue of being on the border of centre-periphery,
belongs to neither but has access to both those worldviews, and then critically engages with both,
drawing them together in myriad ways. Border thinking-doing differs from hybridity (Bhabha,
1994) in the sense that the actor is aware of the source of his/her thought/action, but they do not
seamlessly merge into a hybrid. Here the centre-periphery becomes a hyphenated continuity exist-
ing in the creative tension of the border, carrying both the pain of oppression and the hope of libera-
tion simultaneously. Such border thinking-doing exists as everyday praxis in Souths and Norths. It
emerges at the cracks of totalising modernity, posing critical, radical and insurgent challenges
against colonising oppressions everywhere.
Thinking-doing from borderlands as a praxistical epistemological approach put forward by the
colonised, and aiming at affirmation of life, that is, as a will to life, rather than a will to truth
(Mignolo, 2012), carries the moral, ethico-political force of the ‘excluded Other’ (Dussel, 2013).
This makes its decolonising effects particularly potent in most spheres of human activity, including
MOK. We believe that through this praxistical approach large inclusive bodies of management
scholars/practitioners such as business schools, journals, associations, may potentially transform
from being part of hegemonic universe of MOK into a pluriverse that belongs to everybody. The
production of this decolonising SI is intended as one illustration of this praxistical border thinking-
doing in the Organization borderland.
Contextualising this SI within (our) borderlands

It is with praxistical decolonial understanding and hope that this SI intervenes in management and
organisational scholarship. To this end, it is vital that we take a moment to share our own position-
alities and locations as SI co-editors. Nimruji is a native brown middle-class mother, Indian, edu-
cated and working in India. Belonging to a traditionally elite caste, she is cognisant of the
oppressions perpetrated in the name of caste. She lives a schizophrenic split, practising critical
traditionalism enjoying the privileges and responsibilities of being a teacher, even as she teaches
modern Western colonising management in an elite Indian school. Alex identifies his doubleness
as an afro mestizo raised in a low-middle class suburban Rio de Janeiro family. Alex has experi-
enced both discriminations and protections at houses of knowledge at home, where he works in an
elite business school, and abroad, where he got his PhD. His life enables him to believe that pluriv-
ersality has been oppressed but not defeated by universality: ‘caminante, no hay puentes, se hace
puentes al andar’ (Anzaldúa, 2015: 254). Gavin identifies as a Scottish, white male, carrying the
privilege, guilt and status of his whiteness, gender, first language (English), and academic position
in a research-intensive Australian (usually taken as part of the Global North, despite its location in
the southern hemisphere) university. He takes a keen interest in the possibilities for Scottish inde-
pendence and the resurgence of Celtic nations. Shaun is a fifth-generation South African, a descend-
ant of Indian indentured labour, who in the Apartheid racial hierarchy was considered more
privileged than Black African and mixed race South Africans, but less privileged than White South
Africans. As a descendent of KwaZulu-Natal’s sugarcane slave labour, teaching at the University
of KwaZulu-Natal he too holds multiple identities. We understand that such a detailed statement of
our positions is not the academic convention, yet we believe it is necessary for apprehending the
doubleness and borderlands we embody. We carry and signify both hopes and fears. We do not see
ourselves as either from the periphery or from the centre, North or the South, but as located on the
border with both privileges and lacks/sub-ordinations and thus in a position to effectively utilise
these. We are similar but differently located, carrying with us unique imprints of colonial subjuga-
tions and modernity’s privileges and have approached the decolonial project differently.
Decolonising language, similar to anti-racism language, is liberating and risky. For many, it
means anxiety, threat, chaos, violence, barbarism, even terror. As business school professionals, we
may risk our jobs or livelihoods for suggesting that organisations and academia reproduce racism/
colonialism (Dar et al., 2021). We as co-editors are aware in our being, that engaging with any
decolonising project comes with different vulnerabilities and is at the very least exhausting in
emotional terms. In doing this SI on decolonising, we have been particularly conscious of the dou-
bleness of our actions; that is, of their decolonising-recolonising dynamics. For example, this SI on
decolonising MOK, is being organised in a prestigious Northern journal, with academic English as
the language of writing and speaking. Channelling decolonial currents into prestigious Northern
journals may be viewed as managing and domesticating their radical potential (e.g. linguistically,
epistemically), thereby re-appropriating and re-colonising them in some way. Embracing and inter-
rogating this doubleness through relational reflexivity is needed. This ethos informs the remainder
of this essay.
Producing the special issue: A praxistical case

In this section, we present the doing of this SI as a mini-case study of decolonial praxis, and its joys
and complicities. We do so as an acknowledgement that a SI is not just a collection of papers but a
wider act of scholarly production, and as a commitment to our praxistical-theoretical perspective.
Our intention has been to subvert ongoing colonising endeavours by embracing tightly the practi-
cal/praxistical side of decolonising. The case covers four different aspects: first, the SI idea and
developing the call for papers (CFP); second, doing the special issue workshop; third, receiving
submissions and managing the review process; and fourth, broader editorial reflections around the
decolonising project.
The special issue idea and CFP

The idea for this SI had its genesis in the AOM conference of 2018. Three of us, Nimruji, Alex and
Gavin met regularly in the AOM conferences, served together in the AOM-CMS division execu-
tive. In spite of being only visitors to the AOM, AOM was our borderland. We realised that we had
several shared understandings in our decolonial sensibilities. Recent publishing and research in
MOK conferences and journals seemed to indicate that decolonial was emerging as a strong area.
Roughly 80% of decolonial MOS and 50% of postcolonial MOS was written between 2014 and
2019 (Jammulamadaka, 2020). It seemed like a right time for an SI. While we readily embraced the
idea of a SI, we were acutely aware that coloniality is experienced in diverse ways in diverse loca-
tions of the world and amongst the three of us, we were missing a very important set of experiences
– those from the continent of Africa. In any absence of a co-editor located in Africa, as outsiders,
we were wary of speaking for dynamics, including, if a co-editor were to be part of the diaspora.
Luckily, one of us had met Shaun at the AOM borderland at a previous meeting. We found a kin-
dred spirit and intellectual activist in him and our quartet set to work. The drafting of the call for
papers was not a top down setting of agenda rather it came about as a bottom up engaged conversa-
tion with our multiple embodied identities. We tried to accommodate diverse concerns in a mean-
ingful way. Shaun was particularly conscious of his own racialised and privileged identity (assigned
by Apartheid’s racial classification system) as an ‘Indian’ South African in speaking for and repre-
senting indigenous African interests and colleagues from South Africa. Alex was concerned about
the embodied geo-politicised academic dwelling in borderlands, Gavin about gendered aspects of
coloniality/decoloniality and Nimruji about bridging decolonial conversations from different parts
of the world. These conversations were further de-centered and enriched with the views of
Organization’s editors and editorial feedback. The very same intent for conversations was com-
municated in the CFP.
Doing the special issue workshop

Organization informed us there was some funding to organise a workshop linked to the CFP. We
made a conscious decision to do this in the Global South. As scholars working in the South, some
of us frequently experience access issues, in the form of funding, getting visas and so on to partici-
pate in events that happen in the metropolitan centre/West. We wanted to reduce this access prob-
lem by bringing the event closer to home, and to attempt to shift the geography of/for thinking. The
play between Norths-Souths – involved in Northern funding and legitimacy for a workshop held in
the South by scholars located in the South – was not lost on us and functioned as an interesting case
of border praxis. From the limited options we had, we agreed on Durban, at Shaun’s institution, the
University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). Perversely, or perhaps subversively, the preoccupation of
university managers there with performance metrics (one of which is decolonisation of the univer-
sity in the South African context) and internationalisation helped leverage a space for raising extra
funding. Senior managers were not so much concerned with the content or format of the collo-
quium but rather that it would represent a key performance indicator where international visibility
could be demonstrated. UKZN and Monash Business School (Gavin’s workplace) provided gener-
ous support along with the journal.
While Shaun was wary of the fetishisation of Africa as South Africa, and of decolonial fatigue
in South African higher education, it was nevertheless important that this workshop happened in
Africa. We realised that many of us scholars from South and West Asia, Latin America and Asia-
Pacific were visiting the AOM or EGOS borderlands and getting to know each other there. But
meeting African counterparts was rarer, so we needed to foster solidarities and dialogues with each
other. We were also conscious of the risk that we might get fewer submissions from the Northern
mainstay of the journal for our workshop since it was in the South. Yet in a decolonising way, it
was a risk we were willing to accept. Coming from multilingual regions, we were conscious too of
the language barrier English represented and we looked into the linguistic repertoire of our team
and opened up the workshop for multilingual submissions. We were also aware of funding con-
straints for travel in the South and therefore enabled online participation much before the dawn of
the COVID pandemic, to foster wider participation. While we did not have any submissions in
languages other than English, our aspirations and fears did come true. We had submissions from
Asia, Africa and one from Latin America/Brazil. Folks from India and elsewhere participated
online. But we did not get a single abstract for the workshop from the usual locations in the
centre.
The doing of the workshop was a lesson for us in decolonial praxis in borderland situations. It
underlined the need for continuity in engagement between theorising decolonial and doing decolo-
nial, where the struggles are most prominent. In different situations, we had to find ways to deal
with the complicity-subversion doubleness of our being. In spite of being from the South, three of
us were the privileged international and racialised outside experts at this workshop. This awareness
was important because for large pockets of the South African intelligentsia, the decolonial project
is seen as an indigenous African project. We worked with this dynamic by consciously inviting a
non-management scholar of African origin, and of South African nationality as our keynote
speaker. We were keen to give a local voice centre-stage and step back and engage with this voice.
While there was a structure to the two-day event (keynote and discussion panel; paper develop-
ment workshop for the special issue; PhD colloquium), we adopted a free-flowing approach. We
stuck carefully to the structure for the individual paper presentations which had to be co-ordinated
over time zones. For the rest, we abandoned the structure and let the flow take over. By spontane-
ously reducing the time of presentations of our expertise, instead choosing openness and vulnera-
bility in our approach, we participated in the co-creation of a common space of co-existence,
letting people speak without interruption, specifically encouraging students to talk openly. We
envisioned this as a space where parties could share their experiences and challenges, raise locally
relevant issues, and together we could foster solidarity in differences. We hoped for the possibility
of building alliances around shared issues, and combating perceptions of isolation or exceptional-
ism in our decolonial project(s). All through the course of the workshop, there was anger, pride,
frustration, pain, helplessness, hope, brother-sisterhood coming to the fore at various points of time
and making this workshop a memorable decolonial event in recent times in a decolonial-event-
fatigued South Africa! One participant’s comment captures the sense: ‘The most powerful thing for
me was the audience engagement and the dissolving of boundaries . . .. It was very affirming and
at times felt a bit like managing the trauma of ‘damage.’
Another echoed the decolonial implications of the workshop:
‘The fact of organising the colloquium at the . . ..school, and not having it in the Global North, was in itself
a symbolically and materially important act. Symbolically, it generated pride and excitement for the Dean,
DVC [Deputy Vice Chancellor] and academics and students at the university. Materially, it brought
resources to the institution, and established UKZN as an important site for present and future decolonial
work in our discipline’.
It also underscored an important question: How do we do decolonisation rather than turgid theori-
sations of it? Here, we realised that while many of our authors, Faculty and students, experienced
and embodied decolonial on an everyday basis, they reported being constrained in their doctoral
training, project design and academic writing by a positivist, empiricist, quantitative, English lan-
guage orthodoxy which their academic training valued and mandated under the auspices of the
colonial university. It was these experiences and conversations that occurred over the two-day SI
paper development workshop that were (based on systematic participant feedback and our own
reflection) extremely valuable for understanding what it means to do academic decolonial work. In
many ways, it was the first time for South African MOK scholars, especially younger and African
scholars to engage about their embodied experiences in management schools in South Africa.
Figure 1. A photograph of participants from the decolonising management and organisational knowledge
colloquium. Tuesday 5th November 2019, Durban.
Credit: Khumbulani Mnyeni, UKZN.
It is a sad testament to colonising/decolonising dynamics that in a SI on decolonising MOK

with a workshop in Durban where six papers were from Africa, none of those six was ultimately
submitted to the special issue. There were other submissions from/about Africa to the SI which
were not presented at the workshop, and one of those features in the final line-up. Notwithstanding
this, for many that attended the workshop, publication was perhaps not the endgame. Rather,
being part of a pluriversal community of reflexive scholars that connected over similar issues,
a solidary praxis was more rewarding. The workshop participants taught us, and each other,
most valuable lessons in the importance of decolonial praxis and affective engagement with
epistemologies of love, hope and solidarity for decolonising MOK beyond formal theory. We
therefore in acknowledgement of their authoring, practising and teaching of this decolonising
knowledge with a ‘will to life’, share a photograph of the workshop below (see Figure 1). We
also share the names and topics of the papers that were discussed at the Durban workshop so
that you might contact our colleagues directly if you would like to find out more about their
work (see Appendix 1).
Receiving submissions and managing the review process

Nowhere have the irony and pervasiveness of concurrent decolonising-recolonising dynamics been
more acutely observed, participated in, and felt, than in the subsequent doing of the special issue.
Despite consciously striving to decolonise by engaging with the excluded other through doing the
workshop in the exteriority of the MOK system, we ended up re-excluding as well as simultane-
ously re-appropriating through our final line-up of accepted papers. Such dynamics in this SI jour-
ney, that can be easily illustrated, and are important to our understanding of decolonial academic
praxis, are given below.
Initial submissions to the SI were encouraging and diverse. Some were first-time submitters
who felt solidarity and encouraged to submit after recognising the Southern-ness of the guest edi-
tors! (personal communications). Yet, perversely, the same Southern-ness produced wariness and
anxiety in others about whether their submission (from a Global Northern location) would fit the
call for papers (and indeed was explicitly articulated in a compelling auto-ethnographic account in
one submission). As editors, we struggled at times to find the most appropriate reviewers for the
submissions. Reviewers of journals such as Organization inevitably touch upon and may well
reproduce the colonising machinery. Owing to our/their (we implicate ourselves in this review
process, as we have served as reviewers over the years) status as subject experts, we/they journal
reviewers usually reside in privileged centres, mobilise critical knowledge and expertise ambiva-
lently, sometimes, at odds with decolonising initiatives, and often do not work in decolonising
universities or business schools. We/they are not just part of the decolonising-recolonising prob-
lem, but also embodiments of both complicity with Empire and its partial dismantling with its
tools.
This is a condition that decolonisers (including the majority who will not read Organization,
refuse to or cannot read English language, or even do not have access to the journal) around the
world live in. With this awareness, the parameters we chose to work with to identify reviewers
were: find respected scholars/critters; find someone from the location; find someone with subject
matter familiarity. In balancing these parameters, we invariably ended up having the bulk of our
reviewers from the larger CMS community of scholars from the interiority/centre, many of whom
have been well schooled in the production of critical academic writing in English. One doubleness
consequence of this, possibly owing to the vagaries of decolonial jargon-laden academic writing,
and/or Eurocentric theoretical training, was the tendency of submitters as well as reviewers, to
synonymise pluriversal with postmodern relativism. Both postmodern relativism and pluriverse
refer to multiple worlds/worldviews, which probably explains their conflation. However, unlike
postmodern relativism, pluriversal thinking embraces historical and geopolitical relations between
multiple worldviews. Innocent conflations disavow the constitutive role of such relations in colo-
nial difference, and serve to re-appropriate potentially transformative knowledges.
Sometimes reviewers would object, as indeed would we as editors at times, that authors/papers
had not covered sufficient prior work in, say, CMS as a broad umbrella on a topic, or not suffi-
ciently theorised the contributions or implications for CMS. We may have noted that research
design and methodologies were underdone, or that the academic writing needed further clarity and
proofing. In short, we – as a collective term for reviewers and editors – would sometimes reach into
the arsenal of Western academic orthodoxy/heterodox critique of methodology and theory.
Decolonial had at times to pass through this hoop, before it could be recognised as properly deco-
lonial in the context of this English-language SI! In short, despite encouragement, de-linking of
knowledge claims from the canons of the centre (critical or otherwise) was a privilege that could
not always be easily afforded to the author. The pervasiveness of coloniality is illustrated in the fact
that, not just authors even reviewers (ourselves included) from the Souths, who believed and advo-
cated decolonising, sometimes pointed to ‘poor writing’, ‘poor English’, and weak literature as
shortcomings in some aspects of some manuscripts.
The intractability of the colonial enterprise was also visible in the reference lists of the manu-
scripts we received. While all manuscripts engaged decolonisation, it is (perhaps not) remarkable
that most reference lists (we estimate) comprised articles or books written within the context of
Global Northern academia. Local place-based knowledges, thinkers, writers, journals and books
outside of the usual canon were harder to come by; though there are of course a few in our final
line-up. In some instances, this lacuna persisted, even after reviewers specifically pointed this out.
We do not wish to diminish the work of our reviewers or submitters at all; we merely wish to
draw attention to an operation of decolonising-recolonising in which we all – ourselves included
– are participating, and how praxistically challenging it is. We are extremely grateful to the care
and decolonial sensitivities of many reviewers, and we are extremely thankful to them. These indi-
viduals practised relational reflexivity and were cognisant of the doubleness of their task – their
implication in a colonising apparatus and the incessant striving for decolonising from within colo-
niality. In this relational reflexivity, they/we were at once being able to fathom the historical forces
at work and the individual’s subjective experience, and establish solidarity through care and respect
for the authors’ struggle to express themselves decolonially. They/we strove to provide comments
from and with the stand-point of the author(s) so that they may co-create a better manuscript and
contribute to wider learning and praxis.
How did we try to work with these variegated reviews? Our intent was to practise phronetic
judiciousness, moderating the reviews from a decolonial standpoint, with respect to the compre-
hensibility and internal consistency of the arguments presented, and last but not the least, to the
feasibility of a revision within the short time-frame available to the SI. Sometimes, we even intro-
duced authors to some useful nuances of using and doing decolonial language, to enable better
articulation. Sometimes we had conversations with authors and/or reviewers (both those accepted
and those which could not be) to better understand their point and facilitate its articulation and
clarification. We approached the process more as an ongoing dialogue of co-sojourners, and less as
a detached objective review of merit by experts.
Broader editorial reflections

Our experiences and learnings from various co-sojourners in the unfinished decolonial project that
this SI is a part of, prompt us to assert that this is how things have been happening in the concrete-
ness of everyday decolonising struggles for a 'better world' lived by a growing population. The
decolonial future is now; it has always been. It has been like this for over five centuries. Standing
for 'a better world' is a fraught and passionate venture of doubleness. Our experience has been that
praxistical theorising for decolonising MOK is materialised through a relational reflexivity, a con-
cern rooted in care, empathy and respect for each other. Praxistical theorising is beyond doing
decolonial theoretical analysis. It is embracing tightly the messiness of real-world decolonising-
recolonising dynamics with the ethical courage and practical wisdom to stand for decolonising.
Such praxis requires one to engage deeply with one's own location, actions and implication in
colonisation-decolonisation dynamics in the myriad roles we play as academics: teachers, students,
colleagues, reviewers, authors, researchers, editors, theorising, analysing, conferencing, etc. We
need to consciously ask ourselves about the consequences of our actions and whether there is
something we can do differently even when tradition and convention might be privileging quality,
merit, best practices, professionalism and other similar things in producing knowledge and praxis.
In addition to these passionate assertions, with humility and respect, we offer some insights that
can help us work with rather than manage (read domesticate) difference and put forth further ques-
tions for conversations. These might serve us going forward in our decolonising journey:
a. Similar to the way in which postcolonialism and postmodernity are sometimes framed in
Eurocentric discourse as a moment ‘after’, decoloniality has often been framed as the fu-
ture when coloniality ends. We have learnt here, and in struggles elsewhere, that this de-
colonial language is a problem. For many, the idea of coloniality is deadly offensive and
decoloniality means barbarian threat, and even terror. The virtual impossibility of such
a future has become part of our lives. We do not live in a present of coloniality evolving
perhaps toward a decolonial future; rather we have been living decolonising-colonising
dynamics since 1492. Decolonising-recolonising dynamics are constitutive of the ma-
trix of coloniality that we live, but fail to conceptualise because our theories describe
colonising as unequivocally contrary to decolonising (critique contrary to mainstream,
local contrary to global, us against them). Privileged decolonial academics and practitio-
ners inevitably reproduce extractive-expropriation mechanisms when engaging racialised
others who struggle everyday, with the darker side of colonial difference by using dif-
ferent ways of knowing, and living otherwise. The co-construction of MOK ‘otherwise’
from within dominating institutions demands theories-practices which problematize the
longue durée of everyday decolonising-colonising dynamics lived by practitioners and
academics in general.
b. In our call for papers we inscribed ‘decolonising MOK’, at least in part, as a localised
representation of an emerging ‘goodness’ for/from a 'globalising' MOK. In doing so,
we implicitly equated decolonial knowledge with local knowledge through a binarising
boundary-placing between local-global. During the course of this SI journey, we have
come to recognise and be reminded that decolonising knowledge is not simply a matter of
‘reaching for’ or ‘writing in’ the local. It does not mean recognising and labelling a ‘local
knowledge’ and concurrently, limiting the usefulness, belongingness, and relevance of
such knowledge to a local geography. The questions we grappled with were these. Does
decolonising knowledge have to be necessarily meaningful only for the local context
in which it is developed in contrast to ‘the universal/global’? Can such decolonising
knowledge, also embodying local dynamics of capitalist expropriation, not have util-
ity elsewhere in a pluriversal world, beyond universality? If we only valorise local rel-
evance, are we not falling again into a binary trap created by the dynamics of universalist
appropriation? What we realised is the need for a massive and ‘unfinished’ decolonial
turn to enable the university and its embodied constituents like us and you the reader,
to de-link from global-local, universal-pluriversal binaries. We need to recognise and
enable re-appropriations of interconnections and cross-relevances from knowledges in/
from diverse locales in multifarious ways while being rooted in respectful dialogue and
co-existence (Turnbull, 1997).
c. Inspite of listing the limitations of postcolonial approaches vis-à-vis decolonising ear-
lier, we believe focusing on limitations alone is politically detrimental especially from
the standpoint of establishing solidarities for pluriversal worlds. To us, this seems like
in-fighting within families, while an increasingly ‘diverse’ Eurocentrism and Northern
global system of MOK (Prasad, 2015) silently gains strength and devastating traction.
That said, it would be inappropriate to view postcolonial and decolonial theories as just
either-or choices, or to consider decolonial as the logical and more refined progression of
postcolonial. Their relation is more productively described, we propose, as a hyphenated
and conjugated one – ‘post- and decolonial’. We offer it so that MOK scholars doing such
work, might move along, in between and across these spaces with a practical wisdom
(Jammulamadaka, 2017). Mestizas have been doing just this since before the ‘invention’
of the university.
d. Scholars advocate attention to language and decolonisation of concepts and/or vocabu-
lary (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) through possible catachrestic reading (Spivak, 2000)
to reclaim silenced knowledges. This editorial has also underscored the problematic of
language. Yet, decolonising concepts too, like much decolonial work, are fraught with
doubleness. Indeed doubleness is a term we have struggled with in this editorial and SI
as we have experienced and invoked it several times and with different connotations. Yet
can we clarify different meanings of this word within manuscript word limits? How do
we do this while ensuring that our writings do not become towers of Babel and/or repro-
ducers of the management of difference design? More significantly, when does clarifying
and defining concepts/restricting meaning stop being better writing and start becoming
a silencing device concealing the colonial reign of theory over praxis, while estranging
ourselves from our reader(s)? How can one include me/you, the excluded reader, as co-
creators of meaning along with the author(s) in a hermeneutic process in the publishing
borderlands, to turn ambivalences into something else resurging at margins of the uni-
versity/academic system with a new mestiza consciousness? Such a consciousness is ‘a
source of intense pain [from which] energy comes from continual creative motion that
keeps braking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm’ (Anzaldúa, 2012: 80), and
also breaks down ‘the subject-object duality that imprisons her’ (p. 80) in unambiguous
decolonial positions against epistemic colonisation. Further, how do these questions af-
fect the choices we make as authors, reviewers and editors in our manuscript writing/
reviewing processes? What changes do we need to bring into these writing and editorial
processes?
e. Finally, we have come to realise that the theme ‘Decolonising Management and Organ-
isational Knowledge’ is a kind of oxymoron. The very idea that knowledge could exist
as a free-floating entity within racialised capitalism is a colonial artefact that potentiates,
conceals and enables violence. We have been able to reaffirm that not only does knowl-
edge exist in embodiments, it is also produced in the intersubjective, communicative,
reflexive praxis of such embodiments. The producer and the process of production is
as important as the produced artefact. Thus, for decolonising, we need to recognise this
wholeness, to transcend beyond the producer-produced binary in both ‘epistemic’ and
‘ontological’ terms. The epistemic and psychological violence of the colonial project is
such that the decolonising work we/us do is not just about theorising local knowledge.
It is also about recognising the pain, grief and wounds of the colonial project in its ma-
terialities, and struggles for an otherwise. It is about mitigating, undoing, and healing
the violence of the colonial and apartheid projects on gendered and racialised bodies.
This moves the locus of decolonial work ‘into’ the body and into the realm of affect
(Fanon, 1952/1967, 1961/1967). Decolonisation is therefore not only about decolonising
‘the mind’, or knowledge systems and knowledge production practices. It is also about
liberating the embodied, affective nature of such decolonial praxis and activating the
intersubjective process of knowing and doing things with a double/mestiza/oppositional
consciousness. This is a radical ontological plurality that up-ends the classical division
between theory and praxis.4
The articles in this SI further decolonising conversations by not only pushing the boundaries of
decolonial work in MOK, but also through their significant methodological and conceptual impli-
cations. They are also narratives of struggles, survivals and hope of both the researcher and the
researched. Turning to these articles, the special issue leads with Mohnot, Pratap and Saha’s rich
study on the practices of unlimited liability Marwari businesses in a Western Indian textiles and
trading town ‘Liba’ (pseudonym). Entitled ‘Governance of Marwari Capital: Daily Living as a
Decolonial ‘Matrix-of-Praxis’ Intermeshing Commercial, Religious and Familial Spheres’, the
authors draw on analyses of fieldwork visits, (colonial) historical legal documents on corporate
forms in India, and interpret them reflexively and with reference to Mignolo’s notion of ‘colonial-
matrix-of-power’. The subaltern Marwari world of Bazaar-based textile production system is a
‘way of life’, not just a business. It is one that thrives and survives despite its oft colonial depiction
as backward, inferior and requiring modernisation/capitalisation. In asking why this form of unlim-
ited liability entrepreneurship has enjoyed continued success despite such portrayals, the authors
demonstrate how the intermeshing of commercial, religious and family systems, beliefs and prac-
tices enabled them to engage and flourish inspite of the colonial difference. Marwaripan is an
example of ‘an-other way of commerce’, illustrating a different and decolonial logic and praxis at
the exteriority of limited liability corporate forms.
Our second article by Ainsworth and Pertiwi, ‘From 'Sick Nation' to 'Superpower': Anti-
corruption Knowledge and Discourse and the Construction of Indonesian National Identity (1997-
2019)’ shows that predominantly Westernised MOK influences the construction of national identity
in former colonies. The article investigates how anti-corruptionism has been universalised as a
Cold War conditionality of national identity for a recolonising post-war design of organisation and
management of/in the Third World. Weaving a decolonial perspective with Northern critical dis-
course theory, this article advances the view that decolonising MOK from the South requires a
move beyond a contemporary Northern decolonial focus on organisations, business schools and
inter-state capitalist systems. Instead, it shifts attention to other systems and sub-systems where the
situated colonial matrix of power operates and liberating movements for an ‘otherwise’ take place.
Finally, it also shows the importance of further decolonising the fields and industries of interna-
tional development, critical development studies, international relations, development manage-
ment and (international) political economy. Such fields keep creating and mobilising broader
colonial dynamics through managerialist discourses of ‘good governance’ sponsored by neoliberal
institutions.
The third article by Toivonen and Seremani entitled ‘The Enemy Within: The Legitimating Role
of Local Managerial Elites in the Global Managerial Colonization of the Global South’ explores a
rather under-investigated issue: the legitimating role played by indigenous managerial elites in the
global managerial colonisation of the Global South. It focuses on the city council of Yaoundé, in
Cameroon, an independent state subjected to German, French and British colonialisms and renewed
and contested internal colonialism. The article sets a dialogue between post- and decolonial tradi-
tions beyond the North-South binary to suggest from a Southern perspective that contemporaneous
radicalisation of managerial colonialism on a global scale needs decolonising MOK. The colonial
matrix of power is not construed locally as a direct result of the imposition of conditions from a
distant Global North; rather it is mediated by members of a heterogeneous local elite who actively
promote the selective import of ‘colonising disguised as modern’ knowledge from the North to the
country. At the same time, the authors illustrate counter-revolutionary hybridist mechanisms for
managerial colonialism with support of powerful Northern institutions of international
development.
The papers of Ainsworth and Pertiwi, and Toivonen and Seremani, read together, suggest that
‘local’ dynamics embody a complex capitalist system (without boundaries) in transition. They
provide further academic support for moving beyond the idea of the managed organisation as privi-
leged locus of transformations and the co-creation of a broader decolonising MOK agenda, from
multiple and interconnected Souths for a pluriversalist otherwise. They unmask the possibility that
the project of decolonising MOK and business schools, led from the North, might enable local/
transnational elites to learn from an emerging system of partially decolonised business schools
about fostering more effective hybrid narratives for the expansion of managerial colonialism in
both South and North.
The fourth article by Irigaray, Celano, Fontoura and Maher – ‘Resisting by Re-existing in the
Workplace: A Decolonial Perspective through the Brazilian Adage ‘For the English to See’- offers
a window into how Brazilian executives from a variety of organisations encapsulate their resist-
ance to colonial dynamics and interactions using this common idiom. Analysing how the partici-
pants explain the meaning and use of ‘For the English to See’ in business settings, the authors
identify a set of subjectivation strategies on a range of embodiment to concealment of coloniality.
These various strategies illustrate distinct forms of hybridisation and border thinking-doing by
these savvy executives, forms which the authors collectively refer to as ‘resistance by re-exist-
ence’. The papers of Irigaray and colleagues, and Mohnot and colleagues, share an empirical con-
cern with local practices, and praxis of decolonial living and resistance. Despite their distinct
contexts and histories, and for sure the socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds of the research
participants, they give rich insights into living colonial difference, and surviving and thwarting its
operations.
The fifth article by Yousfi ‘Decolonizing Arab Organizational Knowledge: ‘Fahlawa’ as a
Research Practice’ is a deeply reflective study that unpacks what it means to occupy certain posi-
tionalities and identities as an organisational scholar, and its implications for how management and
organisational knowledge is produced. More specifically, when occupying simultaneously contra-
dicting and competing identities as a scholar ‘from an Arab country with a Francophone intellec-
tual mindset’ who is trying to produce knowledge ‘based on subjugated perspectives for and about
the countries studied’. The account given is both a personal and methodological reflection.
Methodologically the Arabic term ‘Fahlawa’ is offered as a way of engaging in research practice in
these contexts. It is more than just a research strategy, but a practice that becomes embodied in the
researcher as part of her continuing journey in performing and doing MOK. Fahlawa is ‘messy’,
ambiguous and incomplete and reveals the nature and experience of embodied border-thinking.
The special issue concludes with the paper by Scobie, Lee and Smyth ‘Braiding Together
Student and Supervisor Aspirations in a Struggle to Decolonize’ and it echoes the personal and
relational ethos of Yousfi’s work. It explores how the supervisor-supervisee doctoral relationship,
located within a UK university and cultural context, unfolded in the doing of decolonising manage-
ment and organisational knowledge. It draws on the Māori braided rivers metaphor to articulate
and recognise a plurality of knowledge streams as well as relational, epistemological and bureau-
cratic issues for supervisors from the Global North supervising a doctoral student from Aotearoa/
New Zealand, identifying as Indigenous. The inherently power-laden relationship is compounded
by coloniser-colonised dynamics, also experienced by the supervisee as he undertook local field-
work in Māori community settings. This paper, whilst speaking to a specific set of relationships,
poses broader questions about decolonising the MOK curriculum and the complicity and roles of
universities in maintaining power imbalances. The papers by Yousfi, and Scobie and colleagues,
Lee and Smyth in this volume, read together, make us ponder upon the complex relationship that
links ‘the border’ and ‘oppressed bodies’ when producing decolonising MOK. They also under-
score the importance of messiness, empathetic relationality, and situated other-oriented reflexivity
in the process.
We conclude this special issue editorial essay with important acknowledgments, and a series of
thank-yous. First, we wish to gratefully acknowledge the material support and encouragement of
UKZN, Monash Business School and Organization in funding our successful SI workshop in
Durban. In particular, we thank Professor Stephen Mutula, Dean of UKZN Business School, and
Professor Brian McArthur, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, UKZN, for funding, for speaking at, and
attending the workshop. Nuria Cadete is currently doing her PhD at UKZN and led the practical
organisation of the workshop, whilst also contributing and participating in it. Thank you Nuria! To
our wonderful keynote Professor William Mpofu, we say thank you for your inspiration and soli-
darity. And to Professor Stella Nkomo, your constant intellectual companionship and sage advice
at the workshop, and for the special issue and the decolonising agenda more broadly meant the
world to us. We would like to express our condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of
Professor Kriben Pillay, who sadly passed away recently. Professor Pillay was one of our keynote
panelists, and an outstanding scholar and educationalist. We thank all the participants at the work-
shop, especially the PhD students from UKZN and elsewhere, and for those who travelled to
Durban to take part. We have received unstinting support and encouragement from the editors and
editorial board of Organization, especially Raza Mir, Patrizia Zanoni and also from Nusi
Cornelissens, the journal’s amazing manager. We are thankful to you all. And finally, we wish to
acknowledge our mutual respect and work with each other as co-special-issue editors over the last
few years.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iDs
Nimruji Jammulamadaka https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5488-1638
Shaun Ruggunan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9585-8939
Notes
1. A few words about our use of some key terms. We follow Mufti’s (2005) definition of Eurocentrism as a
knowledge structure and cultural imaginary that normalises the idea of Europe as the ‘birthplace of the
modern’ and ‘the theoretical subject of all historical knowledge’. According to Mufti, Eurocentrism is
‘Western in an encompassing sense, underwriting narratives of American universalism as well as those
of a uniquely European polity and culture in the geographically specific sense’ (p. 474). We ourselves
deploy problematised binaries of West/non-West, (Global) North/(Global) South, and plural Norths and
plural Souths through the editorial. We recognise that we are risking reproducing the very binaristic
thinking that we seek to avoid or at least problematise, the only justification we have is that we are invok-
ing these as ‘strategic essentialisms’ for ethicopolitcal reasons following Spivak (1988: 13). Our plural
Norths/Souths recognises the heterogeneity of the geopolitical referents Global North and Global South.
2. We are acutely aware of the inappropriateness of this term, but are limited by the way English approaches
such aspects. The term is inappropriate because the notion of epistemology is based in Western philoso-
phy and other ways of thinking-knowing do not necessarily subscribe to the distinctions such as episte-
mology and ontology found in Western philosophy. We however use it here given the academic writing
conventions.
3. Several reviews of postcolonial theory and MOK already exist (see, for example, Jack et al., 2011;
Prasad, 2003).
4. Thanks to the editor Raza Mir for this pithy wording!
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Author biographies
Nimruji Jammulamadaka is a professor in the Organization Behaviour Group at IIM Calcutta, India. Her
research interests include organisation design, corporate social responsibility, qualitative research methods,
theories of power, critical and postcolonial management studies, non-profit and social sector.
Alexandre Faria is an associate professor of Organization Studies and Strategy in the Brazilian School of
Public and Business Administration at Getulio Vargas Foundation (EBAPE-FGV). His current research inter-
ests include development administration/management, diversity management, corporate social responsibility,
management and organisations in emerging societies, critical/decolonial management learning, critical and
post/decolonial management studies.
Gavin Jack is professor of Management in the Department of Management, Monash Business School, Monash
University, Australia. His current research interests include gender and diversity in the workplace, postcolo-
nial organisational analysis, and farming and critical development studies in the contexts of India and the
Philippines.
Shaun Ruggunan is an associate professor of Human Resources Management at the University of KwaZulu-
Natal, Durban, South Africa. Shaun has published on the transformation of global labour markets under
neoliberalism.
Appendix 1
Decolonising management and organisational knowledge colloquium. Tuesday 5th November 2019, Durban.
Paper titles Authors

Transformation of management and Yashoda Bandara (Rajarata University of Sri
organizational knowledge in a decolonized Lanka), Kumudinei Dissanayake (University
context: A study of public administration and its of Colombo, Sri Lanka) & Arosha Adhikaram
values in Sri Lanka (University of Colombo, Sri Lanka)
Locating workers in decolonizing South African Nomkhosi Xulu-Gama (Chris Hani Institute,
management practice South Africa) & Samukele Hadebe (Chris Hani
Institute, South Africa)
Disrupting the Western Eurocentric canon: In Devika Pillay (University of KwaZulu-Natal,
search of a sustainability marketing curriculum South Africa) & Suriamurthee Maistry (University
of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa)
Decolonizing corporate governance through Jitesh Mohnot (IIM Tiruchirappalli, India) &
re-existence: Share-of-God and ever-evolving Sankalp Pratap (IIM Tiruchirappalli, India)
indigenous mechanisms through praxis of living
An investigation into the perceptions of Chimene Nkouamou Tankou epse Nukunah
postgraduate management students and academic (University of South Africa)
regarding the application of critical pedagogy in
management teaching context: A South African
perspective
Introducing Multiple Perspectives: decolonising Abdullah Bayat (University of the Western Cape,
the hegemonic perspective in teaching supply South Africa),
chain management
Understanding the colonial roots of Indian Abhoy K. Ojha (IIM Bangalore, India) & Ramya
management thought: An agenda to de-colonize Venkateswaran (IIM Calcutta, India)
the ‘Indian’ mind and theorise for India
The Embedded Recolonisation in Postcolonial Arpita Mathur (National Institute of
Thought Construction Management and Research, India)
and Chandraketan Sahu (IIM Calcutta, India)
The integrating of indigenous knowledge into Chris Ndlovu (Lupane State University,
the Agricultural College curriculum: A means of Zimbabwe) & Angela James (University of
knowledge production and management KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa)
Who needs global diversity management? Alex Faria (FGV-EBAPE, Brazil)

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Special Issue: Decolonising Management and Organisational Knowledge

for potential worlds

Departing from colonial difference

Are business schools and management education embracing the

Why decolonise MOK?

Decolonising MOK: Journeys to date

Contextualising this SI within (our) borderlands

Producing the special issue: A praxistical case

The special issue idea and CFP

Doing the special issue workshop

It is a sad testament to colonising/decolonising dynamics that in a SI on decolonising MOK

Receiving submissions and managing the review process

Broader editorial reflections

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