Organization: A Decolonial Interpretation

Abstract

ecolonizing management and organization studies scholarship still operates from within modern Western capitalist frame of what an organization means. As such meanings of organizational power relations, functional efficiencies and co-ordination are fully assigned to, and contained within logics of capital and eurocentric frame of organization. Decolonial discourses eschew these logics of capitalist organization through contraposing communitarian organizing with modern Western capitalist organization. This impedes the possibility of decolonizing organization through plural understandings of cognate ideas such as organizational power relations, functionalist co-ordination. This chapter through an analysis of a strategic planning workshop for NGOs (non government organization) and a communitarian NGO suggests another meaning for organization as community enmeshment. In community enmeshment, organization and individual are relationally co-constituted, individual and organization are not ontologically prior and distinct from each other. In this conceptualization, organization is not only communitarian, but also leads to other meanings for cognate ideas, in that its function not only preserves human dignity and freedom but simultaneously enables autonomy, agency and survival from uncertainties and shocks.