Unlocking Postcolonial Perspectives in International Business and Management

Abstract

Scholars widely acknowledge that business activity and education have profound impacts on a multitude of stakeholders in both the formal and informal sectors. To address concerns that the voices and interests of many of these actors remain unrepresented requires reflexivity and disclosure of the underlying assumptions and motives of scholars’ research agendas. International business and management have been identified as not only lacking this reflexivity, but also of active resistance to it (Jack, Calas, Nkomo and Peltonen, 2008). The panelists argue that the systematic devaluation of the interests of stakeholders places counterproductive limitations on the development of the scholarly field of international business. The two primary goals of this symposium are first to reignite and increase interest in a critical, postcolonial examination of the theory and teaching of international business and management, and second to provide directions for developing new theory, more inclusive of the direct and collat...