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Organization: A Decolonial Interpretation

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Managing the Post-Colony South Asia Focus

Part of the book series: Managing the Post-Colony ((MAPOCO))

Abstract

Decolonizing management and organization studies scholarship still operates from within modern Western capitalist frame of what an organization means. As such meanings of organizational power relations, functional efficiencies and co-ordination are fully assigned to, and contained within logics of capital and eurocentric frame of organization. Decolonial discourses eschew these logics of capitalist organization through contraposing communitarian organizing with modern Western capitalist organization. This impedes the possibility of decolonizing organization through plural understandings of cognate ideas such as organizational power relations, functionalist co-ordination. This chapter through an analysis of a strategic planning workshop for NGOs (non government organization) and a communitarian NGO suggests another meaning for organization as community enmeshment. In community enmeshment, organization and individual are relationally co-constituted, individual and organization are not ontologically prior and distinct from each other. In this conceptualization, organization is not only communitarian, but also leads to other meanings for cognate ideas, in that its function not only preserves human dignity and freedom but simultaneously enables autonomy, agency and survival from uncertainties and shocks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The word native here is used to refer to what in India is commonly identified as desi, crudely translated as country as in countryside and not nation.

  2. 2.

    The specific laws are British era laws, Society’s Act of 1860 and Trust Act of 1925.

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  1. Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata, India

    Nimruji Jammulamadaka

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  1. Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, West Bengal, India

    Nimruji Jammulamadaka

  2. Karachi School of Business and Leadership, Karachi, Pakistan

    Shoaib Ul-Haq

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Jammulamadaka, N. (2022). Organization: A Decolonial Interpretation. In: Jammulamadaka, N., Ul-Haq, S. (eds) Managing the Post-Colony South Asia Focus. Managing the Post-Colony. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2988-5_10

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