Decolonising management studies

Abstract

Business schools and universities across the world are being swept up by a diversified array of decolonising movements. Nimruji Jammulamadaka, Alex Faria, Gavin Jack, and Shaun Ruggunan explore the practice of decolonising in management and organisation scholarship, challenging the notion of decolonising as a theoretical project. They propose reclaiming decolonising as a radical praxis of ‘(un)doing academia’ that transforms us and the ways we understand and practice management, do research and how we produce and spread management knowledge. Business schools and universities across the world are being swept up by a diversified array of decolonising movements in response to the successful recolonisation championed by the neoliberal university since the 1970s. In theory, these movements aim to undo colonial structural, racial and epistemic violences we continue to experience everywhere. There was a brief lull following the political independence of colonies in a post-WWII era of decolonisation. But the five-century-long everyday struggle of the colonised has now connected with the freedom and rehumanising movements of the mid-twentieth century. Decolonising is resurging in the popular imagination, transforming not just society, business and politics, but also the neoliberal, capitalist academia. As Achille Mbembe, the noted de/anticolonial historian and thinker says, “decolonising is back on the agenda worldwide.” Whether you are a professional, school administrator, scholar, or student—and whatever your gender, race, ethnicity, or identity—you cannot afford to disengage from decolonising. Such decolonising is a multifaceted response to the everyday, internalised colonising of living.