A short summary of the debate

Calls to decolonise the university have gained traction over the last couple of years, but business schools on the whole have been slow to engage with the conversations surrounding what it means to decolonise. Some argue that the reason for the slow development of the field is due to the fact that managerial practices and organizational forms are based on (neo-)colonial ideologies (see, for example, Cooke, 2003; Frenkel and Shenhav, 2003; Neu, 2000; Spivak, 1998/2006). As a result, postcolonial and related perspectives have occupied a marginal position in the extended business and management field (Prasad, 2012), and there are limited frameworks available to account for the (neo-)colonial impact of management theories and practices on Indigenous communities (Banerjee, 2000).

There are significant differences between thinkers on the extent to which the latent radicalism of the decolonial way of looking at and intervening in the world can be maintained in environments antithetical in different ways to that intent, particularly given the responsibilities and priorities held by Business Schools (Banerjee, 2021; Dar et al. 2021; Jammuladaka et al. 2021). For example, the embeddedness of colonial ideas around resource exploitation, profit maximisation and the economic dominance of capitalist countries especially from the West. This sentiment aligns somewhat with the argument that to decolonise is to necessarily critique or even reject the possibility of a capitalist enterprise ridding itself of colonial legacy and exploitation (Mignolo, 2011). These thinkers typically refer to a revolutionary praxis in which the Western university must have its fundamental objectives and values around the dominance of Western philosophies and ideas profoundly changed. This involves rejecting the Western managerialist approach of the neo-liberal university based on a “preordained academic narrative of competition, individualistic careerism and the automaton-like compulsion to produce outputs at any cost” (Dar et al. 2021: 699) and its reproduction in non-Western context (Vakkayil and Chaterjee, 2017; Jammuladaka et al., 2021).

Despite the challenges of decolonising in Business Schools and academia, many decolonial thinkers advocate for a generative rather than deleterious vision of decolonisation. This entails an argument that an overhaul of existing systems and practices within HE and beyond can be achieved by “build[ing] new concepts and being willing to revise critically all received theories and ideas” and associated colonised practices and institutions (Maldonaldo-Torres, 2011: 4) that reproduce unequal power structures based on race and identities. In words emphasising the links between epistemology, ethics and politics, decolonisation means promoting an “open-ended academic concept of diverse epistemic and ontological criticisms and refusals of Eurocentric modernity and its capitalist, patriarchal underpinnings” within academia and the Business School environment (Jammulamadaka et al. 2021: 720). To support this, some call for the practice of a collective form of anti-racist activism led by scholars of colour where “anti-racist scholar-activists use materials capable of overturning racial logics centring whiteness – critical theory, political dialogue, visual, musical, poetic and performed art, Indigenous feminist medicine, ancestral non-European knowledge” (Dar et al. 2021: 699).

Decolonising is therefore widely understood by its advocates – as well as those who reject or distance themselves from it – as going beyond the diversification of the staff and student body, and existing EDI commitments which are a fixture in the modern university (Banerjee et al, 2020). How far, and in what way, the decolonisation effort goes beyond EDI commitments, remains contested and open to interpretation. In many cases decolonisation requires or demands academics and academic institutions to be reflexive, acknowledging their privileges, positions and modes of operation and consider how these may produce or reproduce neo-colonial practices within and outside academia. This is an uncomfortable request for many staff who might not necessarily engage regularly in reflexive practice and may feel that their own career status and success is undermined by critiquing the structures that contextualise their achievements (Holmwood,2018: 38-39). In this sense, ambivalence or backlash to the decolonisation effort is widely considered inevitable.

The growing literature around decolonisation in Business Schools built on the wider literature on decolonisation in academia. It has typically been focused on developing understandings of what the term means in theory and practice (or in praxis) within management and organisational knowledge (Ruggunan, 2017; Jammuladaka et al., 2021), challenging the absence of race in management and organisational studies (Nkomo, 1992), opening up management and organisational knowledge outlets to voices from the South (Alacadipini et al. 2012; Jammuladaka et al., 2021), discussing the extent and ways in which neo-colonial or colonial legacies persist in academia (particularly in terms of the “hidden cannon” and curriculum) (Banerjee, 2021) and then reflecting on and testing specific attempts towards decolonisation in terms of teaching (BARC, 2019; ETHOS, 2022; Scobie, Lee and Smyth, 2021; Woods, Del and Carroll, 2022) and to a lesser extent research (Yousfi, 2021), and discussing identities and decolonised practices and activism within the Business Schools (Khotiyal et al., 2018; Dar, 2019; Dar et al. 2021). While there are some studies which do concentrate on how decolonisation efforts can change research practice (e.g. Yousfi, 2021), the major focus of both research and internal reviews and projects run by universities tends to focus on discussing the decolonisation of management and organisational knowledge and Business School at large. This includes the decolonisation of the curriculum and teaching or giving more spaces to “unheard voices”. In addition, there is a recognised lack of literature on decolonising praxis (Jammuladaka et al. 2021). Furthermore, there seems to be an unspoken assumption in the literature that most Business School academics in the West are already aware of what colonial legacy in the realm of research (culture and practice) looks like in theory and practice, and could easily “be on board” to combat it. We would question this assumption, especially as some literature both on decolonising management studies and other disciplines highlight the caution and reluctance in the way some non-Western academics may approach the decolonial turn in academia as it may challenge their personal and/or professional values and those of their disciplines, leading to cognitive and emotional dissonance (Ruggunan, 2016).

As such, what it means to decolonise the Business School is still open for discussion and the development of practice in situ. We hope you can join us in this endeavour by sharing your thoughts and ideas about this as we move this project forward at BBS.