De-centring Management and Organisation Studies: On the Eccentricity of US-Based Management and Organisation Theory and Practice

Centre-periphery relations are, as we made clear in the introduction, an ideological construction; indeed, boundaries of all forms are a human construction. The construction of boundaries has been a feature of human organisation since the bounding of land and the construction of the fence (Kotchemidova, 2012). The carving up and enclosure of land was central to the machinations of the industrial revolution and to colonisation. Beyond the appropriation and enclosure of land, a further geopolitical effect of colonialism was the inscription of ‘nation’ across the globe. The nation-state emerged in tandem with the rise of capitalism and imperialism and the demise of feudalism in Europe (Wallerstein, 1974, 1995). It was a social construction, an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991), displacing prior forms of structured collective relationships. The ideological construction and the myth of the nation-state and nationhood was greatly facilitated by European nations placing themselves at the centre of a new world formation and defining themselves ‘specifically in opposition to the difference which that “other” represented’ (Ashcroft et al., 2000, p. 15). That ‘other’ was the rest of the world outside the European centre that it engaged with in a colonialist and imperialistic manner.