Writing the Adivasis (indigenous) in MOS: A critique of colonial and postcolonial epistemology and reframing the multiple worlds of Adivasis

The global Indigenous population, comprising approximately 476 million people across 90 countries, continues to face systemic marginalization despite decades of institutional recognition and international policy interventions. In India, the Adivasi population—numbering over 104 million—embodies a distinct form of indigeneity shaped by a long history of colonial classification, caste-based exclusion, and developmental displacement. While Management and Organization Studies (MOS) has increasingly examined social inequalities, the unique experiences of Adivasis remain conspicuously absent from mainstream scholarship. This exclusion is not incidental but reflects entrenched epistemic hierarchies and spatial biases that render Indigenous people invisible within organizational research. Existing studies overlook how Adivasis, as Indigenous populations, are embedded within structures of precarity and modern slavery. In response, this paper foregrounds Adivasi perspectives to interrogate the colonial-caste-capitalist matrix of exclusion and calls for a more inclusive and reflexive MOS that engages seriously with Indigenous subjectivities and epistemologies.