Abstract
This edited book Organizing at the Margins: Theorizing Organizations of Struggle in the Global South, centered on local cultural experiences and social imaginaries of equity and justice, is a source of knowledge that disrupts the dominant Eurocentric epistemology and presents decolonial politics. The decolonial impetus in organizational research involves learning about social imaginaries from organizations of struggle at the margins (Pal & Nieto-Fernandez, 2023; Pal et al., 2022). As one of the editors put it, the book “envisions a more nuanced, context-specific, and justice-oriented understanding of organizing and organization by drawing inspiration from the rich bodies of knowledge from the Global South that have long been consigned to the margins by colonial and, subsequently, neo-colonial structures of domination” (p. 16). This is a pioneering book about organizing in the global South rooted in emancipatory politics and in organizations of struggles that democratize knowledge-making, center alternate epistemes, and challenge dominant hegemonic ideologies. The conceptual categories constituting such alternative epistemes not only bring forth the local organizational values but challenge the sovereignty of Western rationality and contribute to decolonial politics (Broadfoot & Munshi, 2007). Understanding organizing principles from the global South provides entry points for alternative epistemologies and crystallizes social justice agendas in organizational research. This book, as Mohan Dutta wrote in his chapter, “puts real politics back into decolonial thinking rather than present privatized ideas of social justice” (p. 158). This edited book turns to the liberatory roots of decolonial struggles and makes interventions into dominant organizational principles that render land and natural resources as exploitable and gendered, raced, and classed bodies as killable (Banerjee, 2008; Cruz, 2021).
This edited collection, consisting of 13 chapters, brings forth organizational stories from global South - Africa, Asia, North America, and Latin America and is divided into three sections. The first section, Decolonizing Dominant Epistemologies, emphasizes “a process of unlearning for relearning and reimagining” (p.5). The second section, Dismantling Borders, aims to “challenge and transform the hegemonic social order from the perspectives of disenfranchised communities at the margins” (p. 7). The third section, Deconstructing Structures, focuses on “decoloniality for creating opportunities for the articulation of alternative discourses that challenge oppressive mechanisms of neoliberal governance” (p. 8).
Notable highlights from the book include a conversation with iconic indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwahi Smith (chapter 2), who shares insights about the relationship between colonialism and academia and highlights the need to return to more authentic roots of the Indigenous mode of organizing. This argument solidifies the book’s aim to address “imposing colonizing conceptual frameworks on the global landscape, leading to huge disparities in power and control” (p. 16). Alijla’s story (chapter 8) about the traumatic experience of crossing the Gaza Strip draws attention to the longing for imagined freedom and a border in the global South. His story bears witness to the commodification of freedom (p. 123) and the economy of starvation (130) that invites us to “think in the margins” and in “organizations of struggle” (Mignolo, 2012). Similarly, “Invisible [hi]story of the other” (chapter 9) makes a clear connection between slavery, dehumanization of the other, and modern scientific management and rewrites historical narratives (p. 147). Drawing from the experience and “trauma of border crossing faced by colonized people of color” (p. 8), Imas renders visible the present-day dominant epistemes and organizational theories as colonial tools of knowledge production. An important contribution comes from Gist-Mackey and Oliha-Donaldson’s analysis of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement (chapter 12) as postcolonial organizing. The movement demonstrates that even within the global North, there are spaces inhibiting the global South through “a continuation of a centuries-long global struggle for human dignity across the African diaspora” (p. 203). Mohan Dutta’s culture-centered organizing (chapter 10) enables theorizing “agentic capacities of the subaltern communities as owners of knowledge and concepts for suggesting transformative praxis” (p. 8).
Similarly, other chapters also provide an alternative episteme of knowledge, highlight anticolonial struggles of organizing, and disrupt Western rationality, contributing to the decolonial potential of organizational research and knowledge production. Slis and de Souza (Chapter 3) focus on feminist struggles in Latin America and bring articulations of “disruptive and (re)creative power” (p. 50) of the feminist movement in “allowing the reconstruction of a new democratic political grammar” (p. 50). Similarly, Waisbord (Chapter 4) focuses on the hybrid collective action of social movements in Latin America, which he calls “Anti-extractivism.” Through the discussion of the evolution and the impact of “anti-extractivist” movements, Waisboard offers an alternative vision of human development as well as environmental and social politics, rather than simply opposing dominant policies” (p. 55). Ngwu (Chapter 5) focuses on Kenyan migrant women’s informal childcare organizing (ICCO) in the U.S. context and to reveal: “utu-feminist values to organize against, within, and beyond capitalism” (p. 84). The utu-feminism based on “solidarity, reciprocity, sharing, and gifting – embedded in the philosophy of ubuntu” (p. 84) disrupts Western-centric assumptions of organizing and demonstrates alternative episteme of organizing as practiced by women from the global South living in the United States. Sodeke’s (Chapter 6) “autoethnographic re-storying” (p. 102) of roadside workers in Lagos, Nigeria, “reveal hidden meanings of their organizational lives” (p. 5) and importantly showcases “alternative narrative of bound(less) hidden meanings of their organizational lives” (p. 102). Similarly, Robb (Chapter 7) examines how knowledge, power, and resistance impact undocumented immigrants' communication around issues of health in the United States (p 7). Both Sodeke and Robb’s work centering on voices of the margins signify the ongoing tension of “whose stories count” and “who matters” in the context of knowledge production, as well as highlight that decolonial projects require “engaging with subaltern voices” (p. 8). Ban’s (Chapter 11) work in China examining mobilization at the margin within a “platform-based fan economy” (p. 183) provides “an understanding of the dialectical relationship between power and resistance” (p. 9) as a way to subvert the dominant system and mobilize power at the margins. Seneviratne (Chapter 13) examines the reproductive labor of women in Sri Lanka at the intersection of oppressive structures of gender, class, and ethnicity. The women “reaffirm their agency and represent themselves beyond the traditional images of ‘oppressed'” (p. 267), calling into question the theorization of victimization and oppression of women in the global South.
In sum, this book provides a powerful intervention in organizational scholarship. The book challenges our taken-for-granted canons within the discipline and invites us to reimagine decolonial organizational theory. The possibilities of reimaginations offered through the critique of neoliberal extractive knowledge in studying “organizations” are rendered visible through lived experiences within histories of coloniality, oppression, and marginalization in the global South. Ultimately, this book disrupts hegemonic knowledge power structures within the global North, moving towards social justice orientated scholarship.
