Unsettling West-centrism in the study of professional service firms

Abstract

Over the last two decades, scholarly research on professional service firms (PSFs) has grown into a significant body of knowledge and indeed a distinct subfield of management studies. In this essay, we offer a postcolonial critique of this subfield. We show that it is built almost exclusively on studies conducted in the West (mainly North America, Scandinavia and the UK), and yet presents its theorising as though it were universal. This is despite PSF scholars generally being distinctly sensitive to (organizational) difference and having no steadfast commitment to positivism. Importantly, we also show that PSF scholarship tends to construct Western professionals as a normative referent whilst glossing over their role in neo-colonialism. What started as a productive effort to research an unusual – ‘professional’ and ‘knowledge-intensive’ – type of organization (in the West) has, in effect, inadvertently evolved into a geopolitically inflected scholarly domain. We urge PSF scholars to recognize and interrogate the problem and work to address it in their own research – and we offer suggestions to that end. Our analysis also has implications for the postcolonial critique in management studies more broadly.

Decolonizing international business

“….] thereby reproducing the teleological assumption that] non-Western countries "evolve" towards more Western-style institutionsalbeit with some local flavour (see also Boussebaa, 2022;Filatotchev et al, 2020).…”

“…In many ways, this is symptomatic of the field's West-centrismfor West-centrism means not only assuming the universality of Western thought and "othering" non-Western contexts but also occluding the reality of neo-colonialism in the production of knowledge (Boussebaa, 2022). Focusing on management research concerned with global professional service firms, Boussebaa (2022) argues that sanitised accounts of globalization in such research in effect serve to occlude neo-colonialism and the role played in it by these firms (see also Boussebaa, 2023). The same argument could be made with specific reference to IB, where the study of MNEs has generally tended to say much about the positive nature of these organizations but little about the "'dark side' of MNE-state relations" (Eden and Lenway, 2001, p. 383).…”

“…Here, organizational scholars have been, perhaps, most active. Among other things, they have produced a rich stream of research exposing false universalisms in management knowledge and challenging tendencies to marginalize or devalue non-Western cultures and institutions in articles, books and textbooks discussing “other” cultures (Ailon, 2008; Boussebaa, 2022; Fougère and Moulettes, 2012; Jack and Westwood, 2009; Nkomo, 2011; see also contributions in Prasad, 2003) [13]. Organizational scholars have also done much to help recover the voices of the “other” through research conducted from non-Western (aka “indigenous”) perspectives (see e.g.…”

“…contributions in Alcadipani et al , 2012) and to develop decolonial research methodologies (Girei, 2017) and forms of management education (Kothiyal et al , 2018; Woods et al , 2022). They have also started to challenge “the obscuring or de-thematizing of neo-colonialism in the study of (transnational) organizations” (Boussebaa, 2022, p. 3), a point to which I return later.…”

Professions and inequality: Challenges, controversies, and opportunities

“…The study also shows how the legal and institutional arrangements produced by such efforts can 'trump domestic laws to the disadvantage of developing nations by pre-empting laws designed to protect indigenous accounting industries, and by instituting transparency rules [… that give accounting firms] access to and a voice in the rulemaking deliberations of smaller nations' (Arnold, 2005: 323). Further insights on such neo-colonial dynamics can be found in various sociological studies examining sustained efforts by networks of Northern actors, including professionals, to reshape Southern societies in congruence with the goals and preferences of the former (e.g., Dezalay and Garth, 2002;Halliday and Carruthers, 2009; see also Boussebaa, 2022;Boussebaa and Faulconbridge, 2019).…”