The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies

Anshuman Prasad, Pushkala Prasad, Albert Mills, Jean Helms Mills, Anshuman Prasad, Pushkala Prasad, Albert J. Mills, Jean Helms Mills, Albert Mills, Anshuman Prasad, Pushkala Prasad, Albert J. Mills, Jean Helms Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138386204
• eBook ISBN: 9781134511303
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The scholarly field of Critical Management Studies (CMS) is in a state of flux. Against a backdrop of dramatic global shifts, CMS scholarship has lately taken a number of new and exciting directions and, at times, challenged older critical voices. Novel theoretical frameworks and diverse research interests mark the CMS field as never before. Interrogating conventional critiques of management and arguing for fresh approaches, The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies captures this intellectual ferment and new spirit of inquiry within CMS, and showcases the pluralistic generation of CMS scholars that has emerged in recent years.

Setting the scene for a crucial period for the discipline, this insightful volume covers new ground and essential areas grouped under the following themes:

• Critique and its (dis-)contents
• Difference, otherness, marginality
• Knowledge at the crossroads
• History and discourse
• Global predicaments.

Drawing on the expertise of an international team of contributing scholars, The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies is a rich resource and the perfect reference tool for students and researchers of management and organization.

Part I
Introduction

1
Debating knowledge

Rethinking Critical Management Studies in a changing world

Anshuman Prasad, Pushkala Prasad, Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills

Globalization is creating… the conditions for ‘barbarian theorizing’: theorizing from/of the Third World (the expression used metaphorically here) for the… entire planet.

(Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking)

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

(Arundhati Roy, ‘Confronting Empire’)

In Hell there is a valley uniquely reserved for ulama who visit kings.

(Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali [1058–1111 CE], quoted in Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples)

In the year 1627 of the common era (1036 AH), Mutribi al-Asamm al-Samarqandi – poet and scholar, and a courtier well versed in the refined etiquettes of the Persianate world which straddled large swathes of the Asia of his times – presented himself at the royal court of Emperor Nur-ud-Din Muhammad Jahangir, ruler of the mighty Mughal Empire in India, where he was received with due dignity and lavished with expensive gifts. The traveler from Samarqand stayed at the Mughal court for more than two months, during which time he and the Indian emperor developed a close relationship and held a number of extended conversations that provided the material for an account penned by the Central Asian visitor. In his account (generally known as Khātirāt-i-Mutribī Samarqandī),¹ Mutribi ranges over a variety of areas and, among other things, offers the reader several comparisons between Central Asia and Mughal India. As the historians Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2007) highlight in their commentary on the Khātirāt, Mutribi’s account showers praise after praise on Emperor Jahangir – “one of the greatest rulers of the age,” in Mutribi’s words (p. 121) – and by means of a series of comparisons brings out “the wonders and the superiority” of India over Central Asia (p. 128). Indeed, observe Alam and Subrahmanyam (2007: 128), it seems that Mutribi’s Khātirāt almost wishes to represent the Mughal emperor himself as one of the great wonders of India and virtually serves as a “vehicle for the expression of Jahangir’s [and not only Mutribi’s] opinions and prejudices.”

Roughly a decade before Mutribi’s visit to Jahangir, yet another visitor from distant lands had journeyed to India, in this instance for a rather more extended stay of close to three years (1616 –1618) at the Mughal darbar. The visitor in question was Sir Thomas Roe, an ambassador dispatched jointly by James I, King of England, and the English East India Company to seek certain favors from Jahangir’s court. Interestingly, it so happens that, somewhat similar to Mutribi, the English ambassador too has left for posterity his impressions of Emperor Jahangir and of the Mughal Empire more generally (see Subrahmanyam, 2005). However, if, as we saw above, Mutribi’s impressions of India were exceedingly positive, Jahangir’s empire seems to have left an overwhelmingly negative impression on the English ambassador. As Subrahmanyam (2005) points out, Thomas Roe’s correspondence and journal relating to India often adopt a heavily denigrating tone that veers from the ironic to sneering and contemptuous, and his account of the Mughal Empire frequently tends to “drift towards the topos of Oriental Despotism: absence of laws, arbitrary royal power and a penchant for blood-lust, absence of private property” and so forth (p. 152). Indeed, so intense is Roe’s aversion for some of the ceremonials of the Mughal court that when Jahangir honors the ambassador by organizing a dance for his entertainment, Roe can only refer to the dance disdainfully as: “some whoores² did sing and dance” (Thomas Roe quoted in Subrahmanyam, 2005: 155).

A reader of the accounts left by these two historical figures, who happened to have visited Jahangir’s imperial court during roughly the same time period, would be justified in asking why the two authors offer such highly antithetical appraisals of early 17^th-century India. Why, in other words, do the two writers see and reconstruct India so differently? Or, put differently, why the stark divergence between the knowledge about Mughal India being produced, on the one hand, by the Central Asian Mutribi Samarqandi and, on the other hand, by the Englishman Thomas Roe?

Before addressing these questions, it may be useful to point out that we have decided to open our introductory chapter to this volume by highlighting the question of (widely divergent forms of) knowledge because, as we discuss below, the contestation over knowledge is likely to be one of the most significant debates of the rapidly changing world of the 21st century, and, we believe, the scholarly field of Critical Management Studies (CMS) needs to be a full-scale participant in that important debate. Accordingly, critiques focusing upon different aspects of production and dissemination of knowledge constitute an important feature of the present Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies. In addition, the contributors to this volume address a range of other issues that hold considerable significance in the context of today’s transforming world. The remainder of this chapter is intended to outline the overall nature of this Companion, while also providing the reader with an understanding of the wider context in which the present volume’s scholarly efforts are situated. We begin by going back to the question of the glaring difference between the knowledges being produced, respectively, by Mutribi Samarqandi and Thomas Roe. As we will see in the next section, a look at the differences that characterize those two knowledges is of considerable help in developing some important insights about the nature of present-day structures of knowledge.

Knowledge and xenology

Needless to say, the question as to why Mutribi Samarqandi and Thomas Roe have produced such extremely disparate knowledge about India is a complex one, and we would be well advised here to resist the temptation to come up with hasty and simplistic answers. For instance, although it is indeed the case that knowledge is often shaped by power, any attempt to explain Thomas Roe’s contemptuous views of India on the basis of power differentials between England and India will quickly run into problems, because during the 17th century, England – at best “a medium-sized power from the [far] western end of Eurasia” (Subrahmanyam, 2005: 170) – was simply no match for the powerful Mughal Empire, whether economically, militarily, demographically, or in terms of other measures of state power (see, e.g. Madison, 2007).

Similarly, one needs to be somewhat wary also of explanations that seek to account for the nature of the writings under consideration simply on the basis of the Central Asian courtier’s desire to ingratiate himself with the Mughal Emperor or, since Roe’s embassy had largely failed in gaining the favors it sought from Jahangir, as merely reflecting the English ambassador’s chagrin and his search for excuses for a failed embassy. Although factors like these may well have played a role in shaping the overall makeup of the writings in question, we propose to briefly explore here the idea that the stark difference in the knowledge being produced by Mutribi Samarqandi and Thomas Roe may be attributable, at least in part, to the differing traditions of xenology to which the two authors happened to belong. These two early modern traditions of xenology – one ‘Indo-Persian’ and the other ‘Western’ (Alam & Subrahmanyam, 2007; Subrahmanyam, 2005) – are complex and internally differentiated cultural/intellectual approaches for engaging with ‘the outsider’ and ‘the foreign’, and only a very rough outline of some of the differences that characterize the two can be offered here.³

The overall contours of the early modern Western⁴ tradition of xenology seem to have been shaped, in particular, by two horrific calamities that unfolded during the course of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries: (a) the ‘American Holocaust’ (Stannard, 1992), i.e. the brutal European conquest of the so-called ‘New World’, and (b) the ferocious wars of religion in Europe. Importantly, the issue that lay at the heart of both of these catastrophic events was one of how to deal with ‘difference’: if the peoples of (what came to be called) ‘the Americas’ confronted Europe with the question of human difference, Europe’s religious wars came to be waged in response to the ‘problem’ of difference involving modes of Christian worship and related doctrinal matters. As Inayatullah and Blaney (2004) have pointed out, the unimaginable savagery of the religious wars⁵ produced deep “moral and psychic scars” on Europe (p. 29), and was accompanied by the consolidation of an intellectual and cultural way of being, thinking and seeing that came to regard ‘difference’ as leading to “disorder and degeneration” and “homogeneity [as productive of] … social order and stability” (p. 33). In sum, this cultural/intellectual mindset was fearful of ‘difference’ (because it believed that ‘difference’ led to a dangerous state of disorder), while also being contemptuous of ‘difference’ (because, according to this mindset, ‘difference’ produced degeneration).

Simultaneously, the European ‘discovery’ of the diverse peoples of the Americas (e.g. the Aztec, the Inca, the Maya, etc.) with their own unique cultural, political and religious practices, created new and added tensions for European Christianity’s system of belief and led to major theological, legal and intellectual debates in Europe regarding “the degree of the humanity of the [American] Indians” (Mignolo, 2003: 428).⁶ In the course of those debates, ‘difference’ once again was identified with degeneration, and, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, the American Indians came to be seen as civilizationally belonging to a prior European age (i.e. to the ‘past’ of Europeans of that time), while also representing radical otherness (Inayatullah & Blaney, 2004).

Thus, the early modern Western tradition of xenology may be viewed as an outcome of Europe’s historical engagement with ‘external’ as well as ‘internal’ difference, and it seems to have produced a cultural and intellectual mindset – i.e. a combination of ethical as well as epistemological orientation (Spivak, 2008: 18) – that was, on the one hand, overwhelmingly inclined to compare and rank various cultural and political systems and, on the other hand, deeply committed to notions of Christian Europe’s (religious/moral) superiority, as well as to a view of ‘difference’ as dangerous and degenerative. Once Thomas Roe is placed within such a tradition of xenology, his contemptuous assessment of India – in all its ‘difference’ and (to him) radical otherness – becomes more readily comprehensible.

It is important to emphasize here, moreover, that the orientation towards ‘otherness’ that manifests itself in the early modern Western tradition of xenology (of which the English ambassador appears to have been a fairly representative and faithful practitioner) does not seem to have completely left the cultural/intellectual world of ‘the West’ until this very day. As scholars have pointed out, over time, that orientation came to assume a highly systematized form in the West via the discourses of ‘Occidentalism’ (Mignolo, 2000, 2011) and ‘Orientalism’ (Said, 1978) and, in that process, became entrenched as one of the key organizing principles of much of modern Western knowledge. The selfsame orientation, we need to note, continues to animate significant sections of different social sciences (including organization and management studies) even today (Inayatullah & Blaney, 2004; Nederveen Pieterse, 2010; Westwood, 2004; Young, 1995).

In contrast to Thomas Roe’s writing, however, Mutribi’s account of Mughal India belongs to a stream in the Indo-Persian tradition of xenology that dates back to a time prior to the 15th century (Alam & Subrahmanyam, 2007; Subrahmanyam, 2005). Subscribing to such a perspective, Mutribi’s organizing framework (for understanding and commenting upon India) is rooted not in notions of India as a radical other (which seems to have been the case with Thomas Roe), but in the idea of India as a “somewhat familiar” (Alam & Subrahmanyam, 2007: 295). As Subrahmanyam (2005) has pointed out, in travelling to India, Mutribi is entering a political/cultural/religious world which he considers, simultaneously, to be both different from, as well as similar to, his own Central Asian world. In other words, in Mughal India, Mutribi as a visitor/observer/author is both an ‘outsider’ as well as an ‘insider’. Moreover, the Indo-Persian world of Mutribi’s times was also a world in which there simply did not exist any generally accepted hierarchies across different peoples, cultures or regions. All in all, therefore, Mutribi seems to have subscribed to a xenological perspective informed by an element of hospitality to the cultural stranger, in which the nature of the relationship between the observer and the observed was markedly different from the characteristic features of that relationship in the Western xenological tradition. Hence, in part, the radical divergence that we find in the respective accounts of 17th-century India left by Mutribi Samarqandi and Thomas Roe.

The foregoing narrative about Mutribi Samarqandi and Thomas Roe brings us face-to-face with differing traditions of xenology and different approaches to knowledge production. Indeed, in some ways, this narrative is also a pointed reminder that, for most of human history, the world has been characterized by the simultaneous existence of a highly diverse range of knowledge systems in different regions of the planet. However, beginning perhaps in the late 15th century, when the project of modern Western colonialism came to be launched, ‘the West’ seems to have waged an ever intensifying war designed to eradicate the world’s thriving heterogeneity of knowledge systems.⁷ The war on knowledge served as one of the constitutive elements of the overall project of modern Western colonialism, and during the course of that war, the West’s fear and contempt for ‘difference’ (noted earlier) was sought to be globally inscribed on the domain of ‘Truth’, epist...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the contributors
• Foreword by Stewart R. Clegg
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Critique and its (dis-)contents
• PART III Difference, otherness, marginality
• PART IV Knowledge at the crossroads
• PART V History and discourse
• PART VI Global predicaments
• Index