Braiding together student and supervisor aspirations in a struggle to decolonize

Abstract

In this study, we explore a student-supervisor relationship and the development of relational and reflexive research identities as joint actions towards decolonizing management knowledge and practice. We frame a specific case of PhD supervision through he awa whiria the braided rivers metaphor, which emerges from Māori traditions. This metaphor recognizes a plurality of knowledge streams that can start from different sources, converge, braid and depart again, from the mountains to the sea. In this metaphor, each stream maintains its own autonomy and authority, but knowledge is created at an interface in partnership. We use this framing metaphor to illustrate the tensions between co-creating knowledge with an Indigenous community that a research student has kinship ties with and feels a strong affinity to, and navigating the institutional requirements for a PhD within a UK university. We surface two contributions that open up future possibilities for supervision, research and practice. The first is the use of the metaphor to frame the student-supervisor partnership and strategies for decolonizing management knowledge more broadly. The second is the requirement for relational and reflexive research identities in decolonizing management knowledge.

Decolonizing inclusion in performing academia: Trans‐inclusion as phronetic border thinking/doing praxis

“…We apologize for being reductive (pedagogically) toward our colleagues this way. We eschew western institutional academic ethics models here because they are insufficient for decolonizing management research (Scoobie et al., 2021). We retain as much of the original conversation as possible, editing for readability and length.…”

Indigenous practices of accounting on the ground: a Bourdieusian perspective

“…The lead researcher constantly reflected on their position as a researcher seeking to avoid the bias that social and cultural background brings. Being reflexive is an important part of Indigenous and decolonizing research (Smith, 1999; Scobie et al. , 2021).…”

Racialized experiences as in-betweenness in academia

“…Although race is often included in organizational discourses related to diversity—as one of the many sources of workplace discrimination—contextually situated questions about the subtle ways in which race and racialization materialize remain understudied in the discipline (Bell et al, 2021; Liu, 2020; Prasad and Qureshi, 2017)—and in business school scholarship more broadly (Annisette and Prasad, 2017). Not surprisingly, this has led some critical scholars to pursue studies on race as a systemic, intersectional phenomenon (Abdellatif, 2021; Bourabain, 2021; Kempf, 2020; Miller, 2021; Ramos and Yi, 2020; Yousfi, 2021) as well as to call for more research that represents voices from the margins; including from geographical locations of the Global South (Alcadipani et al, 2012; Jammulamadaka et al, 2021; Scobie et al, 2021; Ulus, 2015) and from conceptual spaces informed by Black feminism (Contu, 2018; Dorion, 2020). Accounting for racially disenfranchised voices would move toward understanding the discursive and the subtle ways in which racialized bodies become hyphenated, weakened, disabled, and silenced in contemporary organizational settings (Abdellatif, 2021; Christensen et al, 2020; Smith and Nkomo, 2003).…”

“…In doing so, we join a collective effort to speak out and act up against the myriad forms of implicit and explicit racism found in academia and in the broader communities in which academia is located (e.g. Abdellatif, 2021; Bourabain, 2021; Calas and Smircich, 1996; Einola et al, 2021; Gao and Sai, 2020, 2021; Jammulamadaka et al, 2021; Mir and Zanoni, 2021; Prasad and Śliwa, 2022; Ramos and Yi, 2020; Scobie et al, 2021).…”

“…We speak out against colonializing patterns of knowledge production, including the ways in which we socialize, conduct, and write organizational research. We speak out to enable us, academics of all colors, to overturn the normalizing discourses that function to disenfranchise the experiences of racialized bodies in academia (Jammulamadaka et al, 2021; Scobie et al, 2021; Yousfi, 2021); to reflexively cross borders, meet foreignness, and recognize the value of different knowledge creation in this process (Cixous, 1993). We invite organization scholars—starting with ourselves—to embrace giving up the inclination to “reproduce” academically sound knowledge that abstractly speaks of and for others (Kaasila-Pakanen, 2021; Rhodes and Westwood, 2007).…”