Your Basket and My Basket: Teaching and Learning About Māori-Pākehā Bicultural Organizing

Abstract

A commitment to partnership between indigenous Māori and the nonindigenous Pākehā provides a process for bicultural organizing in Aotearoa New Zealand. The authors introduce this partnership process to provide perspectives for teaching and learning about “closer encounters” between indigenous and nonindigenous people. The bicultural model the authors present derives from a specific response to a history of colonization, in which the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) is central. Forms of biculturalism derived from this treaty seek to share governance and to include both indigenous and nonindigenous cultural practices and knowledges. It is shown how material about indigenous peoples and their relationships with others can be written into the management curriculum by presenting examples of bicultural organizing. A theoretical framework is proposed, which analyses organizations in terms of “race relations played out in power struggles” and which uses the concept of “whiteness” to show how all organizational members are involved in these struggles. The authors introduce the “power struggles” of bicultural organizing through a discussion of two nursing organizations as examples of a commitment to a bicultural partnership model. They suggest further pedagogical resources for studying bicultural organizing in terms of two themes: governance and interview practices. These resources encourage educators to explore the new perspectives that a bicultural model can bring to familiar organizational behavior topics.