Southern voices in management and organization knowledge

The rationale for this special issue has been to open a space for reflection about management and organizational knowledge (MOK) as it is practiced and constructed in the global South. Organizational scholars working outside the West rarely appear on the radar of the most prestigious scholarly journals of the field, the institutionalized ‘core’ of the management and organizational science. However, there is life beyond Northern academia, both in terms of management theoretical concepts and in terms of organizational practices. This special issue aims to make these voices heard, without any particular commitments to Western theoretical framework or approaches, insofar as the contributions have a critical lens, given the nature of the journal Organization. A detailed mapping of the nature and extent of MOK in the Global South falls clearly beyond the scope of this introduction, but before discussing the particular articles selected and which insights about this special issue topic they generate, we will make a very succinct presentation of the problems involved in the production and diffusion of Southern MOK. Before doing this, we will characterize what we understand as Global South and how this terminology has emerged.