Making space for Indigenous worldviews: from received economic hegemony to diverse ways of knowing

Abstract

Management research and business education is largely bound by western organisational discourses. With some notable exceptions (for example Banerjee, 2011; Peredo & Chrisman, 2006), the Academy of Management has published few scholarly contributions that focus on Indigenous perspectives, leaving these perspectives on the periphery. The purpose of this symposium is to call into question the hegemonic performativity of conventional business/management discourses by opening up a space for Indigenous subjectivities (Peredo, Montgomery & Carlson, 2012). Further, and in response to the All Academy theme, the participants will address the contradictions and tensions inherent in classic assumptions that underpin the idealisation of continual economic (capitalist) growth, ways of conceiving social transformation that reproduce existing relations and the assumed role of human beings as ‘homo-economicus’ (Tedmanson, Verduyn, Essers & Gartner, 2012). This symposium brings together established and emerging scholars from across the globe who focus on Indigenous perspectives. This can mean bringing an Indigenous perspective to research (for Indigenous scholars Peredo and Evans), as well as engaging with Indigenous and other groups who represent marginalized communities that have been characterized by their experience of exclusion and oppression. Individually, panel members will each contribute insights from their unique and diverse experiences of engaged research journeys that have challenged established hierarchies of privilege. Together this group will construct an embodied space to dialogue with each other, speaking back to the field about the complexity of navigating management research and business education from an Indigenous worldview and/or standpoint (Fitzgerald, 2010; Foley, 2008; Moreton-Robinson, 2003). Each scholar brings an academic, intellectual rigor and a cultural, embodied authority to the symposium. However, it is in relationship with each other from which they will build a ‘space of belonging’ and demonstrate through their discursive engagement the creation of a community (Spiller, Erakovic, Henare & Pio, 2011; Evans, 2012).