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ABSTRACT
Given the increasing globalization of management and organization science (MOS), it has been suggested that scholarly communities examine the contributions of their contexts to the discipline. Accordingly, the contributions from Africa to MOS across the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern eras are examined using generative theory. Evidence from historical, philosophical, anthropological, and sociological sources demonstrates that significant contributions to MOS have originated from Africa. Even so, those contributions have not been acknowledged, especially in the post-modern era, due to the “writing out” of Africa. Several implications for research and pedagogy concerning MOS and Africa are considered given the current trend of decolonization.
Acknowledgement
This paper – “Academic Athena?: ‘Writing In’ Africa in Management and Organization Science” – won the Carolyn B. Dexter Award for Best Paper that Internationalizes the Academy of Management from the Management History Division at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Seattle, Washington, August 4–10, 2022.
I express my profound gratitude to Peter Bycio for his invaluable and insightful suggestions in this paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 As in Martin Bernal’s book on Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1, “If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the Revised Ancient one, it will be necessary not only to rethink the fundamental bases of ‘Western Civilization’ but also to recognize the penetration of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history. The Ancient Model had no major ‘internal’ deficiencies, or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was overthrown for external reasons. For 18th- and 19th-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans” (Martin Bernal, Citation1987, p. 1).
2 http://read.hipporeads.com/plato-studied-in-africa-the-case-for-culturally-inclusive-philosophy/. Accessed on 10/16/2021.
3 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics/?source=post_page. Accessed on 9/5/2021.
4 Eurocentrists and deniers of Africa’s influence on the Greeks such as Lefkowitz (Citation2008) claim that no Greek studied in ancient Africa which is patently false as suggested by the philosophers’ own writings.
5 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400874309/html. Accessed on 9/9/2021.
6 The Amazigh people speak Amazigh or Tamazight language. Often referred to as Berber in Western literature the Amazigh people are indigenous to Tamazgha (North Africa plus Mali, Niger and the Canary Islands). They were there before the arrival of the Arabs in that region, which started around the mid-seventh century. Their language, Tamazight, was spoken all over the North stretching from the Siwa Oasis in western Egypt, and westward to the Canary Islands through Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and from the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea extending southward to Mauritania, Mali, and Niger (see Achab, Citation2001 for details).
8 https://therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/obituaries/meyer-fortes. Accessed on 9/18/2021.
9 The original quote is “this”. I changed it for syntactic purposes.
10 “I will never admit that the similar ceremonies performed in Greece and Egypt are the result of mere coincidence – had that been so, our rites would have been more Greek in character and less recent in origin. Nor will I allow that the Egyptians ever took over from Greece either this custom or any other” (11.49: Herodotus’s comments in Bernal, Citation1987).
11 Thanks to a reviewer for this observation.
12 I do not deny that some of these scholars were complicit in the colonial enterprise. Like others – Allman and Parker (Citation2005) who offer a critique of Fortes’ “complicity with imperial culture” (p. 216) – (Lentz, Citation2007), I believe that even to this 21st century, there are scholars who are continuing that enterprise.
13 James Mwangi. The Africa Report, No. 121, October-November-December 2022, p. 94.
14 Some may say there is no one African way. That is fine. But if there is a Nigerian way, a Ugandan way, a South African way, a Kenyan way, an Egyptian way, please use it.
15 James Mwangi. The Africa Report, No. 121, October-November-December 2022, p. 95.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Baniyelme D. Zoogah
Baniyelme D. Zoogah (PhD – The Ohio State University) Associate Professor of Management at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Ontario, Dr. Zoogah teaches HR/OB courses in the Human Resources and Management area. In addition to Visiting Professorship positions in Ghana and South Africa, he has published in several high-level journals. He has, in addition to book chapters, authored two books, Strategic Followership and Ethnos Oblige: Theory and Evidence, and co-authored Managing Organizational Behavior in the African Context. He also edited one volume of the Emerald series on Research Methodology in Strategy and Management (in the Context of Africa). He is currently the Past President of the Africa Academy of Management.