Can Management and Organization Knowledge Speak Portuguese?

Abstract

This paper’s objective is to question whether management and organization knowledge (MOK) is able to speak a language other than English and discuss how the hegemony of this language in the scientific field has contributed to the reproduction of the same colonial logic that for centuries prevented native peoples from making sense of what they thought, spoke and wrote. We show that the main instrument of power that guarantees this hegemony is control over the criteria used for the publication and circulation of MOK, which tends to marginalize everything that is produced outside the linguistic basis controlled by the North. The main effect of this logic is that native researchers to submit to control by the North; they find themselves in a subaltern position, condemned in their own country to operate under an external logic that defines what is and what is not quality scientific knowledge in the management and organizational field.