Bringing Postcolonial Women Writers to Executive Education Case of Women Managers' Program in India

Abstract

The term feminism is often treated as a stable and universalizing politics and practice. For postcolonial feminism, the issues of interest are not only social and cultural inequalities in terms of caste, class, color, ethnicity, gender, and religion, but also historical, political, and geographical inequalities in terms of “Third World”, “Global South” and “remnants of the colonial past”. Postcolonial feminism pays nuanced attention to historical diversity and local specificity of feminist issues. This book draws upon the work grounded specifically in the context of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to demonstrate the plurality of thinking.

In mainstream management and organization studies, context is often understood as a present, static field. This book discusses how context is an important consideration for any management and organization study and for feminist studies in management and organization studies. It informs the way we need to understand context not just as “present” but also as “past”. Postcolonial feminism highlights the historical roots and past privileges of a context that often gets overlooked in management and organization studies where context is mostly understood in the present.

This book highlights the contributions of women writers, poets, and activists such as Christina Stringer, Elena Samonova, Gayatri Spivak, Mary Douglas, Naila Kabeer, and Uzma Falak to postcolonial feminism in management and organization studies. Each of these women has engaged with writing that has the potential to enrich and transform understanding of postcolonial feminism in management and organization studies, making this book a valuable resource for researchers, academics, and advanced students.

Despite several women writers of South Asian origin writing on the postcolonial condition, management education, especially executive education, ignores the postcolonial. Even though a plethora of executive education programs target women managers in the contemporary diversity and inclusion era, these perpetuate a same-as-West and same-as-men paradigm. This chapter intervenes in this context by documenting the novel attempt by IIM Calcutta to introduce women managers to critical postcolonial thinking and women writers through a module on postcolonial woman in an executive education program for women managers. The participants resonated immensely with the program and requested for more accessible reading material articulating postcolonial women writers.