AFAM Newsletter

LEAD: Leadership Effectiveness in Africa and the African Diaspora

• Presents an original, research-based model of studying African leadership based on a distinct research project
• Offers diverse perspectives and leadership examples from a wide range of African countries
• Closely examines the African Diaspora’s current role in shaping leadership principles and practices

This book considers the new business environment of modern-day Africa, addressing how management styles must adapt to societal changes across the continent. As investment in the continent grows and African businesses begin to look beyond their own borders, there comes a real need to understand leadership from an Afro-centric perspective. 

The purpose of this PDW session is to assist early career scholars focusing on management in Africa who have limited experience in publishing high impact research to complete a high quality research paper for later submission. The PDW will help early career scholars to understand the key elements of writing an empirical paper for publication through one-to-one developmental feedback in a supportive environment. Second, these developmental relationships will continue after the 2019 Academy of Management meeting as both members work toward the goal of getting the manuscript submitted and published in a top-tier journal. Thus, a unique aspect of this initiative is that the developmental relationship is goal-directed; it is focused on a specific task (improving a drafted manuscript) that leads to critical short- term results (publication), more publications on management in Africa, and ultimately participants’ long-term productivity as a management scholar. In addition to improving the careers of early career scholars, this PDW will support the Academy’s vision to strengthen  the breadth of management scholarship to be more inclusive.

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For a long time the AUC School of Business has been one of the leading universities in the region in providing high quality education to local and international students.

 As a recognition of this excellence, we are happy to announce that our school has been officially ratified as the first university in Africa and the Middle East to join the CEMS consortium offering a distinguish Master in International Management CEMS MIM ranked number 9 by the Financial Times. 

 Stemming from our deep belief in the strength and potential of your institution, I am sending you this email to invite your students and fresh graduated to get informed about this program and to apply for our first cohort that will start in Fall 2019. 

The deadline for the 5th Biennial Conference of the Africa Academy of Management to be held at Lagos Business School from January 8-11, 2020, has been extended to June 30, 2019. Visit www.academyofmanagement.org/conferences to submit your paper.

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.

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.

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?

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).

The global economy has significantly changed for the last few decades, driving many Developing Countries to engage an important socio-economic transformation for the purpose of alleviating poverty. In Africa, in particular, various socio-economic initiatives have been taken including revamping regional economic integrations, promoting entrepreneurship and SMEs creation, designing business incentive policies to attract foreign direct investments or promoting inclusive finance or diaspora socio-economic involvement.