A critical analysis of North American business leaders’ neocolonial discourse: global fears and local consequences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a postcolonial analytic frame and critique this article investigates the nature of the discourse used by 24 North American business leaders to describe, understand and make sense of the economic development of China and India and contemporary international encounters. In particular the article investigates how business leaders discursively characterize this ‘threat’, how they (re)present China and India and, how they discursively construct the requirements of a response to this ‘threat’. An analysis of the interviews indicates the persistence of the discourse of (neo)colonialism (Orientalism) in the construction of the Other within the context of a view of China and India as developing and progressing towards a North American ideal. Despite this, North American business leaders also show ambivalence and uncertainty towards China and India. On the one hand they laud their success while damning them for their apparently exploitative social, economic and workplace systems and practices. Moreover, while they promote a Western development discourse concerning China and India, North American business leaders recognize that China and India are becoming centres of global economic power that are increasingly challenging the global hegemony of the United States. The article ends with a conclusion on the contribution of the article and in particular points to the value of Bhabha’s notion of the in-between’ spaces as a way forward for understanding developments in the global business environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".