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May 2019

Organisation Special Issue Call for papers 2019

Submitted by AFAM on Tue, 05/28/2019 - 9:00pm

This special issue focuses on decolonising management and organisational knowledge (MOK), a vital and timely endeavour. The contemporary globalised world is experiencing new and continuing conditions of coloniality/decoloniality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) organised by forces of transnational capital and the nation-state on the one side, but counter-balanced by resurging, insurging peoples and scholars on the other. The nature and momentum of these axes of neo-colonial power and decolonial praxis-theory (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) has led Mbembe (2016: 36) to observe that the “decolonizing project is back on the agenda worldwide”. Decolonial conversations set out to both critique the “dominant Eurocentric academic model” and “imagine what an alternative to this model could look like” (Mbembe, 2016: 36). Decolonial feminists (Lugones, 2010; Mohanty, 2003; Simpson, 2011) call for nothing less than the transformation of hetero-patriarchal, colonial, and racist structures of organisation and power, and the revival of Indigenous knowledges-practices. Most MOK as is generally understood – theory, discourse, practice, and its asymmetrical generative structures of production, distribution, and consumption - is based on the dominant Eurocentric academic model. Decolonising sentiments in respect of that model have expressed themselves as a recent coming together of regional scholars and non-scholars (e.g., the African AOM, LAEMOS) to assert difference from hegemonic forms of MOK built on colonial blindness. It is no coincidence, then, that over a third of all “decolonial management” scholarship emerged in the year 2017 alone (googlescholar search on 12 October 2018). It is therefore timely to revisit the broad theme of coloniality/decoloniality, and management and organisational knowledge.

Call for Nominations: THE 2020 EMERALD AFRICA ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT TRAILBLAZER AWARD

Submitted by AFAM on Fri, 05/24/2019 - 7:27pm

The Africa Academy of Management is seeking nominations for the 2020 Emerald Africa Academy of Management Trailblazer Award. Purpose of the Award: The purpose of the Emerald Africa Academy of Management Trailblazer Award is to recognize a scholar who has taken a leadership role in promoting and advancing management knowledge in and about Africa.

CALL: AfricaJOM Special Issue - Work-Family in Africa

Submitted by AFAM on Thu, 05/02/2019 - 9:27pm

Recent work-family (WF) meta-analyses have all but left out the scholarship of and about work and family intersections in Africa (Allen, French, Dumani, & Shockley, 2015; Shockley, Douek, Smith, Yu, Dumani, & French, 2017).  Yet WF research is accumulating in South Africa, Ghana, and other African nations (Hoobler & Koekemoer, 2018).  And characteristics of certain African cultures suggest that work and family may be more intertwined and family may play a larger role in work for people in African nations, as opposed to nations in the Global North (Aryee, 2005), based on higher degrees of collectivism (vs individualism) and femininity (vs masculinity).  To date, what we know about work and family in Africa has taken a somewhat piece-meal approach.  For example, new research has been performed just on entrepreneurial women in sub-Saharan Africa (Wolf & Freese, 2018), domestic workers in South Africa (Hoobler, 2016), and a new conflict measure just for South African workers (Koekemoer, Mostert, & Rothmann, 2010). We ask whether it is time to take stock of the literature as a whole.  Just as Nkomo (2011) asked if there is or can be an African way of leading, is there an Afro-centric version of work and family intersections?  Is this unique?  What can be learned from studying work and family in African contexts?

The China-Africa Engagement: Contemporary Developments and Directions for Future Research

Submitted by AFAM on Wed, 05/01/2019 - 11:37pm

With the increasing Africa-China engagement particularly in light of China’s new ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, this special issue seeks papers that contribute to our understanding of the nature of this engagement with regard to, inter alia, the management, social-cultural, investment/industrial, and trade/business dimensions. This engagement has important implications for Africa’s industrial-economic rejuvenation, and as Chinese investors become significant players in what has come to be viewed as Africa’s renaissance, we see an important opportunity to debate this phenomenon, to identify appropriate theoretical lenses for an emergent and hence under-researched phenomenon, and to shed light on how the Chinese presence is impacting the African investment and business landscape, including business human resource practices. This call is consist with recent exhortations for researchers to develop new and ambitious inter-disciplinary approaches to African management research and managerial thinking (e.g. Amankwah-Amoah, 2016; Kamoche et al., 2012; Zoogah et al., 2015).