Independence or North: reflections on the influence of foreignness in the administration knowledge field in Brazil

Abstract

This theoretical essay surveys the main aspects in the formation of administration theory and it provides a closer look at the approach by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who advocates for an epistemology of the South. It is observed that the positivist science has demarcated what is valid as knowledge and it has excluded what is beyond this “scientific canon“. In short, any scientific work outside the patterns regarded as true and accepted by the global academy becomes invalid. From this perspective, the work by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, particularly the sociology of absence and emergence, highlights the hegemony of values noticed in the process of interpreting and leading people in society from the North’s hegemonic viewpoint. Thus, an abyssal (invisible) line was drawn, which demarcates as valid only the North’s experiences, producing epistemological absence in the other countries that have, due to determining conditions of their history as colonies, imported theories. By means of a theoretical essay, we introduce the influence of foreignness on the administrative science and the contributions by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, which can inspire the construction of an emancipatory and interdisciplinary knowledge, so that administration also use its knowledge ecology to overcome its epistemological absence.