With special guest Anupama Kondayya from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta

Anshuman Prasad was a leading scholar in the development of postcolonial theory and bringing it to the domain of management and organization studies.  Integrating various sociological perspectives, it examines how “European” or “Western” worldviews came to dominate non-European and non-Western societies through colonialism—and how that domination continues to this day despite so many former colonies having achieved their political independence from their colonizers. The postcolonial project, as Prasad terms it in one of our readings, aimed to expose the problems and inequities that such colonialism produced and work to remove or diminish these lingering influences in their cultures.

The two readings we chose for our episode are among Prasad’s best known. The first is the 1997 article, “Provincializing Europe: Toward a post-colonial reconstruction: A critique of Baconian science as the last stand of imperialism.” Prasad’s explores how science, particularly as understood in colonial times through the work of Sir Francis Bacon, was used as an instrument of colonial expansion under the belief that “European” philosophies, epistemologies, the beliefs in the scientific method were conceptually and morally superior to those elsewhere in the world. Using the works of various European philosophers of the time, Prasad shows how European “universalism” justified colonization in the guise of civilizing other societies. Prasad critiques Baconian science as inherently linking knowledge to power and explains why colonial legacies persist in modern scientific thought.

Our second reading is Prasad’s opening chapter, “The gaze of the other: Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis” from the edited volume Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: A Critical Engagement published in 2003. The chapter provides a valuable overview of the contributions of key scholars like Edward Said, Ashis Nandy, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. Prasad remains cautious about presenting postcolonial thought as a unified and straightforward idea. In the latter part of the chapter, he summarizes some of the disagreements and debates, such as around the meaning of “post” in postcolonialism. He then introduces the volume’s goal of applying postcolonial perspectives to a better understanding of organizations, especially along cross-cultural contexts. This is relevant for examining many of the key topics we address in our Resource Center such as digitization where cultural dynamics have played great roles in both spread and rejection of such technologies.

You may also download the audio files here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Supplement

Read with us:

Prasad, A. (1997). Provincializing Europe: Towards a post-colonial reconstruction: A critique of Baconian science as the last stand of imperialism. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 3(1), 91-117.

Prasad, A. (2003). The gaze of the other: Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis. In Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: A Critical Engagement (pp. 3-43). New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.

To know more:

Prasad, A. (2015). Toward decolonizing modern Western structures of knowledge: A postcolonial interrogation of (Critical) Management Studies. In The Routledge companion to critical management studies (pp. 161-199). Routledge.

Prasad, P., Mills, A. J., Elmes, M., & Prasad, A. (1997). Managing the organizational melting pot: Dilemmas of workplace diversity. Sage.

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Nandy, A. (1983). The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery of self under colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.

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