IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-62753-6_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Cave Canem! The Art (or Science?) of Western Management in an African Context

In: Diversity in Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Nadine Mendelek Theimann
  • Kurt April

Abstract

The West has continued to supply leadership and management ideas, political systems, and economic infrastructures to Africa, from colonial times to the present. Understandably, most Western theories that are continuously being used in organisations in Africa, with their seemingly good intentions, have not achieved the desired outcomes, because many Africans find it difficult to relate to them and have to sacrifice their authenticity in order to fully embrace them. Some have identified the limitations of perspectives and practices formulated solely in the West (Blunt and Jones, 1992; Kamoche, 1993, 1997; Nzelibe, 1986), while others have offered empirical evidence on the nature of extant practices, pointing to their appropriateness or lack thereof (Blunt and Jones, 1986; Kamoche, 2000a; Seddon, 1985). This growing critique has highlighted the need to understand the African context as well as the indigenous thought system and, in particular, the perspective of the African worker.

Suggested Citation

  • Nadine Mendelek Theimann & Kurt April, 2007. "Cave Canem! The Art (or Science?) of Western Management in an African Context," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Kurt A. April & Marylou Shockley (ed.), Diversity in Africa, chapter 2, pages 10-34, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-62753-6_3
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230627536_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-62753-6_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.