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This paper seeks to interrogate the international business and management studies (IBMS) discourse via postcolonial theory. It demonstrates the value of applying postcolonial theory as a critical practice with respect to that substantive domain.

The approach is to draw on the critical and intellectual resources of postcolonial theory and apply them in an interrogation of IBMS.

The paper shows the value of applying postcolonial theory to open up the discourse of IBMS, which is revealed to deploy similar types of universalistic, essentialising and exoticising representations to colonial and neo‐colonial discourse. It is revealed to rely on functionalist orthodoxy, realist ontology and neo‐positivist epistemology. Furthermore, it masks its own power effects, fails to make explicit its research commitments, especially its political and ethical ones, and remains deeply unreflexive.

The use of postcolonial theory in relation to organisation studies is in its infancy with only a limited number of studies directly related to that critical practice. This paper, then, is a contribution to an important, but emergent arena of scholarship. The interrogation mounted here points to a radical reconfiguration of the field and indications as to where that might take us are made.

This study aims to investigate the treatment of translation within the international business and management (IBM) literature to highlight colonialist assumptions inscribed in this treatment as a result of the hegemonic status of English.

This investigation takes the form of a systemic literature review to examine the treatment of translation in the IBM literature through a postcolonial lens.

The findings demonstrate that despite growing interest in language in international business, matters of translation have received comparatively little attention. However, those articles that do address translation matters tend to do so in five key ways, including epistemological/methodological considerations, exploring translator agency, the investigations of the discursive void/conceptual fuzziness between languages, and approaches that discuss translation as social practice.

Despite the authors’ critique of English-language hegemony, this literature review is restricted to English-language journals, which the authors acknowledge as problematic and discuss within the article.

In exposing the limited treatment of translation within the literature, the authors provide a call to action for IBM scholars to be more explicit in their treatment of translation to ensure representation of cultural and linguistic Others, rather than providing domesticated accounts of multilingual research.

Although there have been other articles that have examined translation in the past, this paper is the first to do so through a postcolonial lens, demonstrating from a linguistic perspective the colonialist assumptions that are still prevalent in IBM knowledge production, as evidenced by the treatment of translation in the field.

This paper seeks to present an analysis of the historical emergence of international business and management studies (IBMS) within the context of the post‐World War II USA. It seeks to show how certain conditions of this time and place shaped the orientation of foundational IBMS texts and set a course for the subsequent development of the field.

The approach is primarily conceptual. The paper pursues both a historical analysis and a close reading of foundational texts within IBMS. It first examines the key conditions for the emergence of IBMS including: the internationalization of the US economy and businesses; the Cold War and perceived expansion of Soviet interests; and finally decolonisation processes around the world. These are interrelated aspects of a commercial‐military‐political complex, which simultaneously enabled and constrained the emergence of IBMS scholarship. The paper moves on to link these conditions to two seminal IBMS texts.

The paper reveals the localised and particular conditions that surrounded the emergence of IBMS and how IBMS was constituted to serve particular and localised interests associated with those conditions.

The paper's originality and value lie in a unique historical and discursive analysis of the conditions for the emergence of IBMS that were, in part, instrumental in the development of the field. It thus responds to calls for a “historical turn” in International Business scholarship.

The special issue aims to look into what it means to be critical in relation to international business.

Gives an overview of articles submitted by experts in the field.

Finds that old practices of international trade are out of touch in the modern world and that new practices need to be agreed in order to make international trade work for all.

Collectively, these papers provide a response to what it means to be “critical” in relation to international business and in doing so will provide a useful touchstone to those who wish to make contributions to this new journal.

Submitted in the form of a manifesto, this article seeks to make a call to scholars in international management and business studies to embrace post‐colonial theory and to allow it to provide an interrogation of the ontological, epistemological, methodological and institutional resources currently dominating the field.

A manifesto approach is adopted in providing a series of deliberately provocative principles which it seeks to have the field adopt.

The paper finds the field to be currently imprisoned within a limited and limiting paradigmatic and institutional location and offers the resources of post‐colonial theory as a way to interrogate and reconfigure it.

The paper points to the limitations of the field and provides the grounds for a radical reconfiguration across all aspects of its knowledge production, dissemination and research practice.

The paper offers practical steps which the field can take to reconfigure itself more appropriately in terms of its various research commitments and its institutional frame.

This article offers an original assessment of the orthodoxy currently controlling and disciplining the field, presented in the relatively novel and challenging form of a manifesto.

At Shepparton in the Murray electorate of Victoria in 2007, the Federal Liberal Member, Sharman Stone, announced that under a returned Coalition Government, Shepparton ‘would get a stand‐alone technical college’. One year earlier, the Victorian Minister for Education, Lynn Kosky claimed that ‘We lost something when technical schools [the ‘techs’] were closed previously. Yes, the facilities were not great but we lost something that was important to young people’. This article explores the development and demise of ‘South Tech’, Shepparton South Technical School, 1966‐86 to identify the ‘something’ that Kosky claimed was lost, and to argue that technical education is essential in a reconstituted system.