Situating Core-Peripheral Knowledge in Management and Organisation Studies

Abstract

Since its emergence in the early 1900s, the discipline of management and organisation studies (MOS) has predominantly relied upon a Euro-American epistemology, presenting managerial and organisational forms developed in the West, or Global North, as exemplars on a path towards modernity for the rest of the world to follow (Calas & Smircich, 1999; Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006; Westwood, 2001). With few (but growing) exceptions, scholars in MOS have adopted this Euro-American outlook in both the centre and the periphery of the system of global management knowledge (Tsui, 2004). In this book, we intend to flip this outlook in order to explore what management and organisation might look like from a peripheral perspective, and how the periphery might write back to the centre of the discipline of MOS. How different would the world of management and organisational theory and practice become when studied from the periphery?