Decolonizing Organization Theory: Management and Multiculturalism in Organizations

Michal Frenkel
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
The Hebrew University
Mount Scopus,
Jerusalem 91905,
Israel.
mailto:Michalfr@mscc.huji.ac.il
Yehouda Shenhav
Tel Aviv University
mailto:Shenhav@post.tau.ac.il

Abstract
Two main thrusts are discernible in postcolonial studies today; the distinction between them is
analytical and constitutes the structural underpinning of the present article. One thrust is the
perspective known as “Orientalism,” which focuses on the West’s perception of the “Orient”
in the construction of its self- identity (Said, 1978). This perspective has undergone something
of a reversal in the past two decades. The discourse now concerns the carriers of colonial rule
as well as its objects. This led to the second perspective known as “Occidentalism,” which
makes use of the epistemological territory forged by the postcolonial view in order to examine
and understand Western modernity itself from a new angle (e.g., Venn, 2000; Chakrabarty,
2000; see also the term “writing back” as described in the works of Aschcroft, Griffiths &
Tiffin, 1989, and Comaroff & Comaroff, 1997).

In this article we invoke insights from both thrusts in order to re-examine the basic premises
of OT. We begin by reviewing some of the “Orientalist” attitudes embedded in OT toward the
non-Western “other”. Second, we subject to a postcolonial reading some of the canonical
management texts that deal not with the “other” but with the “Western” subject himself.
Third, we draw on insights from postcolonial theory to urge the pluralizing of OT and the
promotion of multicultural thought in manage ment.

It is universally acknowledged that OT is a fundamentally Western discipline. Its orientalist

feature lies in the discipline’s own self-definition as a profession and as a sphere of
knowledge. Management, as definede for example by Peter Drucker, is not only a salient
product of Western thought, it is also one of the elements that distinguish between the West
and other civilizations and it accounts for the West’s economic and social superiority. The
dissemination of Western management conceptions, Drucker maintains, is a necessary
condition for the growth of developing societies, not a cultural mechanism that undermines
the basic principles by which non-Western societies conduct themselves (as argued, for
example, by Wallerstein, 1974).

From the “Orientalist” point of view, Drucker’s description suggests the manner in which the
non-Western “other” is conceptualized, portrayed, and analyzed as inferior in managerial
thinking.

Duker's view explicitly refers to "other" civilizations, however, it is important to note that
even when there was no explicit reference to the “colonial other” in managerial thinking,
colonialism itself was very much present. Initial managerial techniques took shape in the light
of the colonial experience in administering large-scale systems, both military and civilian,
across a broad geographical area even before the rise of the large companies in mid-
nineteenth century America. Many of the insights that were later applied concretely in the
large industrial corporations in the West, and that their way into theoretical writings first
emerged as part of the colonial encounter. The first management experts borrowed managerial
techniques that had developed in the plantation colonies of the American South. The fact that
the colonies were managed on a basis of impersonal rules, introduced to reflect the cultural
difference between rulers and ruled, was a manifestation of culturally neutral formal
management that was taken for granted long before it was formalized in theories of
organization and management (Shenhav 1999).

Among the most prominent organization’s writers who’s work demonstrates an orientalist
thinking one can find such influential characters as the French anthropologist Guillaume
Ferrero, the father of “bureaucracy”, Max Weber and Elton Mayo.

Ferrero, for example, argues for an objective and timely difference between the western
civilization and the "others" in terms of potential productivity. The Western civilization, he
argues, diminishes the “natural” negative trait and thus makes its offspring, who are civilized,
more productive. Those who have not internalized the values of Western civilization – the
criminal population, thieves, nomads, and prostitutes, who are driven only by the desire to
avoid work, and the savage barbarian in the colonies, who views work as an evil second only
to death – effectively preserve the inclination toward laziness and non- productivity (Ferrero
cited by Rabinbach, 1991:174).

A clear connection between Western culture and the competitive advantage of organizations
is discernible also in the writings of Max Weber, the father of organizational bureaucracy
theory, whose work is generally thought to display sensitivity and awareness regarding
cultural differences and historical processes. True, Weber is known to have sharp opposed the
inclusion of blatantly colonial themes, such as racial hygiene and social Darwinism, within
the framework of the sociological discipline in Germany. Nevertheless, it is impossible to
ignore the influence of the “colonial episteme” on his work (Proctor, 1991; Nelson and
Gitteman, 1973).

In his critique of the colonial heritage in Weber’s work, Dussel (1998) notes that as early as
his essay on “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Weber displays an
ethnocentric attitude by using the word “we” when referring to the West. Far from being
haphazard, this ethnocentric approach effectively dictates the central research question that
informs Weber’s work on rationality: “Why did not the scientific, the artistic, the economic
development there (in China and India) enter upon the path of rationalization which is
peculiar to the occident?” (Dussel, 1998:25). The formulation of this question exposes
Weber’s view that the non-Western civilizations are not only substantively and statically
different from Western civilization, they are also inferior.

This argument is especially relevant for a critical reading of Weber's writing about
Bureaucracy, throughout which he portrays the bureaucratic organization as distinctly
“Western.” This Western model, he argues, is technically superior to all other forms of
administration, much as machine production is superior to non-mechanical methods: in
precision, speed, lack of equivocation, knowledge of the documentary record, continuity,
sense of discretion, uniformity of operation, system of subordination, and reduction of
frictions” (Weber 1946: 196). The other civilizations, Weber implicitly argues, are therefore
objectively technically inferior and should adopt Western methods to survive.
The Orientalist thrust in Weber's work is covert and complex, and this is precisely why its
influence is far more significant. As translated and interpreted in the United States, Weber’s
work constitutes a proposal for a universal organizationa l model that transcends national and
cultural borders (“one best way”). A similar trust could be found in Elton Mayo's work out of
which the Human Relations "one-best way" model has emerged. From an “Occidentalist”
viewpoint, the blatantly Western basic assumptions that inform these models make it, along
with the other models of the “one best way,” part of a neo-colonial mechanism that preserves
and reproduces Western superiority and endows it with “scientific” justification.

A postcolonial “Occidentalist” analysis of the managerial models that have usually presented
themselves as the “one best way” – such as “scientific management,” “human relations,” and
“structural contingency theory” – shows that even though none of them deals with the “Third
World,” they all make ethnocentric assumptions about human nature and about the
organization and the society in the different cultures.

The dissemination of these universalistic models effectively continues (or completes) the
missionary heritage of Christianity, which held that the propagation of Christian beliefs
provided moral justification for the entire colonial project. According to the colonial
approach, spreading this universal knowledge is part of the “white man’s burden” and of the
acculturation mission he undertook in order to redeem the “other” from ignorance, wrong
beliefs, or, in the case of management, inefficiency (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1997; Mitchele,
1988). Consequently, the role of Western knowledge that is disseminated across national and
cultural borders as part of the mechanism of colonial rule has been extensively discussed in
the postcolonial literature (see, e.g., Bhabha, 1994; Arnold, 1993; Johnson, 1996; Cohn,
1996).

These works show that, paradoxically, it was precisely the (apparent) blindness to cultural and
ethnic differences that made the Western models more effective instruments of colonial rule
and of the reproduction of ethnic and racial inequality than the direct Orientalist works. The
adoption of a uniform model containing basic assumptions about the desirable traits for
workers and managers and about the best form of organization, legitimizes a particular type of
organization over other types, at the level of both the global system (between societies and
states) and the struggle for ethnic and racial equality within the West. The identification of
these traits with a particular ethnic, cultural, or racial system also creates a hierarchy between
groups of workers that are more suitable or less suitable to work in and manage organizations,
and between societies that are entitled to financial credit and international investments and
societies with cultural traits that are not entitled to trust and confidence of this kind. The paper
focuses on three main themes -- prominent in the mainstream OT literature -- that exemplify
this point: Establishment of the Rational Organizational Subject; Establishment of the
“Emotional” Organizational Subject; and the reproduction of Western domination in theories
of homogenization of global management.

Finally, the paper turns to explore the relevancy of this postcolonial reading of OT to the more
practical issue of diversity in organizations. We argue that as long as OT theory, which in
large measure shapes the thinking of the organization’s senior personnel, is vitiated by an
fundamentally colonialist viewpoint, whether Orientalist or Occidentalist, organizations will
find it difficult to integrate substantively members of “other” ethnic and racial groups and
enable them to express their different approach in a way that will contribute to the
organization as a whole. Although it does not address questions of race and culture explicitly,
OT, which does much to shape organizational praxes in day-to-day life, portrays the WASP
male as its ideal worker, as most naturally suited for promotion and reward and whose
opinion is more deserving to be heard and accepted.