AFAM News

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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. 

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.

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 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.