The Researcher as the Other: a Postcolonial Reading of the Brazilian “Borat”

Abstract

This paper discusses the application of the ethnographic method in management research. Specifically, it aims to examine how colonial differences preserve social hierarchies that end up being expressed in the practice of scientific research. Using data gathered during an ethnography conducted in a British organization, the analysis addresses how the Brazilian researcher is perceived by Europeans. To analyze this process, we drawn on the postcolonial perspective, especially in its critique of the Eurocentrism and its critique of the desire to develop a “universal” knowledge. The results demonstrate that even in the role of researcher, when the non-European subject takes the European subject as the Other in the research process, he ends up being the target of an inversion that moves him back to the position of the Other, perceived by the traditional epistemology as research object of European subject.