De-Colonizing the Boundary-Object

Abstract

What role does language play in disciplining subjects in the international development sector? Previous critiques of international development organizations have focused on the role of knowledge tools, such as reports, in reproducing dichotomies between developed and under-developed subjects. In this paper, I de-colonize NGO reporting through a reappraisal of the boundary-object concept. I utilize Ngugi’s (1986) problematization of language and translation to demonstrate how the boundary-object is experienced differentially across stakeholder groups and caste/class structures. Using findings garnered from a multi-sited ethnography of an international NGO in India, I examine the prominence of English language in NGO reports over indigenous languages. This paper therefore contributes to contemporary understandings of neo-colonial power relations as sustained by the English language within India.

Keywords

boundary-object colonial language ethnography international development knowledge work neo-colonial NGO report

Introduction

The boundary-object (Star & Griesemer, 1989) conceptualizes collaboration among diverse ‘social worlds’ by tracing how a knowledge object structures co-ordination among divergent stakeholders. By analysing how a boundary-object constructs new, or reproduces established, infrastructures that support collaboration, knowledge work is understood as an activated system of objects and infrastructure, where a knowledge tool provides opportunity for cohered goals and interests to materialize. The boundary-object takes a distinctly cognitive approach to theorize co-ordination. It is noted for its ability to engage distinct social actors through an interpretive process that may involve standardization of knowledge forms, aligning actor’s perceptions and producing new ways of learning or working collaboratively (Star, 2010). Empirical work supporting the concept has been predominantly carried out in the global North and has looked at co-ordination among linguistically homogeneous networks, where ‘language’ is analysed as emerging work cultures or jargon that mitigate barriers to knowledge transfer at a boundary (see Carlile, 2002). Where studies have been carried out in cross-cultural contexts, language has not been analysed as a significant factor impacting co-ordination (see Barrett & Oborn, 2010; Merminod & Rowe, 2012).

In this paper, I contribute a conceptualization of language use in the Indian development context to highlight (a) the structuralizing power of language activated in stakeholder collaborations and (b) the limitations of cognitive approaches to understand knowledge work in linguistically diverse contexts. To accomplish this, I de-colonize the boundary-object by arguing that first, the persistence of colonial languages in neo-colonial organizing reproduces inequalities based on language use and second, cognitive approaches de-contextualize workers’ relations to colonial languages and instead promote a neutralized schematic concept for collaboration. My critique of the boundary-object is supported by findings garnered from a multi-sited ethnography of reporting practices among three related development stakeholders working predominantly in central India, in the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP).

My analysis identifies the non-governmental organization (NGO) report as a boundary-object on account that it is a knowledge tool used to co-ordinate activities among stakeholders. I also note that its connective function materializes through its English narrative form, a form that is only accessible to Indian workers who have learnt and therefore can utilize English. The prominence of English is deeply problematic in contexts that have a colonial relationship to the English language because it has been historically used to coerce subjectivities and induce subjugation. Based on this historical association, I ask: How does the imposition of reporting in English contribute to reproducing inequalities among development stakeholders?

I utilize Ngugi’s (1986) work on colonial languages to conceptualize the role of English in mitigating collaboration among Indian NGOs and argue that boundary-objects may create new, as well as reproducing established, inequalities based on the use of English. Drawing on Nandy (1983), Bhabha (1994) and Ngugi’s (1986) work on knowledge, language and translation, I highlight that inequalities are associated with how workers negotiate the prominence of English in management tools and how this negotiation informs collaboration among workers from varying educational and socio-economic backgrounds. Yet, upon closer investigation, I observe that development subjects internalize the cognitivism underlying NGO reporting, thus embracing it as a knowledge tool that communicates beyond the ‘reproaches of tribalism’¹ (Ngugi, 1986; Bhabha, 1994; Nandy, 1983). Thus workers’ differing relations to English, and consequentially the boundary-object, are understood as significant factors mitigating the possibilities for equitable collaboration in this stakeholder context.

De-Colonizing the Boundary-Object

Global inequality and poverty are said to be rising as a result of institutional donors financing development programmes that fail to address the needs of beneficiaries at the grassroots (Oxfam, 2015). I argue that it is not only the programme logic that fails development subjects, but also the persistence of colonial languages in development programming that undermines the potential for stakeholders to break free from the inherited biases colonialism produces. For if the development subject cannot speak in her language, if the development subject cannot take part in decisions about her life unless she demonstrates the ability to speak, listen and write in a colonial language, then how does she use the colonizer’s languages to inform an empowered selfhood? How can Anglo-Saxon management tools nourish and sustain empowered subjectivities that are indigenous and de-colonized? These questions are sadly not new and have been raised and worked through over a number of years by postcolonial scholars. Within management and organization studies (MOS) these issues have been addressed by problematizing the overwhelming dominance of North American scholarship in the field. I now provide a brief summary of these engagements and offer a definition of Anglo-Saxon management that informs my critique of the boundary-object.

MOS has been critiqued for its exclusion of voices from and subjectivities of scholars working outside the American academe (Alcadipani &d Faria, 2014; ; Cooke, 2003a; Faria, Ibarra-Colado, & Guedes, 2010; Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Mir & Mir, 2013; Nkomo, 2011; Prasad, 2003, 2012; Yousfi, 2014). A key argument underlining these critiques is the marginalization of non-American knowledge, expertise and experiences that the dominance reproduces. Critiques have challenged the broader Anglo-Saxon authority in MOS that prevents participation of scholars from the global South to shape ideas about management and organizing (Gantman, Yousfi, & Alcadipani, 2015). More recent calls for de-colonizing MOS have highlighted the need to write through the colonized experience (Faria et al., 2010; Girei, 2016; Khan, Westwood, & Boje, 2010; Mir & Mir, 2013), dislocating management models from their Anglo-Saxon localities, and providing models of management and organization that flourish outside the Northern hemisphere. In this paper, I advance the arguments above by evaluating the prominence of English use in NGO reports and conceptualize the structuring role of the English language in neo-colonial workplaces. Here, I do not mean to revise arguments about the enduring authority of colonial powers over former colonies. But rather, I seek to trace the subtle internalization of colonial hierarchies by looking at how the use of English structures knowledge work among Indian workers.

The boundary-object is an idea that originates in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of academic scholarship, the concept being defined and coined in 1989 by two American academics, Star and Griesemer. The boundary-object is described as a knowledge tool that produces participatory and equitable knowledge transfer across diverse stakeholders: boundary-objects are ‘artefacts of practice shared between communities’ (Sapsed & Salter, 2004, p. 1518) that ‘satisfy the informational requirements of each of them’ (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393). It has been described as aiding the movement of political ideas (Kimble, Grenier, & Goglio-Primard, 2010), congealing work practices (Bechky, 2003) and incorporating diverse communities in knowledge-sharing activities (Koskinen, 2005). Thus, a central characteristic of the boundary-object is its interpretive flexibility and its pragmatic function to co-ordinate action among diverse social worlds.

The boundary-object concept’s explanatory power is arguably aligned to its roots in cognitive sociology and interpretive philosophy that underline much of Anglo-Saxon MOS (such as Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Fairclough, 2013; Staber, 2006). For example, proponents of the boundary-object (Sapsed & Salter, 2004; Yakura, 2002) have described it as a tool that draws knowledge into recognizable forms (e.g. social information processing models), thus connecting consumers of knowledge to different stakeholder positions (Burman, 2004; Fox, 2011) leading to changes in recognition, understanding and perception (e.g. theories of mind). Similar cognitive concepts are prevalent in current understandings of NGO reporting in the Indian subcontinent. Previous studies have argued that NGO reporting is a strategic interplay between various stakeholders, where disadvantaged groups can utilize reporting to negotiate for better terms and conditions. For example, Ebrahim (2003) uses developments in new institutional theory to propose that NGO workers use reports intentionally. He argues that reports withdraw, emphasize or selectively include information to serve the purpose of securing funds or ‘voicing’ opinions to impact donor decision-making.

Where political models for knowledge management have been taken into account, the results have been similarly optimistic. Development scholars have argued that collaborative reporting is a beneficial process that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of development projects (Cornwall, 2003). Here, reporting is demonstrated to correct malfunctioning institutions by involving stakeholders in setting objectives and working towards common goals. Collaborative reporting has also been identified as providing a tool for mutual learning, in which stakeholder involvement aligns perceptions and leads to inclusive learning (Chambers, 1997). The boundary-object logic, as presented above, relies on a distinctly schematic, not a political, model for aligning action and values among diverse stakeholders. Others have added that the impact of collaborative reporting on stakeholders can be transformative, providing a space for democratic organizing akin to citizenship-building mechanisms (Golooba-Mutebi & Hickey, 2010). However, the above findings along with recent studies that argue similarly (Czarniawska & Sevon, 2005; Kostova, Roth, & Dacin, 2008; Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2009) overlook the development subject’s experience of power in which she is reproduced as (un)knowable and as (un)recognizable on account of her capacity to use a colonial language in knowledge work through which infrastructures for collaboration are established (Ngugi, 1986).

The boundary-object is, nevertheless, a contested concept even from within the Anglo-Saxon MOS tradition. These critiques include institutional analyses that identify inequalities between the knowledge producer and recipient as impacting their value (Briers & Chua, 2001) or how social actors engage with boundary-objects to indulge in strategic behaviour (Oswick & Robertson, 2009). Further, Kimble et al. (2010) have emphasized the local dimension of boundary-objects, stating the importance of political context and the motivations of people who choose a particular object over another to serve a communicative role. Despite these analyses placing power and politics at the forefront of their critiques, they do not overturn the cognitivism that the boundary-object relies on to theorize collective action. Instead, these critiques preserve the idea that the individual is inherently agentic, capable of autonomous thought, and sensing power (albeit somewhat inhibited by political structures) and conceptualize the boundary-object as an extension of this human expertise. Thus, these critiques cannot explain why some subjects’ identification with an oppressive force (the English language) appears to conflict with their best interests (equality). In this paper, I contribute a non-cognitive analysis of boundary-objects that (re)produce inequalities based on English use while structuring stakeholder co-ordination.

Within development studies, Green’s (2010) critique of collaborative reporting, goes to great lengths to uncover the non-cognitive dimensions of knowledge production. Green (2010) identifies NGO reports as boundary-objects; as tangible artefacts representing participation in process, but also as symbols of democratic management that remove the necessity for real face-to-face collaboration. Here, the boundary-object becomes an ‘enactment of development’ rather than a radical practice that challenges ‘pre-existing expectations’ about who has the authority to speak (Green, 2010, p. 1256). This conceptualization induces conclusions that the process can be mitigated by difference, history and power, and that these forces remain implicit as long as the boundary-object is explicitly recognized as a legitimate tool by its users. Thus, in refashioning themselves as recognizable or comprehensible to the donor (by authoring the Anglo-Saxon report), development subjects may displace their sense of social sovereignty in an act of ‘colonial depersonalisation’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 195). Gray, Bebbington and Collison (2006) explicitly highlight these unconscious processes and argue that reporting in English has a necessarily colonizing and oppressive effect on development subjects who, in the process of writing a donor report (often in the donor’s language) dehumanize and un-culture their experiences of working in the field.

Extending these analyses, I highlight the diverse workers’ experiences of reporting in English that reproduce class or caste hierarchies and mitigate the worker’s experience of language through knowledge work. I therefore question the ‘bridging’ function of the boundary-object by examining the neo-colonial order it reproduces.

The English language and Indian selfhoods

Previous studies have analysed the imperialist dimension of using English in non-Anglo-Saxon organizations within the context of globalization (Boussebaa & Brown, 2017; Boussebaa, Sinha, & Gabriel, 2014; Morgan & Quack, 2005; Śliwa & Johansson, 2014). However, these studies do not provide an insight into how Anglo-Saxon management tools are conjoined with cognitive frames of sense-making, nor do they address the complex social ontology of neo-colonial Indian subjects. This paper contributes a rare application of postcolonial theory to the study of organizations, highlighting the inefficacy of the boundary-object, as a cognitive concept, to theorize the impact of English use on diverse stakeholders in a neo-colonial context.

NGO reports are predominantly written in English. They are written in English because it is considered to be a language that is recognized, understood and thus common to most, if not all, managers working in Indian NGOs. This assumption is based on the prevalence of English-medium schooling and higher education in India (Bhabha, 1994), India’s historical and colonial relation to British administration (Kaviraj, 1994), and the seeming efficacy with which English is used by Indian professional classes (e.g. Indian medical doctors working in the NHS and America, offshored Indian call centres; see also Boussebaa et al., 2014). The veritable utilization of the English language across India’s professional classes leads to claims about the connective (and developmental) role English plays in the Indian organizational context, rather than generating theories of language use that conceptualize it.

The juncture between language and power has been explored in organization studies in a variety of ways. For example, processes of Englishization in non-English-speaking countries have disempowering effects on workers based on workers’ historically colonial relationship to the English language (Boussebaa et al., 2014; Boussebaa & Brown, 2017). Critiques have also looked at the internationalization of business as managed through the expansion of English into non-English-speaking countries (Morgan & Quack, 2005), and others draw attention to the disempowering effects of native speakers making judgements about non-native English speakers in a UK context (Śliwa & Johansson, 2014). While these studies develop important theoretical insights into the effects of the English language on non-native English-speaking subjects, they do not provide an understanding of how English dominance is experienced differentially among workers through neo-colonial class or caste relations. Instead, by studying stakeholders as homogeneous, rather than inherently heterogeneous communities, these critiques uphold an implied inseparability among communities that facilitates knowledge to circulate. The boundary-object relies on this fusion (albeit temporal) to theorize knowledge objects and their collaborative potential. Bringing this ontological problem to a neo-colonial context, the boundary-object’s reliance on inseparability means that the colonial subject can be captured in knowledge formation because the grounds for collaboration necessitate the fieldworker becoming assimilated into a linguistic (English-mediated) structure. As my interest is to demonstrate the continuity of colonialism in contemporary Indian knowledge management tools, I now offer a brief historical note about India’s differentiated experience of English.

‘Modern colonialism,’ Ashis Nandy argues (1983, p. ix), ‘won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular² hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order.’ These hierarchies, Nandy (1983) describes, form a new world order in which traditional forms of organization are identified as barbaric and are overturned in favour of a more modern, critical and enlightened society. This transformation, despite being fought historically on purely racist grounds (see Cooke, 2003a, 2003b), is today rolled out by secular communities within neo-colonized regions and, as Ngugi (1986) argues, is a cultural war that uses language to discipline subjects.

Britain’s empire-building activities in India restrained historical Indian ontologies and produced inflexible identities based on religion and language. This process was not absolute and Indians experienced it in various ways over two centuries of British rule. Whereas pre-colonial selfhood drew on a variety of subject positions including caste, class, language (there are over 1600 languages in India), trade associations and gender, British administrative practices put an end to this fluidity once and for all. Colonialism demanded immense investment into military, political and administrative resources, all of which were managed using an ‘entire cognitive apparatus’ (Kaviraj, 1994, p. 117). In particular, mapping and counting practices induced an image of India that was categorical and teological (Chakrabarty, 2002; Kaviraj, 1994). Despite the subjugated castes of India not having the cognitive capacities to allow them a full understanding of numbers, statistics and categories, these cognitive tools allowed groups of Indians to understand their position in terms of majority or minority and to claim rights over geographies and resources drawing on this quantified ontology (Chakrabarty, 2002).

As a consequence, social categorization in India became predominantly defined by religious and caste identification, with language playing a critical role in solidifying cultural identities further. Access and ability to speak the English language set a boundary between Indians who accepted the Raj’s authority and those who remained resistant to its ideology. Yet, the uptake of the English language was fragmented and its authority was accepted and undermined in a variety of ways. For example, by the 1860s, the British authorities had established an English-medium education system that was accessed predominantly by the Hindu upper castes, Muslim elites and Zoroastrians. English-fluent Indian workforces were in high demand. Indians occupied senior positions in the Indian army and courts so that local Indians could support the 50,000 or so British personnel stationed in India in their imperial activities. Within colonial institutions, it was predominantly the English-speaking, high-caste, Hindu Indians who found a political visibility and voice.

Yet, these distinctions based on language were also in flux and prone to subversion. For example, the nationalist movement that overturned colonialism was far from unified in the way language was conceptualized and used by its proponents. English-speaking, high-caste politicians who retained the caste system (e.g. Jawarlal Nehru) formed India’s first government alongside socialist, anti-caste, anti-Hindu economists (e.g. B. R. Ambedkar). The English language was used by the political elite (e.g. Mohandas Gandhi) and resisted by a number of freedom movements in India (e.g. E. V. P. Ramasamy). Thus, a conflicted modernity pervaded the map of Indian identities; modernity did not produce dichotomies between modern and pre-colonial selfhoods. This hybridity (Bhabha, 1994) continues to sustain an image of Indianness, as well as disrupting it. I draw on this problematization of Indian ontology to demonstrate the contradictory effects of using English reports in Indian development contexts.

Methodology

To understand the co-ordinating role of reporting across organizational settings, I utilized a multi-sited ethnography. My interest in understanding development subjects’ differentiated experience of the English language means that I begin with a reflexive account of how my subjectivity informs the analysis and experiences offered here. I then describe the research design, my methods, analytical approach and translation issues.

The role of the researcher

If the aim of this paper is to reveal the loss of subjectivity incurred through the loss of language, then how can I re-humanize my account of this loss using the English language that I am framing as unacceptable, as a form of oppression? Developing a critique of knowledge production can be construed as an act of violence in itself; it is an abstract phenomenon that can only be understood by analysing structuring power relations between subjects (Nandy, 1983; Ngugi, 1986). By conceptualizing it, I perform a necessary dislocation that separates my rationalized account of the boundary-object from the development subjects who use Anglo-Saxon reporting in their work. My subjective role in knowledge formation is inescapable.

An ethnographic methodology goes to some lengths to make this problematization blatant and central to the research process. Reflexivity sanctions the ethnographer to make knowledge claims but to make them with a self-awareness of her personal politics, privileges and resources. It is imperative to open up concepts of selfhood to challenge and intervene in grand narratives, rather than to close down understandings by reproducing them (see also Prasad, 2014). I therefore state my own subjectivity and politics and how it impacted research activities. My subjectivity as marked by Anglophonic academic British Indian high-caste Hindi-speaking fair-skinned woman queer unmarried young unquestionably imposes multiple interpretive frameworks on the findings I present here. My Indianness was drawn on to create connections with participants (e.g. I sat on the floor to eat with my hands) and it was ignored when participants wanted to exclude me. For example, during one site visit, I was labelled ‘English’ and kept at arm’s length throughout my time there. My insider/outsider perspective therefore presented difficulties and barriers as well as a source for connecting to participants. I used these interactions to develop an analysis that took power relations between the workers, their own differentiated selfhood, and relations with me as a foundation to avoid essentializing workers’ experiences of reporting. In practical ways, the knowledge and analysis I produced was shared and discussed with participants throughout the fieldwork. This process was not always without resistance; however, it did instruct a measure of accountability that challenged the production of a grand narrative.

Methods and analysis

My research adopted a multi-sited ethnographic design that allowed me to understand the different functions (both formal and informal) that the boundary-object played within and between workers and across organizational settings. I was participant observer from October 2003 till May 2004 at three Indian NGOs including an international donor NGO (in Delhi), its regional headquarters called South Office (in Hyderabad, AP) and one of South Office’s partnering NGOs (in Araku Valley, AP).³ During fieldwork I used South Office as my base organization and visited the other organizations for months at a time. I was given full access to internal meetings, stakeholder meetings and field visits. My observations focused on activities where reporting was used to co-ordinate work among stakeholders, as well as to secure funding.

I employed three complementary methods to understand the impact of reporting in English on workers. These included first, analysing formal reports, second, daily observations of formal and informal worker interactions, and third, semi-structured interviewing. This paper contains analyses of two reports, 34 semi-structured interviews, and observations recorded in a research journal. Daily observations of workers’ interactions commenced from the moment I started fieldwork. At each site, I started by observing behaviours associated with reporting. I attended planning meetings, shadowed site visits and observed ‘writing phases’ – times when NGOs prepared donor reports. I noted that workers argued, bartered and self-questioned their efficacy at writing reports. Observations brought to light the powerful emotions workers felt when asked to communicate formally to stakeholders. To understand this performative dimension of reporting, I carried out an initial round of interviews with workers. Each interview lasted between 50 and 75 minutes. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and printed up for analysis. Table 1 sets out the different organizations I researched, the time spent at each site, the number of interviews carried out, and the workers’ gender and caste.

Table 1.

The Organizations and Interviews.

Site	Duration at site	Total participants interviewed	Women and men	Caste and religion
Delhi HQs	January 2004	7 Senior management	1 woman 6 men	1 Christian 6 Hindu high-caste
South Office	October–December 2003	5 Senior management	2 women 3 men	5 Hindu high-caste
Partner NGO	February–May 2004	22 managers and co-ordinators	8 women 14 men	22 Tribal
Partner Meeting	20–24^th February 2004	9 repeat interviews (1 Delhi HQ; 3 South Office; 5 partner NGOs)	2 women 7 men	4 Hindu-high caste 5 Tribal

In line with Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) method of theoretical sampling, interview participants were identified for data triangulation and gaining a deeper understanding of analysed cases rather than a representative analysis of possible variations between cases or participants. Interview questions explored four main themes: how does reporting feature in daily working practices, how does reporting impact outcomes (organizational and inter-organizational), how does reporting impact organizational priorities and fieldwork, and what informal monitoring and evaluation tools exist in the organization? During the interviewing stage, contradictory themes emerged that described reporting as a connective strategy among stakeholders and as a tool to demarcate between proficient and under-developed workers. I conducted secondary one-to-one interviews to explore these contradictions. Secondary interviews explored two additional themes: How does reporting in English impact workers and stakeholder relations? How have changing reporting structures impacted stakeholder relations? Alongside interviewing, I collected and analysed 22 reports and four documents that were given to me by the organizations. This paper analyses two of these reports, one from South Office and one from the partner NGO. Both are written in English.

Data analysis was conducted using Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) constant comparison method, where theory is generated over several rounds of data collection and analysis to account for how a social phenomenon ‘works’ in a given context. Analysis began during fieldwork and was composed of reading and re-reading research journal notes, reports and interview transcripts simultaneously. Recurrent themes were noted during this initial phase; open coding (O1, O2) revealed workers associated the boundary-object with a ‘learning’ tool (O1 – Learning) and with coalescing development practices (O2 – Bridging). Secondary interviews followed alongside analysing reports. Transcripts and reports were read and re-read simultaneously; axial coding (A1, A2) revealed English-language reports dictated the parameters of collaboration (A1 – Language as structure) and all three stakeholder groups experienced language differentially through caste/class identities (A2 – Tribal/Andhrite/Foreign identities). Concluding analysis revealed theoretical codes (TC) highlighting the boundary-object’s relation to caste/class structures is activated through English (TC – English as activating inequalities). This activation serves to disadvantage the most marginalized groups of workers who are unable to access local languages and tools to describe themselves and the community projects in which they are involved in.

Translation

Language and translation issues during interviewing and observations were an ongoing matter. Delhi HQ workers spoke mostly English and almost three-quarters of staff were bilingual in Hindi, a language in which I am fluent. I could therefore carry out all fieldwork activities independently. South Office workers were fluent in English and Telugu. English was always utilized in interviews and many meetings, and I therefore had no need for a translator. The partnering NGO was made up of three trilingual workers (fluent in Adivasi Oriya, Hindi and Telugu), two bilingual workers (fluent in English and Adivasi Oriya) and a majority of workers who spoke only Adivasi Oriya – a tribal oral language quite separate from Hindi and Telugu (446 workers). Note that the term ‘Adivasi’, in native language, already infuses the subject as tribal; the subject is already caste as pre-modern and hence should be spoken for. Translation was used only with the partner organization, as I do not speak Telugu or Adivasi Oriya. I was conscious of the problems of using senior workers as translators when observing and interviewing fieldworkers. Translation added a layer of othering that was not experienced by South Office and Delhi HQ on account that they spoke English. Translation mirrored the distance and marginalization of tribal workers from mainstream society. To mitigate this power relation, I secured the translation skills of two fieldworkers: a tribal fieldworker and a tribal project officer who both spoke Hindi.

Overview of the Cases

This multi-sited ethnography spans three interrelated NGO partners. These include, first, a partner NGO based in the tribal heartlands of central India where workers speak an oral language pre-existing modern Indian languages; second, South Office, the partner organization’s international donor located in Hyderabad, where English, Oriya and Telugu are utilized; and third, the international NGO country headquarters based in New Delhi, where English is used for all internal and external communications. Reporting among these three stakeholders is carried out in English, despite South Office and the partner NGO using local languages and forms of knowledge production to report informally between them.

Delhi HQ is a donor organization and has a history of over 80 years working on human rights issues in India. In the 1920s, an English philanthropist designed the first campaigns in collaboration with Mahatma Gandhi. It has a federated form, structuring projects across India through four regional offices, South Office being one these branches. Delhi HQ employed over 30 members of staff. English was spoken throughout the office; Hindi was spoken very rarely and only during informal conversations. The director was an American expatriate and the only white member of staff. At the time of carrying out this research, Delhi HQ was managing significant changes to how information and knowledge is structured amongst its regional offices.

The South Office team were a small entity set up in 1998. It employed three programme staff and one administrator; Delhi HQ’s mission and goals informed its rights-based approach. The management team were highly educated and had social science backgrounds (e.g. development studies, economics, politics). South Office managed eight projects across AP and Orissa. Its charismatic director (since 2000) had made significant changes to the organization’s reporting process. She had re-designed monitoring and evaluation as a collaborative activity, breaking form with written reporting and addressing the communicative needs of children. She had introduced alternative reports by way of using puppet shows, songs, theatre and play as a way of involving children in project evaluation. However, South Office’s formal reporting structures were changing; these changes were driven centrally and demanded standardization of reporting indicators.

The partnering NGO was located in Araku Valley, an area with a high population of tribal people living and working there.⁴ Set up in 1992, the NGO employed 451 tribal people. The NGO had been working with South Office for two years on HIV/AIDS issues. Better-educated and more affluent workers in this stakeholder context were fluent in English. After designing and rolling out educational campaigns since its inception, the NGO had engaged lower-ranked workers to use writing and numbers in their reporting practices. Alongside these data collection activities, the NGO used theatre, song and puppetry to communicate development goals to tribal children and adults.

English prominence and NGO reporting in India

Among the stakeholders, there existed an uneven uptake of English; however, where it was taken up, the more affluent and privileged workers utilized it. English, therefore, emerged in a negotiated form that was already localized in a number of ways. All inter-organizational communication was carried out in English and employed social scientific methodologies to gather, analyse and disseminate knowledge. These reports were written by a handful of workers in the partner NGO; this was in sharp contrast to all workers in the regional and national donors being fluent in English and therefore having the capacity to read and share reports.

Reflecting on these differences, I noted the way reporting featured in each donor organization’s daily activities. South Office’s documentation was well-ordered and kept in exemplary conditions. My observation notes describe: ‘reports were beautifully bound in a black leather volume’; reports were carefully bound like a thesis, suggesting a literary association. Delhi HQ mirrored this educational association; reports were kept in a ‘library’ in the centre of the office space with a walk-through structure. Reports materialized as something scholarly, respected and treasured. For example, Delhi HQ and South Office workers referred to reporting as ‘institutional learning’, ‘a guide for the future’ and ‘a learning system for the whole organization’. Reports were perceived to have a cognitive function – a learning function – among the donor stakeholders. These sentiments echoed in a cross-section of interviews with workers from the partner NGO. Reports were described as ‘proof’, ‘research tool’, ‘self-learning’ and ‘my ideas develop’. Anglo-Saxon reports were associated with distinctly cognitive elements of learning (research tool, a learning system), and conjointly writing the report in English was experienced as a form of empowerment (self-learning, ideas develop).

On the other hand, workers at the partner NGO highlighted the problematic association between reporting structures and writing in English that inhibited collaboration. The partner’s documentation officer stated, ‘there is a real problem with relating to donors when most of our workers don’t speak the donor’s language’ and the Director contended, ‘If you can’t read or write, then you can’t do most of the work in the field. We don’t make these rules, it’s what we need to do in order to report to our donors.’ Learning English in order to report to the donor was an inescapable part of a longer journey towards becoming developed. Here, the boundary-object activated a structure for collaboration with a donor that was based on knowledge of social science and the English language. The few privileged workers who were proficient in English entered these collaborations while the vast majority of tribal fieldworkers were excluded from formal donor–partner knowledge exchange.

English proficiency constructed Indian selfhoods in a variety of ways. For donors, the ability to write a report was conjoined with a global outlook. It was common for donor managers to point out their connection to the global North. During interviews with South Office and Delhi HQ, management stated: ‘I was in Bristol for 15 years, I got my masters in Development there’, ‘I did my PhD with Robert Chambers’, ‘I worked with UNDP, best years’, ‘People laughed at me when I said I wanted to come back to India’. Literate, Eurocentric, global, English-speaking: these workers’ self-descriptions proudly drew on their relationship to Anglo-Saxon knowledge and excluded their local subjectivity. Workers located their qualifications outside of India through an imagined lack of the local context, such that they could be constructed as having tools to create knowledge with global reach – beyond the immediate surrounds of their work. The report served to reify an implied inseparability, this time not with other stakeholders, but with the global North. Here, the boundary-object amplified identities that drew on a hierarchical language structure and a sense of superiority based on foreignness.

In contrast, the partner NGO perceived itself as a small entity, with a direct connection to the tribal experience; they employed, and worked for, the tribal community in Araku Valley. As the director explained: ‘Our goals are simple, they are very narrow, to make tribals’ lives better!’ Workers’ professional selfhoods were not tethered to their connection to a world outside, but to a world within. For example, the director drew on local knowledge cultures that were oral and indigenous; these included tribal songs, theatre, dances and puppet shows. The songs were known by all workers and would be sung in the evenings, often around a campfire and always when a donor visited – providing the donor with a view of the spectacular or exotic. Indeed, donors expected to hear a song or to see a row of dancing tribal women when they made a field visit. Thus, tribal aspects of their selfhood provided social capital to perform an NGO identity to the world outside. Something of this spectacular was visible in the partner’s reports. The partner was encouraged by South Office to include photographs of fieldworker meetings and village activities in reports. Photography was absent in South Office and Delhi HQ reporting – viewing workers’ and beneficiaries’ bodies was not appropriate for communicating ideas about work at the higher levels. Thus, South Office closely managed tribal identity; it was ‘edited’ out of communications with Delhi HQ, where co-ordination around development projects was imagined as possible only at the expense of tribal visibility.

The boundary-object therefore provided an opportunity for collaboration; however, the report’s format incorporated stakeholders who could read, write and perform a global identity. Local identities based on local knowledge found little visibility in NGO reports. For example, tribal people’s vast knowledge about local ecologies, biodiversity and plant-based medicine was absent from inter-organizational reporting, despite development work including health and education components. This supports Green’s (2010, p. 1256) assertion that the boundary-object represents an ‘enactment of development’; that despite collaborative work materializing through localized practices (counting the number of children in school, using puppetry to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS), the report’s form and content undermines tribal knowledge. This finding is not so much an example of boundary-objects creating ‘“barricades” and “mazes”’ to knowledge transfer (Oswick & Robertson, 2009, p. 190), or even that the motivations of particular organizational actors impede equitable knowledge formation (Kimble et al., 2010), but rather that collaborative reporting appears to reproduce inequalities based on the social order it invokes through language and form. I now provide a comparative analysis of reports, to demonstrate how selfhoods are constructed in reports.

Inscribing subjectivities: Reports and the construction of Indian selfhoods

Across all three NGOs, formal reporting comprised a number of detailed stages of data collection, analysis and writing up. This writing up occurred every quarter in the partner NGO, every six months to a year within South Office and annually at Delhi HQ level. Figure 1 illustrates this process and the workers responsible for each cycle of reporting.

Figure 1.

The Reporting Process.

Despite Delhi HQ insisting on a standardized format for reporting, South Office resisted any formalization and instead used a uniquely emotional narrative to relate their work in the field. However, unlike other reports, and in contradiction to its emotional content, South Office’s annual report is formatted as a CD-ROM; the virtual template of this report gives it a removed and rationalized appearance. The report ‘opens’ with a page composed of two photographs of smiling children and the NGO’s logo. There is an enter/exit button on the bottom left-hand corner. After pressing ‘enter’, the next screen displays links to partner reports. Each report is a short 10-page Word document and has no author name, contents page, photographs, images or annexure. The analysis here looks at a report evaluating the Araku Valley partner.

The report’s author is not stated, yet the style is so personal that the author’s voice is very much present in the prose. An excerpt reads:

However challenging our work, it had its moments of despair. In the who-loses-control tug of war, I am proud to say that we have emerged triumphantly, and not surrendered to emotional blackmail. This has forged a stronger and personalised bond with children of all projects.

The tone of the report is immediately engaging, breaking away from standard reporting styles; the personal tone gives voice to the emotional life of the author (despair, tug of war, emotional blackmail). The emotional voice claims the report as a space for self-determination that foregrounds the Andhrite experience (we have emerged triumphantly), yet materializes self-control over self-expression through using the English language.

Despite the report giving the author a space to self-produce, the subject-positions available to beneficiaries are limited. Their subjectivity is formed through contradiction: folding their way of life into new secular selfhoods that alter traditional ones. The report describes the children involved in development projects as agentic actors and adult-like:

Our workers were highly inspired, motivated and charged by children’s involvement in our internal management processes. Children bring with them, challenges, zest and seriousness, these in turn catalyses our own thinking process.

Here, the beneficiaries are described as organized, active, strong and resourceful. There are other references in the report that describe children as ‘bold’, ‘involved’ and ‘not willing to backtrack’. Their attitude to project activities is described as full of ‘commitment and vehemence… for fair hearing to their opinions and voices’. Children are attributed with citizen-like qualities and characteristics. A programme manager noted this transformation as progressive: ‘we are breaking cultural rules and challenging the authority of adults’ and simultaneously as a secular activity that re-organizes village life at the grassroots: ‘this is something new because it is something democratic’. Thus, the new language of secularism produces empowered child subjectivities that overturn traditional familial and religious structures. But in doing so, the new language assimilates tribal children into a developmental logic that draws boundaries around progressive (democratic) and backward (Adivasi) identities. Here, it is important to reflect on the social imaginary that may be reproduced by using English to describe such dramatic transformations. English mediates representations of these transformations and sustains a new world order; it sustains a social imaginary of English’s democratic function in a postcolonial India. A notable exclusion in the report is the adult tribal experience. The fieldworkers’ involvement is noted as periphery (our workers were…) but not central to development work. To understand how fieldworkers construct a narrative of their experience, I now provide an analysis of a partner report written for South Office.

The quarterly report takes the form of an eight-page, A4, paper document printed in black ink. The partner report employs a diary format that lists activities alongside photographs of tribal beneficiaries and workers under monthly headings. In the report’s text, the beneficiaries are referred to as ‘club members’ or simply as ‘members’ throughout the report. This label implies an organized group, an amount of exclusivity, and also the idea that those who are part of the club have certain privileges and rights. Beyond the use of English, the NGO’s reconstruction of children as club members also serves to possess the children in discourse, to manage and direct their subjectivities. Children are constructed as dynamic and well ordered, taking on the position of political activists in their communities:

Members are very eager to know about child rights, they agreed to work with school drop-outs about re-joining school, and they promise 100% education rates in their village.

Here, the child takes on the qualities of a self-directed and independent force, capable of understanding her rights and pledging to carry out complex activities. The report also includes descriptions of children as ‘proud’, ‘eager’ and ‘active’: the child is reconstructed as worker-activist. The re-organization of the child’s subjectivity (as adult-activist) impacts on how the report produces the subjectivities of working adults. The report does not describe the experiences of workers, but it does provide a long list of ‘training camps’, ‘training of trainers workshops’ and ‘re-orientation trainings’. In contrast to the children who are produced as knowing and active, the workers are produced as lacking, disorientated and passive.

To understand how workers experienced these trainings, I interviewed tribal fieldworkers. Participants offered a variety of self-descriptions that undermined a sense of self. For example, a fieldworker stated, ‘I felt very scared of the donor, very scared. I couldn’t read or write, and they were asking me to do really complicated things.’ Another participant said, ‘I don’t talk to the donor. That’s not something for me, you know, I don’t know them so I don’t feel comfortable’ and a project co-ordinator stated, ‘It takes such a long time to learn about reporting because you are trying a new language, numbers and also doing something completely separate from your normal life.’ Donors used trainings to teach tribal workers how to construct reports (mapping, counting, interviewing) so co-ordination could be more collaborative. However, fieldworkers experienced trainings as outside of normal tribal life and alien to local experiences of trade, politics and sociality, thus undermining the function of the report to bring donors closer to fieldworkers.

Despite these problems, reporting was also experienced as something empowering on account of its cognitive function: its ability to teach adults to map, count and analyse data to construct a rational argument. As one fieldworker succinctly stated:

First I couldn’t talk to my seniors, I couldn’t even look them in the eye. But now, after being in the community, following through with surveys, writing everything I have experienced in a report, it’s made me confident. I can discuss things with my seniors. Sometimes I even disagree with them because I can say ‘No, but I didn’t find that in my report!

There is a paradox that this worker faces in relation to learning how to write reports for donors. His association with his own language incites a feeling of flippancy (‘I couldn’t talk to my seniors, I couldn’t even look them in the eye!’); but the ability to write in the donor’s language incites a sense of efficacy and delight (‘it’s made me confident’). The cognitive or pragmatic function of the report was perceived to override the inequalities writing in English reproduced at the grassroots. Alongside this, workers positioned languages in a hierarchy, where even borrowed tongues could not carry the weight of the tribal experience (see Ngugi, 1986). Thus, collaboration was only possible when marginalized stakeholders repressed a tribal selfhood in favour of a secular one that was aligned with foreign values, methods and languages.

In the remaining analytical section, I show how report subjectivities are performed within stakeholder encounters. In doing so, I suggest how local tools for self-expression would help produce empowered tribal identities. I draw on my observations and interviews during a four-day partner event where NGO workers, children, South Office and Delhi donors were present.

Performing the boundary-object

The stakeholder meeting took place in a large conference centre on the outskirts of Hyderabad. It was a sizeable event, inviting over 100 participants from all eight of South Office’s projects. During the four-day event, I noted that language was important in maintaining subject-positions and hierarchy. Different groups of workers spoke different languages, depending on their regionality, education and training. Despite the majority of workers being fluent in Telugu, Oriya or Adivasi Oriya, Delhi managers carried out the event predominantly in English. A few sessions were managed by South Office and utilized Telugu. A number of fieldworkers and all four South Office managers acted as translators.

I observed how power operated non-discursively as well. The fieldworkers sat on the floor with the children; there were jokes and hugs, giggles and restlessness. Senior management sat on plastic chairs, placed at the periphery of the room. Their heightened positions enclosed the participants with a watchful gaze. NGO workers were then split up from the children and each group was asked to suggest indicators for HIV/AIDS programming. Noting these instructions, the group of 60 or so workers formed into groups of 10 and sat in circles around flipcharts – an Anglo-Saxon object.

A few NGO workers facilitated small groups of children, asking them to draw and make posters. The children were visibly more comfortable. They spread themselves out and some left the conference building to sit in the sunny gardens, breaking for play and asking for songs to be sung. The fieldworkers stayed inside and worked diligently in their groups, writing lists with numbers and bullet points. Despite fieldworkers having low literacy skills, the tools they were provided with forced them to express themselves in a way that was unfamiliar and undermined a sense of involvement. Several comments were made during these activities that indicated workers’ frustrations: ‘I feel like I’m in prison! This is pointless’, ‘I don’t like writing, can you do it?’, ‘This is a waste of time, we should be out there doing our work’. As only a few workers could take the lead in discussions and writing ideas on the flipcharts, the spaces for adult tribal experiences to be voiced were severely limited. The apparent frustration with group writing could also suggest that collaboration was, and remained, a difficult enterprise and may have benefitted from better facilitation or a familiar format to support unfettered involvement. However, notwithstanding the need for a different format, the fieldworkers’ visible awkwardness with the task impacted perceptions of them.

The following day, the children’s groups were first to report back. Holding up posters and drawings, they shouted out their ideas, as if in defiance and with a level of pride. South Office managers delighted in these presentations, noting to each other that the children had a ‘better awareness’ than adults and that ‘they are more tolerant’. As reports centralized the child-activist’s experience, the positioning of child as adult at the stakeholder meeting led to infantilizing the adult NGO worker. During the adults’ presentations, South Office managers were concerned by the lack of imagination and understanding, they stated: ‘This is focused on project activities’, ‘the adults are very general’, ‘I have a doubt. Why are children so good at this and adults so bad?’ The fieldworkers were outcast as irrelevant, as unable to think. This perception endangered the collaborative element of the event, as it associated the fieldworkers’ lack of confidence with a lack of cognition.

During the next day, a Delhi manager with South Office managers finalized the indicators that fieldworkers would report against. The Delhi manager scribbled keywords on a whiteboard and said: ‘I think we can just work with the kids’ indicators, the kids did really well. We can ignore what adults have said.’ The other managers nodded in agreement; the fieldworkers’ lists and bullet points were deemed irrelevant. The workers’ voices were not adult enough for informing reporting formats, their ideas were not evolved enough to permit them a role in determining their work activities. Hierarchies invoked through language and Anglo-Saxon tools interacted with already existing local social hierarchies (between tribal fieldworkers and Indian donors) and also created new ones based on secular selfhoods (between child-activist and adult-child).

Discussion

Recognizing the complex international terrain in which organizations exist today, Star (2010) asks that we analyse knowledge production as a process that materializes co-ordination by circulating objects within new or established infrastructures. Further, she seeks to understand how communities create common understandings without losing the diversity of their social worlds. This study has highlighted that NGO reporting is used to co-ordinate activities, share knowledge and include all stakeholders in collaborative work; however, it achieves this collaboration through utilizing English. English emerges as a structuring architecture in formal work, through report writing, and informal work, during stakeholder meetings. This structure reproduces social hierarchies related to India’s historical use of English in colonial administrative practices. The structure also activates new identities founded on a secularization of Adivasi organizing. Let us now reflect on the boundary-object’s defining attributes in light of the findings of this study.

Interpretive flexibility

A key characteristic of a boundary-object is that it is common enough to multiple social worlds to ensure a minimization of identity during times of co-ordination while simultaneously providing enough flexibility so that it is adaptable to autonomous social worlds. The boundary-object is therefore a tool that serves an association based on distributed cognitive processes that facilitate corresponding interpretations across stakeholders and maintain the independence of each community. This conceptualization of knowledge tools is inextricably tied to an implied inseparability among social worlds that appears temporarily and supports pragmatism (Carlile, 2002, 2004). Latour (1987) would insert that the imperial dimensions of knowledge formation (as observed during elite groups stabilizing ‘facts’) will consistently override the pragmatic logic. As my findings highlight, the conflation of English and reporting undermines collaboration because it is the most marginalized communities that experience English as a barrier. Furthermore, the conflation of pragmatism and reporting in English serves to prop up and amplify powerful stakeholders in the development context because these workers associate proficiency in English with a superior identity that questions the collaborative premise for equitable knowledge work.

Findings challenge the assumption that boundary-objects produce co-ordination without de-stabilizing the autonomy of all involved. NGO reports reproduce the muteness of the development subject by prioritizing a cognitive, and therefore de-historicized, framework for theorizing interpretation across social worlds. It is the de-historicized cognitive premise for learning that appeals most to tribal fieldworkers who internalize its claims to ‘development’ and ensure that the boundary-object appears as a hermeneutically porous and pragmatic object. Ngugi argues that the persistence of the colonizer’s language in African, Latin American and the Indian subcontinent serves to ‘annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves’ (Ngugi, 1986, p. 3). By writing and circulating reports written in English, NGO workers co-opt the inferiority and savagery that their own languages come to represent into collaborative stakeholder knowledge work.

Representation and co-ordination

The boundary-object embodies the desire to ‘bridge’ or ‘abolish’ the distance between seemingly diverse communities, identifying the routines through which co-ordination is possible. The premise for theorizing co-ordination is to understand the nature of collaboration during uncertainty, division or when established rules of engagement are yet to be formed. The NGO report can be nominally identified as a knowledge tool that coheres stakeholders around projects that are dynamic and uncertain because they set out to rearrange established socio-economic relations towards more equitable structures. My findings indicate that the NGO report’s capacity to democratize co-ordination faltered along the lines that it exposed and amplified the distance between stakeholders. Tribal adults were consistently positioned as passive and infantile within a reporting regime that demanded knowledge of English or enlightened methodologies. Thus, distance between stakeholders was defined by donors (and the tribal partner) as a measurement of knowing and not knowing how to construct a report. Here, the fieldworker’s inequality became tethered to her ability to write a report, and the donor’s superiority was embodied in the boundary-object’s capacity to teach (‘a learning tool’), rather than co-ordinate. In this formulation, is it not precisely the desire to abolish the distance between communities that creates it? Here, identifying the conflation of knowledge and communicative form may offer an avenue to address the limitations Anglo-Saxon management tools impose on development work.

Where children were given the tools of play and art, they were able to articulate their wishes that ultimately became central to the new reporting indicators for the entire South Indian region. Fieldworkers who were not offered such tools during collaborative forums failed to engage effectively with donors and ultimately their ideas were written out of reporting formats. The boundary-object reproduced infrastructures for knowledge work that undermined fieldworkers’ ability to self-represent. It therefore follows that translation of the form and report to local languages by local fieldworkers could overcome the problem of inequalities and disempowerment. During fieldwork, I noted that tribal workers questioned whether their reports ‘captured field realities?’, ‘Did reports have the right indicators?’, and do ‘fieldworkers know what to look for and what to record?’ These questions pervaded conversations about reports – there was constant self-questioning but no one asked if what the fieldworkers produced was already a report. The Anglo-Saxon report was unfamiliar to fieldworkers and moreover its form and language materialized the distance between knowing (donors) and not knowing (tribal adults). I contend that in any given multilingual context, the boundary-object is much more than an act of lingual substitution (using one language in favour of another); rather it is a more complex negotiation between two or more cultural identities. Thus, the text (or boundary-object) cannot be analysed in itself as a knowledge tool, but rather it necessitates an analysis of the whole language and culture in which it is constituted (Bassnett & Trivedi, 1999).

The findings from this paper also contribute to current debates in postcolonial MOS. In particular, this paper offers an ethnography of knowledge work that helps to work through the differences between hybridity and translation in neo-colonial workplaces. Findings indicate that the continuity of colonial languages in the development sector can mute fieldworkers’ subjectivities by colonizing their language and modes for self-expression. Fieldworkers associated reporting with struggle, awkwardness and lack. Findings also show that English use may offer management a device to graft their selfhoods onto the foreign experience of Bristol, the UN or David Chambers in an act of superiority over other development subjects. Thus, the emphasis on language has helped to make clearer the neo-colonial infrastructure that mitigates the conditions for co-ordination. Findings support a radical appraisal of English usage in development contexts alongside reaffirming the ever-pressing need to safeguard indigenous knowledge and languages as a de-colonizing strategy for self-empowerment.

A focus on language translation has also offered postcolonial MOS a slightly different vista from that of hybridity for understanding knowledge objects. Hybridity would conceptualize translation as ‘the performative nature of cultural communication’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 288), that is, the condition of Western multiculturalism brought about by ‘Third World’ migrant flows. It would not require the analysis of a multilingual context and it would not prescribe a methodology that utilizes more than one language. Ngugi’s (1986) critique of language accepts that the neo-colonial context is a hybridity of languages and cultures, but it goes further in showing how different degrees and forms of hybridization mitigate the power of colonial languages, and also that no two hybrids are alike. Thus, the seemingly inevitable formation of a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1996, see also Frenkel, 2008; Yousfi, 2014) as produced through migration and transnational cultural exchange is overturned in place of a neo-colonial structure ordered by language and experienced differentially across caste or class orders (see also, Chatterjee 2016). Accepting rather than working to resolve these differences may provide donors the motivation to reform boundary-objects to accommodate diverse languages.

Conclusion

Translation can be an instrument for discovery and exchange; it can be a process that helps us encounter the other in experience and language. In conclusion, I would propose that there is an urgent need to protect and expand spaces in the postcolonial/neo-colonial worlds where hybridized and multilingual selfhoods may enter development discourses through translation. Indeed, if we bend to the forces that demand a monolingual, single selfhood that proliferates under the guise of pragmatism, we will very quickly become translated into alienable forms, dislodged from the shaky and multifarious ground that our complex subjectivities thrive on. This concern is perhaps most urgently sensed among those who speak tribal languages, whose fate is ever more precarious in a new era of post-liberal anti-internationalization supported by a perverse xenophobia.

The findings of this paper have important policy implications. Recent efforts to standardize social reporting (e.g. the GRI and EMAS) have led to a set of industry norms and standards being published. These initiatives are celebrated for their participatory and democratic dimensions; however, as long as Anglo-Saxon reporting practices are used to evaluate projects in non-Western regions, beneficiaries will remain marginalized in the politics of development. The implications of this study could be further developed through looking at other communicative techniques, which are increasingly incorporated into reporting processes – the role of storytelling or narrative play may shed light on active strategies of resistance that flourish, but are silenced in the formal report. Further, NGOs are already employing mobile and multimedia digital equipment in knowledge production processes that allow subjects to speak in their own language. This is another frontier that is yet to be explored in the idea of collaborative practices. The use of social media is a contemporary development phenomenon and may be more successful in challenging dominant forms of knowledge production in the sector. Therefore, further research that looks into how and why certain types of management tools become prioritized, as well as how are they experienced and performed in a given institutional context, can extend our understanding of the complex politics underlining knowledge production among development stakeholders.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the EGOS conference (2015) sub-theme: Inequality, Institutions and Organizations. I thank the sub-theme organizers and participants for their comments, and particularly Kamal Munir, for his support and encouragement to rewrite the paper more critically. I also thank my colleague, Yasmin Ibrahim, for her detailed comments, critical questions and engaged discussions that helped tighten the paper – along with my thinking. I am also grateful to Rafael Alcadipani for his remarks and encouragement during the later stages of writing. And last, but not least, to the three anonymous reviewers and Senior Editor, Bobby Banerjee, who provided insightful revisions and helped progress the paper towards its current form, I am indebted to your time, energy and engagement with my ideas. Thank you.

Funding

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number PTA030200300275].

Notes

Author biography

Sadhvi Dar’s research investigates the juncture between measurement and culture, and contributes to current understandings in organization studies about accountability, reporting and processes of knowledge production.

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