Decolonizing Arab organizational Knowledge: “Fahlawa” as a Research Practice

Abstract

This article draws attention to how management scholars “the outsiders within” who are structurally positioned within the academies of dominant powers might negotiate the complexities of producing a locally rooted and meaningful knowledge, emancipated from the U.S. hegemony while carrying organization studies in Arab countries. Drawing upon my different ethnographic journeys as a researcher, brought up in an Arab country with a Francophone intellectual mindset and studying Arab management practices, I will discuss both the potential for and the difficulties of critical engagement with a decolonizing management research agenda. Then, and building on critical border thinking tradition, I will propose the Egyptian term “Fahlawa” as a metaphor for better describing the challenges of a decolonizing research practice that privileges contestation and perpetual bricolage over formal and universal design. Finally, I will conclude by highlighting the potential of “Fahlawa” as a survival/resistance practice to theorize what is unthought and invisible in management literature and to build situated knowledge less organized by U.S. domination.