Decolonizing journals in management and organizations? Epistemological colonial encounters and the double translation

Abstract

Increasingly, academics worldwide need publishing in international journals. Various events and articles aim at teaching others how to write, and they spread ideas and skills to help newcomers. However, we tend to neglect the specificities of periphery-based academics, engaging with “international” journals. Drawing from our experience as academics from Brazil, we argue that publishing in top-academic journals in management and organization studies demands more than knowing a language and goes beyond style. Periphery-based academics willing to publish in “international” journals engage in a colonial encounter. They need to develop their ability to perform a double-translation, writing ideas in another language and for another audience. Besides, they need to deal with financial costs that are often invisible to others. We claim that decolonizing international journals is challenging and must be an ongoing process, of which some steps we highlight here.