Reading the Rhetoric of Otherness in the Discourse of Business and Economics: Toward a Postdisciplinary Practice

Abstract

The circular relationship among texts, knowledge, and reality, each involved in the production of the other, has been the focus of much post-structural and postcolonial theorizing. This chapter, which is a postcolonial critique of a selection of texts widely read by the business and management communities, also works on the same principle. Arguing that these texts are premised on neocolonial representations of Others, the paper moves through a circuitous route, introducing first, the idea that the rhetoric of otherness contained in these texts is based on a particular way of representing the political and economic features of these Others. This is in contrast to the emphasis on racial and cultural differences more usually attributed to such rhetoric in postcolonial theory. It then goes on to examine some issues that may arise while attempting to practice a pedagogy which pays attention to these political and economic dimensions within the business and management classroom. It concludes by raising questions about some of the D/disciplinary boundaries that currently define “management studies” and the need to more closely examine its relationship with global economics and politics.

[Certain texts are given] the authority of academics, institutions, and governments … Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.

Edward Said, Orientalism