Organizational Literature, African

The External Environment

One of the earliest themes to have captured the imagination of authors researching Africa is the assumption of a turbulent and complex external organizational environment. The turbulence and unpredictability of the environment include the legal-political (uncertain laws, sometimes at the whim of dictators) and the economic (fluctuations in macroeconomic indicators such as interest rates, inflation, and exchange rates; reliance on foreign aid at the whim of donors). These uncertainties are seen as discouraging foreign investment and hampering strategic planning. It is also argued that managers are compelled to devote an inordinate amount of their time to firefighting internally and striving to tame the threats of the external environmental context. For example, Munene found that external characteristics (e.g., transactional failure, [Page 1098]unpredictability, and uncertainty) and internal characteristics (e.g., red tape and family cliques) combine to create organizational inertia and prevent viable organizational forms. The overriding theme in the literature is that external factors combine to create an environment that is manifestly hostile to business. While the effect of these external uncertainties might be somewhat exaggerated, managers have often found ways to deal with them. In 2000, Kamoche found managers in Kenya adopting a form of improvisational decision making that they described as management by deciding, that is, making binding decisions on the spur of the moment, or going with the flow.

Suitability: Context and Relevance

Related to the environment are the twin concepts of context and relevance. The more critical writings that began to appear in the 1970s and 1980s recognized that the tendency to adopt foreign, mostly Western, management practices was ill-conceived and did not adequately reflect the needs of the organizations or, indeed, of the employees. Criticism was directed initially at the foreign expatriate managers working in multinational firms and subsequently at African managers returning to Africa armed with master's of business administration degrees from U.S. universities. In their efforts to “modernize” management practice in Africa, these individuals ended up transplanting variants of motivation theory, leadership, management by objective, organizational development, and so forth, which seemed at variance with the realities of organizations in Africa.

The influx of management theory engendered research into the appropriateness of management practices formulated in the West, cross-cultural studies, leadership theories, and so forth, so that researchers could formulate approaches that were more relevant. Contingency theory provided a useful starting point; however, we need to specify the relevant contingencies as opposed to developing highly abstract laws of behavior and recognize the futility of researching management as though it existed in a vacuum and thus not reflecting the socioeconomic context. Similarly, Blunt and Jones proposed that organizational effectiveness must be studied via a contingency approach built around a core of relevant organizational values and imperatives. It is now widely recognized that not only are many of the traditional approaches inadequate; they also misrepresent the reality of management in Africa.

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