Decolonising management and organisational knowledge (MOK): Praxistical theorising for potential worlds

This special issue (SI) editorial contributes to ongoing efforts worldwide to decolonise management and organisational knowledge (MOK). A robust pluriversal discussion on the how and why of decolonisation is vital. Yet to date, most business and management schools are on the periphery of debates about decolonising higher education, even as Business Schools in diverse locations function as contested sites of neocolonialism and expansion of Western neoliberal perspectives. This editorial and special issue is the outcome of a unique set of relationships and processes that saw Organization host its first paper development workshop in Africa in 2019. This editorial speaks to a radical ontological plurality that up-ends the classical division between theory and praxis. It advocates praxistical theorising that moves beyond this binary and embraces decolonising knowledge by moving into the realm of affect and embodied, other-oriented reflexive, communicative praxis. It underscores the simultaneous, contested and unfinished decolonising-recolonising doubleness of praxis and the potential of borderlands locations to work with these dynamics. This special issue brings together a set of papers which advance different decolonising projects and grapple with the nuances of what it means to ‘do’ decolonising in a diversity of empirical and epistemic settings.

The speech we do not speak

This essay investigates three distinct modalities of the dialogic: dialogic mind, dialogic praxis, and dialogic ethics. Although each modality shares central dialogic characteristics of polyphony, polymodality, and polychronicity (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984, 1986; Lipari, 2014), each also differs in important ways, some of which are lost by using the single word ‘dialogue’ to refer to them. Rather, I will here explore how the dialogic is not merely a mode of communicative praxis, but it is also a mode of communicative consciousness and a mode of communicative ethics. Each dialogic modality describes different manifestations of what might otherwise be called the dialogic; each mode differs from the others in important ways while also sharing similar attributes.

Karl Weick and the Aesthetics of Contingency

In this essay, I reflect on Karl Weick’s best-known texts as a means of tracing his influence on the field of organizational communication. From this perspective, his main contributions are: (1) recognizing the centrality of language and interaction in the social construction of organizational realities; and (2) focusing squarely on communicative praxis as a site for improving our understanding of cognition and culture. Beyond these substantive contributions, an ‘aesthetics of contingency’ pervades Weick’s writings. I maintain that this perspective presents a much needed alternative to seeking meaning and stability through the pursuit of various fundamentalisms.