Indigenous Management Research

About MIR – Management International Review

Management International Review publishes research-based articles that reflect significant advances in key areas of International Management. Its target audience includes scholars in International Business Administration. MIR is a double-blind refereed journal that aims at the advancement and dissemination of applied research in the fields of International Management. The scope of the journal comprises International Business, Cross-cultural Management, and Comparative Management. The journal publishes research that builds or extends International Management Theory so that it can contribute to International Management Practice. For more information see http://www.mir-online.de/.

About the Focused Issue

Over the last few years, tremendous progress has been made in many emerging markets around the world. The development of knowledge on these economies, however, lags behind their growing relevance in the world economy. One reason for this is that indigenous man-agement concepts such as ubuntu (South Africa), dharma (India), guanxi (China) or blat’ (Russia) which are essential for understanding management practices in these countries are not adequately reflected by traditional “Western” management theories.

It is only recently that the significance of these aspects has been fully recognized in interna-tional management research. For example, in a study of the indigenous conceptual dimensions of Chinese CSR, Xu & Yang (2009) reveal that several widely accepted CSR dimensions in the western world have no embodiments in China. Das (2010) shows how the Indian view of good management practices is strongly rooted in ancient Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. And Jackson, Amaeshi & Yavuz (2008) demonstrate how the success of firms in Africa is affected by the use of indigenous management techniques.

As a consequence, several scholars call for more context-specific research to draw on indi-genous thought in developing new theories that can help to better understand management practices in Asia, Africa or Latin America (Holtbrügge 1999; Meyer 2006; Panda & Gupta 2007; Banerjee & Prasad 2008; Zheng & Lamond 2009). Moreover, studying indigenous management theories can also be useful for understanding the implicit assumptions of tradi-tional western views and in this way contributes to global management knowledge (Punnett 2004; Cappelli et al. 2010).

While the need for indigenous management research is clear, there are currently very few stu-dies that analyze concrete implications for discovering interesting and relevant research ques-tions, theory building, and data collection (e.g., Tsui 2004; Cheng, Wang & Huang 2009). In this call for papers we specifically seek contributions that may help to close this research gap. We encourage contributors to submit both conceptual and theory-building papers, as well as empirical studies. Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

• Foundations of indigenous management practices
• Implications of indigenous management theories for different management functions such as marketing, organization, HRM, etc.
• Implications of indigenous management theories on the individual, group, and organiza-tional level
• Performance implications of indigenous management practices
• Methodological aspects of indigenous management research
• Transferability of indigenous management practices to other countries
• Clashes and synergies between “Western” and indigenous management practices

Submission Information

• All papers will be subjected to double-blind peer review
• Authors should follow MIR guidelines, http://www.mir-online.de/Guideline-for-Authors.html
• Contributions should be submitted in English language in a Microsoft or compatible format via e-mail attachment to dirk.holtbruegge@wiso.uni-erlangen.de,
  knn@hss.iitb.ac.in, and
  wanghui@gsm.pku.edu.cn.
• Submission deadline: 31.08.2011 (however earlier submissions are encouraged)
• The review process will take approx. 5-6 months.