ThinkBox – Decolonizing management research and education in Brazil: integrating theories and methodologies from the Global South

Post-colonial ideas have been increasingly debated among academic communities worldwide, revealing power/knowledge imbalances that have persisted for centuries. Such imbalances are linked to a symbolic and material architecture – the so-called “Western” or Euro-USA-based – which tends to present itself as universal while placing the rest of the world as peripheries. Less well-known under the broad post-colonial umbrella, the decolonial movement was consolidated in Latin America in the 1990s, with Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Catherine Walsh and María Lugones, among others. Decolonial concepts – such as colonial difference, coloniality of power/knowing/being, border thinking, and epistemic disobedience, to name a few – have inspired a growing number of people seeking to break with Western political and epistemic hegemony and to highlight the existence of alternative voices/knowledges in universities and local communities.The consequences of Western hegemony are evident in management studies. Back in 1997, Abdalla and Faria highlighted the subaltern position of Brazil, alongside most countries in the Global South, in the production and dissemination of management knowledge. In denouncing the long-standing and dominant picture of asymmetry and injustice, they pointed to the potential of decolonial perspectives to change this imbalance (Abdalla & Faria, 2017). It is now 2025, and even though many scholars have finally realized (“caiu a ficha”) the harmful effects of subalternity in understanding and discussing not only many regional but also global problems that inexorably affect us, truly decolonizing management education and research is still taking initial timid steps in Brazil.This essay was inspired by a dialogical workshop presented in 2024 during pre-EnAnpad events (Pozzebon et al., 2024) and aims to discuss, in a frank and unpretentious way, the following question: How can we decolonize Brazilian management research and education? Although we are focusing primarily on the Brazilian context, we believe that this exact reflection and the resulting insights could be extended to other contexts of the Global South.To discuss decoloniality, we must think about the difference between colonialism and coloniality, two interconnected but distinct concepts. Colonialism refers to the historical process of domination – political, economic and cultural – of one nation over another. Temporally, most colonizing processes that mark Western history began in the middle of the fifteenth century and ended in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly due to the political struggles and wars for the independence of the so-called colonies. On the other hand, coloniality is not limited to a formal set of territorial domination policies, as it refers to a power matrix resulting from colonialism that remains even after the end of colonization itself (Misoczky, 2011). Various terms cohabit within this polysemic terrain of struggles and resistance: post-colonial, decolonial, counter-colonial, anti-colonial and non-colonial, among others. Behind all those terms, we find a point of consensus: challenging colonialism and coloniality. We can, therefore, understand decoloniality as a political and epistemic movement that aims to deconstruct and re-signify coloniality’s strategies of domination.In brief, the decolonial movement designates a group of Latin American thinkers, while post-colonial represents an umbrella term encompassing groups from all continents (for a comprehensive overview, see Ballestrin, 2013). Post-colonial studies incorporate discussions about the marginalization and stigmatization of the other (Said, 1977), antagonistic relations between colonizer and colonized as an impediment to existence (Fanon, 1961), and the subaltern silencing, even when post-colonial intellectuals seek to speak for them (Spivak, 1988), among several other issues. In its turn, the decolonial movement comes from the Modernity/Coloniality (M/C) group, founded in the 1990s, which deepens the perspective based on the region’s longer trajectory of domination and resistance and recognizes modernity as an inextricably constitutive part of the perpetuation of coloniality (Mignolo, 2003). The collective work of the M/C group became a milestone in what Maldonado-Torres (2005) would call the decolonial turn to reinforce the movement of resistance to the logic of modernity/coloniality.Despite the effervescence of post-colonial and decolonial debates in many areas, a full engagement with the decolonial critique is still marginal in management studies. On the contrary, the foundations that structure business schools in the Global South are still quite solidly laid on allegedly universal frames of reference from the Global North. Most used books, articles, and frameworks are still produced or legitimized by hegemonic ways that tend to make invisible or devalue the diverse epistemologies of the Global South. Even Western critical currents did not see or value OTHER epistemes.Therefore, opening formal academic spaces, such as this editorial, is essential to present new reflections on the field of management continually. Researchers and students must be able to appreciate and recognize that academically valuable knowledge produced in the Global South has the same legitimacy as external references that have been historically incorporated as universal.The emergence of decolonial studies, in general, has been dominated by theoretical content, i.e. articles and books that deeply discuss the different concepts, premises and values that mark the development of this Latin American intellectual and militant framework. Few empirical articles emphasize the “research doings” by discussing concrete strategies or mechanisms to decolonize in practice. We know a lot about what decoloniality is, but we are still learning how to decolonize.In this section, we will look at some decolonizing tactics in management studies, both in the theoretical and methodological domains. Those concrete empirical examples come from the experience of the researchers who presented the EnAnpad pre-event that shaped this essay (Pozzebon et al., 2024) and also the webinar series Inspirations from the South, which took place in Montreal, reuniting researchers from Latin America, Africa and Quebec (IFS, 2020). More experiences are emerging around the world, although most of them remain invisible and unknown to the majority of academic communities. We hope this essay encourages other scholars to publish their decolonizing experiences.Numerous researchers have emphasized the silencing of lenses and voices of the Global South in international (i.e. European and American) academic publications (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021). The editorial boards of these journals tend to be composed almost exclusively of researchers from the Global North, and there is a strong bias to evaluate and judge the production submitted through an implicit vision that discriminates against other ways of producing and presenting knowledge.So far, those journals have mainly published knowledge produced in the Global North’s context, using lenses and perspectives legitimized by the Global North, seen as superior and universal. They are the benchmark to be followed by all other people and cultures, giving a narrower space for other forms unless they resemble the benchmark. Knowledge produced in the contexts of the Global South tends to be seen as local (or endogenous), with little relevance to an “international” (meaning European and American) audience from standard contexts:The academic articles, master’s dissertations and doctoral theses produced in the Global South tend to mimic the conceptual frameworks of the Global North in a naive attempt to find “their place in the sun,” to seek legitimacy and acceptance by the “masters” of the North. They lose out doubly. First, by using lenses and concepts that have little to do with local contexts and issues, research results lose relevance and connection with the territories investigated. Second, even if they use lenses and concepts from the Global North, when they submit their work for publication in so-called international journals, they suffer a high rejection rate and rarely make it through the “funnel”: “We’re not good enough.” It would make much more sense if researchers from the Global South began to value their own ways of making sense of their own contexts and being inspired by the local cultural richness and history. At the same time, giving a voice to the Global South does not mean disregarding or ignoring the vast production of knowledge in the Global North. Rejecting the universality of Western thought does not mean rejecting its value en bloc.We propose that decolonizing management research in the Global South can take at least two main routes, one emphasizing the local and the other more international. The first, more local perspective, involves an internal valorization of what is ours, written in our languages and directly connected to our territories. We need to valorize producing knowledge with and for the people of the territories. Situated research is extremely valuable due to its proximity and local relevance. The second perspective, linked to internationalization processes, also involves valuing what is ours but seeking to create bridges with knowledge created in other contexts. Proposing a bridge differs from accepting a subordinate place. How can we give voice to our knowledge, lenses and methods through a dialogue with other knowledges, lenses and methods? The challenge is to create decolonizing tactics.One decolonizing tactic is related to the literature review. The great tendency of bibliographic reviews carried out in management studies is to concentrate efforts on international databases and journals, especially those ranked as “top” by international agencies (i.e. European and American). The first barrier that makes academic production from the Global South invisible is that our knowledge (in this case, articles) is not often published in these sources. Moreover, a vibrant and deep source of local critical concepts and theories has not yet been written in English. A decolonizing tactic would be to include the production of the Global South in literature reviews, creating bridges between this production and the so-called international one. In this way, we do not ignore what has international legitimacy, but we do not disregard local production either. These bridges can be created in various ways within the literature review:Another decolonizing tactic concerns theoretical positioning, i.e. the lenses, theories, concepts or frameworks adopted within a research project to analyze empirical data and produce results. Almost invariably, this position is based exclusively on European and American authors. Almost all of our academic production is based on authors and knowledge from abroad. We can build bridges not only in literature reviews but also in theoretical positions adopted from a literature review. We need to build an argument about how concepts from the Global South make sense and can guide academic work, whether or not combined with concepts from abroad:This linguistic, semantic, and political struggle to value non-Anglo cultures started more than a decade earlier when Pozzebon, Diniz, and Reinhardt (2011) published an editorial in a leading Brazilian journal calling for the creation of a Brazilian school of thought in the production of knowledge within a key area of management, technology, and society. In 2015, a provocative essay claimed that the academic community should “resist linguistic domination and promote knowledge diversity” as part of a progressive process of decolonizing research and education (Alves & Pozzebon, 2013, p. 1).A second vital domain to be decolonized is the methodological domain of management research. We have been trained to use methodological approaches that, in the name of rigor, consolidate the roles of researcher and researched in such a way that these roles are translated into active/passive or subject/object dichotomies, establishing the premise that it is the researcher who must produce knowledge about the researched. Thinkers such as Fals Borda and Paulo Freire, as early as the last century, as well as Bell Hooks and Conceição Evaristo, to cite more recent examples, challenge this epistemological separation and propose participatory and collaborative methodologies that value the knowledge of the people who live in the situations being studied, eliminating the idea that they are not experts, as researchers would be:These are numerous routes and examples for seeking decolonizing theoretical and methodological paths in management studies beyond historically colonized and functionalist approaches. Those perspectives, principles and experiences can serve as references to exercise other ways of conducting research and education that can be reconfigured and (re)appropriated by researchers in different contexts. However, as we mentioned at the beginning of this essay, there are no definitive answers – and perhaps there never will be – unless we genuinely embrace a pluriverse and value the diverse matrices of knowledge.Deconstructing colonial beliefs that have been inscribed in our minds and bodies for more than five centuries is a lengthy and complex process. One could argue that the tactics and strategies proposed in this essay are not radical enough to bring about the social and political transformation that people from the Global South deserve. We tend to agree with this criticism. Dismantling the colonial matrix is both necessary and urgent, but also a daunting challenge. However, rejecting the persistent dualism – another colonial legacy – that demands “all-or-nothing,” we understand the struggle for decolonization as part of a pluriversal trajectory, where indigenous and non-indigenous, liberal and community-oriented, colonial and decolonial perspectives coexist. In such a hybrid and diverse context, our concrete tactics of integrating Global South theories and methodologies in research and practice represent one step among many towards decolonizing management research and education.

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