Critical international management and international critical management: perspectives from Latin America

Citation

Alcadipani, R. (2010), "Critical international management and international critical management: perspectives from Latin America", Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 6 No. 2/3. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib.2010.29006baa.001

Critical international management and international critical management: perspectives from Latin America

Article Type: Editorial From: critical perspectives on international business, Volume 6, Issue 2/3

Although labelled as “international”, the academic production in the fields of International Business (IB) and International Management (IM) tends to be dominated by ideas generated by Western academics that are located in universities, business schools and academic departments placed in the “centre”, rather than at the “periphery”. Moreover, there is also the naturalization of the private (multinational) company as the paradigmatic organization to be analysed, understood and researched. Thus, there are the privileges of a specific location as a source of academic enunciation and a particular type of organization as object of inquiry. Broadly speaking, the fields of IM and IB are parochial and narrow centred. As a consequence, at least two modes of exclusion tend to be generated, i.e. the exclusion of the academic voices that are not located in the centre and the exclusion of other organizational forms as objects of inquiry.

Recently, there has been an increasing academic interest in management that takes place in countries such as India and China. This might suggest that IM and IB might be opening up their research agenda beyond their traditional parochial and narrow centred focus. A closer look into what is produced about emerging economies will most probably conclude that still a rather usual group of universities are producing knowledge about the same type of (multinational) organizations. In addition, although the interest in developing economies has increased over the years, research into the Latin America management realities is still barely present in English-speaking academic journals. There might be many reasons for that, among which can be the fact that Latin America does not appear highly in the agenda of Western countries foreign policy, as well as it is not also a significant market for international publishing houses. On the other hand, since the 1960s there are academic productions about management in Latin America carried out by local academics. In Brazil, for example, there are more than 30 peer-reviewed journals and the meeting of the Brazilian Academy of Management is attended by more than 1,000 local academics every year. This suggests that there is knowledge produced in this region about management that the centre has not being aware of.

With this special issue, CPOIB seeks to broaden the reach and scope of critical studies of IB, bringing consideration of forms of business and contexts beyond the mainstream, and giving voice to those who are by and large excluded. The papers in this special issue challenge the parochial status of IM and IB and indicate that other organizational forms are worth considering in our field of inquiry. I hope you enjoy your reading!

Rafael Alcadipani