Towards a Postcolonial Reading of ICCM

This book presents a critique of the related academic fields of international and cross-cultural management (ICCM) based on certain commitments, concepts and practices from postcolonial theory (PCT). Our core argument is that these academic management disciplines are Western and Eurocentric discourses (knowledge systems and associated institutional practices) that exhibit historical as well as contemporary resonances with what we might call ‘the colonial project’ — that is, the formal expansion, conquest and colonial occupation by Western European imperial powers of multiple nations in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, South and South-East Asia, and Oceania up to the late-19th and early- to mid-20th centuries. As a contemporary form of cultural imperialism, we will argue that the discursive workings of ICCM render the field limited demographically, skewed theoretically and generative of politically contentious effects on the manner in which researchers, students and practitioners of management across national and/or cultural borders are called to understand the values and behaviours of their various ‘Others’ (research subjects, managers, employees, customers, organizations and so on).