Hi all, Happy New Year!
With apologies for cross-posting.
A gentle reminder for our call for contributions for stream 8 at the ICMS Conference in Manchester on 18th-20th June 2025 below and here: Thinking and Theorizing with the Global South(s): Alternative frameworks for work, management and organizational knowledge production
The deadline for submissions is 31st January
Thinking and Theorizing with the Global South(s): Alternative frameworks for work, management and organizational knowledge production
Jennifer Manning, Maynooth University, Ireland, jennifer.manning@mu.ie
Muneeb Ul Lateef Banday, Goa Institute of Management, India, and University of Bern, Switzerland, muneeb.banday@unibe.ch
Anukriti Dixit, University of Bern, Switzerland, anukriti.dixit@unibe.ch
Call for Papers
This stream invites conceptual and empirical submissions that offer insight into work, management and organisation (WMO) from a Global South perspective, as well as submissions engaging with theorists, theories and ideas emerging from within the Global South(s). Ways of doing, being and working in the Global South have largely been ignored in management research and knowledge production. Academic centres are located in the West / Global North; this is where the terms and categories of academic discourse and debate are determined which sees that WMO studies is dominated by theories and ideas that are implicitly male/masculine, white/western and bourgeois/managerial (Alcadipani et al. 2012; Barros and Alcadipani 2022; Girei, 2017; Ibarra-Colado 2006; 2008; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Manning, 2021; Mir and Mir, 2012; UI-Haq and Westwood, 2012). This creates immense challenges for management researchers and academics from different parts of the world to think, analyse and theorise without relying on Global North epistemologies. This perpetuates the coloniality of power and knowledge (Quijano, 2000; 2007) and creates difficult, nearly impossible, challenges for Global South scholars to publish their work without translating it into Global North theories. Indeed, the top 'international' journals only consider knowledge produced in the English language and often the editors and reviewers of these journals do not have much exposure to knowledges outside of the Global North. This results in academics from/in the Global South translating their work into Western theories or adopting Western epistemologies to the point that they see little value in their own WMO traditions, ignoring or reshaping them to become palatable to the Global North academy. This is not to say that Global South scholars are not aware of this coloniality of knowledge. As noted by Ibarra-Colado (2006: 471), "to belong in 'the international community', you must speak the Centre's language, use its concepts, discuss its agendas and perform to the stereotype of the 'imperfect South' while keeping 'a polite silence' on the real causes of your problems".
In saying this, we do not argue that theories/theorists should be limited to their geopolitical location. For instance, the theory of power advanced by Michele Foucault, sexual contract theory by Carol Patemann, theories of subjectivation and performativity by Judith Butler, theories of cultural capital by Pierre Bourdieu, hegemony and subalternity by Antonio Gramsci have all been widely invoked and studied among a host of important post- and de- colonial canonical works of Gayatri Spviak, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Annibal Quijano, Rita Segato, Maria Lugones to mention a few examples. Many others have followed these bodies of knowledge, including from within critical management studies.
In this stream, we wish to create a regenerative space for critical management scholars to go beyond 'the canon' in the discipline, by seeking connections, interweaving theories of power, gender, capital and knowledge together with theories of the self (such as the ones in Buddhist philosophy and Vedanta philosophy), power, relational dynamics (that may resemble gendered power – for example in the ideas of Motherism, Stiwanism, queens and writers from the Indian, Chinese and African subcontinents), knowledge (such as in Confucianism or Daoism) about and with society (such as that found in Sufism) originating in the Global South. We let the stories of –feminist educator-leader Savitribai Phule, feminist writer Mahashweta Devi, existential poetess Lal Ded, feminist pirates and sea-conquerors Grace O'Malley and Zheng Yi Sao, Black feminist collective Women With A Vision – inspire us to highlight both lives and knowledges produced in the Global South(s). This panel invites researchers and academics to think with the Global South(s). This could include, but in no means be limited to, the ideas or people outlined here, or the theories/theorists of decoloniality (Ibarra-Colado, 2006), decolonial feminism (Lugones, 2010; Manning, 2021), Daoism (Liu, 2017), anti-caste thought, such as Ambedkar's work (Kumar et al., 2022), indigenous management (Peredo, 2023), indigenous ontological understandings of gender (Oyěwùmí, 1997), sex-gender theorisations within caste (Paik, 2022) as well as colonialism (Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2019), anti-capitalist ways of living and working, such as Buen Vivir (Lang, 2022), or research practices such as Fahlawa (Yousfi, 2021). We are especially interested in the implications of these theories, theorists, ideas, epistemologies for WMO studies. We also recognize that thinkers from the Global South have historically relied on poetry, storytelling, music, oral histories, and other as a mode of expression for complex theorisations of indigenous worldviews (Bila & Abodunrin, 2020; Mir, 2014; Shahid, 2013). We therefore welcome submissions that break the boundaries of traditional academic papers.
The Global North and South are heterogenous and complex categories – always already enmeshed with each other – through (pre) and (post) colonial exchanges. The cultures and knowledges produced in either, have always already fused and formed 'mutationally intersectional' (Abdellatif, 2021) subjects – in all of us to varying degrees. We socially reproduce and resignify lives, knowledges, cultures and subject positions which are inseparable fusions of these 'North-South' divisions. In this sense, we recognize the importance of geopolitical location of the theorists in the politics of knowledge production as argued by decolonial theorists (Segato & McGlazer, 2022). It is an important theoretical and political project to create new languages and narratives to understand our worlds and pluriversalize our ways of knowing and being beyond the language, epistemologies, worldviews and frameworks offered by the Global North (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Walsh, 2022). As Patel (2022) argues decolonization does not only entail challenging colonial world order but also centring 'indigenous conceptions of land, lives, and their futurities'. This stream recognises that the cornerstone of the regeneration of CMS is in the centering of the Global Souths as places of producing knowledges to build alternative worlds. The submissions to this stream can be in conversation with Western theory/theorists, solely based on indigenous epistemologies and worldviews, and come from scholars across Global South and North academia. The regeneration of CMS is not a move towards anti-western essentialism but calls for an epistemic shift that brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other worldviews, other ways of working and organising that challenge the dichotomisation of management studies and knowledge into a fixed duality of core-periphery positioning.
Submission Details
This stream will take place in-person onsite in Manchester Metropolitan University, between June 18th-20th, 2025. To support inclusivity, we are open to facilitating a hybrid stream. The nature and number of remote discussants will depend on the proposals received and facilities offered by the host institution. Regardless of onsite or online participation, we will work towards creating an environment that fosters active engagement and connects participants through ideas and rich discussion.
Please submit an extended abstract of up to 1,000 words to all three convenors via the emails provided in this call by Thursday 30th January 2025, 23.59 GMT. If you wish to submit to this stream using means outside of a traditional academic format, please contact the convenors in advance and we can discuss alternative arrangements for submission.
The convenors will let you know by the end of February 2025, via email reply, whether your extended abstract is accepted. If accepted, it is not necessary to have a full paper submitted to the stream convenors prior to the conference, although stream participants will be expected to present their work in full by June 2025.
If you have any queries please contact Jen, Muneeb, and Anukriti, and we'd happily discuss this stream in further detail with you.
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Jennifer Manning
Not Associated
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