Postcolonial Theory

Conceptual Overview

PT is not about what comes after the colonial, but the ongoing effects of colonialism, not only among the previously colonized, but also the previously colonizing. Postcoloniality is held to be a pervasive condition affecting much of the world in different ways and to different degrees. For some, it offers an analysis of the cultural, political, ideological, economic, and psychological effects of an ongoing imperialism of which recent colonialism is but one manifestation. In this sense, the imperialistic effects of contemporary global capitalism are as available to analysis through PT as any other neocolonial practice. Thus the neocolonial effects of global capitalism and international business is one area of PT's contribution to organization studies.

It is common to identify Edward Said's Orientalism, published in 1978, as signaling the emergence of PT, but the roots go back further, to Franz Fanon and beyond. Reference to Said, though, does signal that PT's provenance is located in literary theory and studies with the result that a focus on the cultural representations of the colonial experience and reactions to it are central. PT has been heavily influenced by poststructuralism, and this is reflected in PT's main figures' acknowledgment of their poststructuralist counterparts: Said to Michel Foucault, Homi Bhabha to Jacques Lacan, and Gaytari Spivak to Jacques Derrida. There is also in some versions a Marxian influence, especially via Louis Althusser and, indeed, something of a division exists between those pursuing a Marxist, materialist analysis and those pursuing a cultural discourse analysis informed by poststructuralism.

PT is perhaps more than anything else concerned with the politics of representation and alterity; with the ways the West constructs its others as the objects of its knowledge-power systems, thereby providing a “knowledge” of the other and facilitating control. Said, for instance, was particularly concerned with representational strategies that essentialized and exoticized the other. Orientalism was a Western discursive practice constructed to manage its encounters with difference during the colonial project. It is a practice that continues today, including, as Robert Westwood points out, in international management studies. The orient and [Page 1276]the oriental are entirely cultural constructions produced through Western orientalist discourse and its representational practices and not aspects of any objective, preexisting reality. Such discursive constructions rest on specific, culturally located ontological assumptions and epistemological practices that produce them as objects of study for the West: often in essentializing, binary ways that diminish and denigrate the orient while valorizing the occident. The non-Western other is appropriated in these representational categories such that any knowledge of the other is refracted though the West's theoretical, ideological, cultural, and aesthetic lenses and made to cohere with its established knowledge discourses. Critical analysis shows how such a discourse and its institutional consequences instantiate power effects that facilitate the colonial project of control and domination. PT offers a resource for organization studies to address such representational practices—in Western organization theory and research, in its management pedagogy, and in its actual business and managerial activity. It also, as theorists such as Anshuman Prasad and Pushkala Prasad note, offers critical additional analytics for a more thorough interrogation of power, control, and resistance in organizations across a range of settings, not just in cross-cultural engagements.

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