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This paper aims to discuss, from a post‐colonial perspective, the context and process of the Americanization of Brazilian management.

The paper first briefly discusses post‐colonialism and “Latin‐America”. After this, it analyzes the content of US management and its prevalence in the world. The paper then presents the process of the intentional Americanization of Brazil, in order to contextualize this process in management. It follows an essayist style.

The paper argues that the Americanization of Brazilian management is an intentional process that resembles colonialism.

The paper's contribution is to analyze the establishment and growth of what is one of the largest management academies in the world, showing how it was created under colonial logics. This case may also suggest how these logics have a wider influence on how management knowledge is produced and reproduced in developing economies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore practitioner and post‐colonial perspectives on the implementation of learning organisation theory and practice in a non‐Western setting.

A qualitative interpretive study, using in‐depth interviews and participant observation, was conducted in two public organisations in Singapore. The study looked at relationships between the concepts of the learning organisation and of Singapore national culture, as the members of the organisations saw them. This study is presented and then discussed in commentaries from two different perspectives, i.e. the “insider” perspective of a Singaporean practitioner, and the “outsider” perspective of a New Zealand academic using a post‐colonial critique.

The findings indicate that Western LO practitioners need to pay specific attention to the cultural values expressed by non‐Western organisational members, and to their own cultural limitations and biases which may be embedded in the implementation of LO programmes. This process requires an active dialogue between both parties.

The findings indicate that practitioners need to pay specific attention to the cultural values of employees, and to the cultural assumptions of new management programmes, when adopting Western concepts of management to non‐Western organisations.

This is an empirical study that reveals the particular tensions experienced in two specific non‐Western organisations when LO practice was introduced without explicit exploration of its Western cultural underpinnings. The paper argues that the development of an LO discourse of organisational post‐colonialism can provide a valuable critical framework to examine the global mobilisation of LO concepts.

North America is both geographically large and demographically diverse, which makes a discussion about globalization in North America difficult to distinguish from globalization writ large. This chapter attempts to do so nonetheless by examining tangible, virtual, and envisioned versions of the globalization of education in North America specific to trends in immigration (and migration), identity, and imagination. A brief explanation of theories of globalization that intersect in the North American context includes world systems, neo-institutionalism, cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, and post-colonialism, but could include many more. This chapter also suggests that the globalization of education in North America is not limited to the continent of North America due to the many external or global educational entanglements that North Americans have with other countries and regions worldwide.

The Brazilian Comparative Society was founded in 1983. Comparative education was a strong component of the curriculum of the courses of pedagogy in the period of “Escola Nova,” but this focus changed. In the early 21st century, Brazilian comparative education is no longer a required discipline in the curriculum of most education programs. Comparative education in the Brazilian context has a unique “meaning or use,” which is not the same concept or scientific definition used in other regions. Second, Brazilian comparative education is characterized by an “outsider” perspective, which is a product of post-colonialism and a history of underdevelopment. Third, the majority of comparative education scholars in Brazil are limited by language since most speak and read Portuguese or Spanish only, and much of the research literature in the field is written in English or other foreign languages. The Sociedade Brasileira de Educação Comparada (SBEC) is a small society that is poised to meet the needs and interests of a growing number of members, and the best strategy is to diversify activities and involve the largest possible numbers of associates.

This paper aims to examine the concept of learning organization (LO) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Its objective is to provide initial insight into the potential impact of cultural context on how business managers perceive and interpret the LO theory and practice.

The study was conducted in two phases; the first phase involved a focus group review and discussion of the LO concept and major LO models. With insights gained from the focus group discussions, the second phase of the study developed a number of hypotheses on the potential impact of national cultural orientations on the LO concept, which were tested with managerial responses to a survey.

While UAE managers viewed and interpreted the LO concept in several different ways, most qualitative comments emphasized the following four aspects of an LO: workplace learning, organizational learning, learning climate and learning structure. Both sets of data revealed strong linkages between dimensions of national culture and the LO concept. Organizational culture partially mediated the relationship between national cultural orientations and aspects of an LO. Potential barriers to the implementation of the LO concept as perceived by respondents were largely related to national cultural value orientations and organizational cultures. The findings suggested that Western LO models and measurement instruments do not fully capture the socio-cultural reality of UAE-based organizations and the manner in which they view and interpret the LO concept and practices in their specific context.

Being a preliminary and largely reflective in nature, the present study has relied more heavily upon the qualitative data than the survey data.

The findings of this study document the value of culture-specific criteria to monitor the performance of companies in their LO journey rather than using a standardized LO assessment model.

The study represents an initial attempt at enhancing the understanding of the impact of national culture on the development and application of the LO concept and the challenges it faces in the UAE context.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to consider the (re-)emergence of the sport waka ama (outrigger canoe) in light of the broader historical, social, political, cultural and economic landscape of ‘post-colonial’ Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter draws upon a micro-ethnography of the 2011 Waka ama national competition to elucidate the ways in which the sport serves as an important site for sharing Māori identities and culture. The empirical aspects of the chapter utilise observations and semi-structured interviews with key gatekeepers of waka ama in Aotearoa/New Zealand and participants in the sport.

Findings – The key findings of the study offer new insights into the relationship between the (re-)emergence of waka ama and the wider context of ‘post-colonial’ Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Research limitations/implications – The restricted timeframe that the research took place within could be viewed as a limitation to the research project.

Originality/value – The chapter provides an alternative reading of the sport waka ama within ‘post-colonial’ Aotearoa/New Zealand. To date there has been little research conducted on the role sport has played within the process of colonisation in Aotearoa/New Zealand. There has also been limited research that illustrates the role of waka ama, as a uniquely indigenous sport, as a vehicle of social change within indigenous communities. The authors highlight the unique nature of waka ama and provide an alternative commentary on the colonial/neocolonial forces that have impacted waka ama in its emergence.

Miriam Adelman, who holds the M. Phil. in sociology from New York University and Doctorate in Human Sciences from Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, has been Professor of Sociology at the Universidade Federale do Paraná (UFPR), since 1992. She is responsible for initiating the first gender studies and research activities at that institution, as co-founder of its “Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero,” begun in 1994 and continuing today as the major institutional space for promoting women's and gender studies at the UFPR. In addition to current research and teaching in undergraduate and postgraduate Social Science and Sociology programs at the UFPR, she is also an active member of the Brazilian gender studies community and participates on the Editorial Board of the Revista de Estudos Feministas, one of Brazil's two major feminist academic journals. She has published numerous articles in scientific journals in Brazil and abroad, as well as book chapters on topics ranging from feminist theory, post-colonialism and contemporary sociology to women in sport and gender in film. She has one edited volume (Gênero Plural: um Debate Multi-disciplinar, 2002, Editora UFPR, with Celsi Bronstrup Silvestrin) and is currently organizing another, on gender representations in film.

The purpose of this paper is to offer the latest empirical findings of the difficulties and challenges in teaching New Senior Secondary (NSS) Liberal Studies in Hong Kong from the perspective of pre-service teachers.

This qualitative study is based on Danielewicz’s critical pedagogy framework for identity development. A sample of four pre-service teachers were recruited from the last cohort of final-year bachelor of education students at the University of Hong Kong. They were invited to engage in dialogues of enquiry, through which they recount their teaching encounters during their teaching practices. Emphasis would be put on two relevant pedagogical principles, including deliberation and reflexivity, which are of particular relevance to the case of Liberal Studies.

Challenges revealed the dispositions of conformist learning among the students, manifested in forms of misquoted information and the populist sentiments mirrored from mainstream media, which cost teachers extra efforts to facilitate inquiry-based learning. Adopting deliberation and reflexivity as pedagogical principles, student–teachers responded with attempts to reconnect daily life experiences to teaching, bringing back the social context of knowledge and seeking synergy between traditional and liberatory teaching methods.

This study is drawn from a relatively small sample of pre-service teachers and may run the risk of over-generalization. Moreover, this study tends to neglect other factors such as classroom dynamics, school culture, colleagues’ rapport and students’ responses.

Given the novelty of Liberal Studies as a compulsory subject under the NSS curriculum and its specificity in Hong Kong education system, the amount of literature devoted to this area has been inadequate; among the available studies, the majority tend either to focus on the macro level, addressing the broader narratives of education policies and curriculum studies (e.g. Fung and Yip, 2010; Cheung and Leung, 1998) or to discuss the topic with exclusive reference to political transition and post-colonialism in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Morris and Chan, 1997). Studies on the micro level have generally paid little attention to the dynamics of Liberal Studies teaching, focusing instead on its relationships with other aspects such as private tutoring (Chan and Bray, 2014) and cultural representations of religion in Liberal Studies textbooks (Jackson and Han, 2016); pedagogical studies on the subject remain a minority.

In the wake of the ongoing financial crisis, US managerialism has been denounced as a professional caste that has slowly served to erode the competitiveness of the US economy. In light of this, there is an increasing search for possible alternatives to US managerialism, with some authorities putting forward that one enviable alternative is “Confucian management”, which they claim is a means of organising in Chinese institutions that gets things done by pulling on the rich heritage of Ancient Chinese philosophy. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate “Confucian management”.

This paper questions the common view of “Confucian management” through an ethnography of Baiyun University (a pseudonym) in South China, where the author worked as a “foreign” English lecturer for one academic year, and in order to do this the author draws on participant-observation and semi-structured interviews. Ethnography has long been associated with colonialism and has more recently been connected with post-colonialism, so in an attempt to decolonise the methodology, the author analyses the generated research data through a Chinese sensitive cultural framework.

This paper argues that “Confucian management” offers a confused and epistemologically questionable view on Chinese management. It points to some of the limitations of management and organisation studies brought about by claims being made without sufficient empirical evidence.

The focus is on “Confucian management” at Baiyun University so findings are specific to this empirical research site. It is also acknowledged that universities have a divergent form of management to other institutions. The paper’s intent is ideographic rather than nomothetic; therefore, no claims to generalisation are made.

The paper makes three substantive contributions. First, the empirical contribution is an ethnographic description of “Confucian management” at Baiyun University. Second, the methodological contribution attempts to decolonise methodology by analysing the generated research data through a Chinese sensitive cultural framework. Third, the epistemological contribution queries to what extent “Confucian management” as an idea that is enunciated from the Global North is able to effectively speak about a practice that is supposedly performed in the Global South.