Diverse voices and alternative rationalities: Imagining forms of postcolonial organizational communication

Abstract

In his exploration of nationalism and imagined communities, Anderson (1991) claims that nations are “imagined” (that is, they are constructions), insomuch that people are convinced of the comradeship of unknown fellow compatriots, often ignoring any actual inequality and exploitation that exists in such an imagined community. In a similar fashion, we argue that the subdiscipline or community of organizational communication scholars is also imagined, as much organizational communication scholarship conducted within the global context is performed and interpreted from the dominant Euro-American intellectual tradition, privileging those concepts as well as particular voices and traditions and often ignoring inequality and exploitation within the scholarly community. This forgetting and the imagined scholarly community it creates continue to reify and legitimate a particular form of rationality and, in practice, lead to further colonization, subordination, and oppression of native/indigenous/other forms of understanding and organizing within our disciplinary field. So, how do we recover alternative rationalities, worldviews, and voices on the processes of organizing in diverse contexts?