Recontextualising the New Institutional Conception of the State to the Turkish Case

The centre of global management knowledge, that is, the North Atlantic countries, usually generates context-specific knowledge which aims at understanding local phenomena with inductive research, and, therefore, may not involve explicit contextualisation because the context is taken for granted by the researcher (Tsui, 2004, p. 498). Through the mechanisms of intellectual imperialism and academic dependency (Alatas, 2000; Alatas, 2003; Altbach, 1987; Selvaratnam, 1988), scholars in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries generally employ theories developed by the centre in this way in investigating organisational phenomena in their own contexts without recontextualising them (Kipping et al., 2009). The result is the generation of knowledge that neither helps understanding organisational facts embedded within the native contexts nor contributes to the conceptual development of global organisational knowledge. What is needed, according to Tsui (2004), is more context-specific, or indigenous, research that involves the highest level of contextualisation by going beyond the bounds of existing theories. However, this does not mean that management scholars outside the central countries should close their minds to genuine knowledge from any part of the world. Alatas (2000, p. 27) suggests that scholars at the periphery should assimilate as much as possible from all sources, from all parts of the world, but they need to do this with an independent critical spirit.