A decolonising approach to Practice Theories in management and organisation studies

Abstract

In this critical theoretical essay, I propose a Decolonising Practice Approach for research in Management and Organisation Studies. Building on practice-based scholarship—particularly Gherardi’s understanding of practice as collective knowledgeable doing—I define practice as historically sedimented, politically contested, and differentially enacted across intersectional positions. Adopting an onto-epistemic orientation, the Decolonising Practice Approach treats sociohistorical embeddedness, the political, and intersectionality not as contextual background but as constitutive dimensions of practice. I develop this argument through two complementary documentary analyses. First, a mapping of 33 empirical studies published between 2021 and 2025 shows that, even in Global South contexts, colonial legacies, struggles for recognition, and intersectional asymmetries are frequently muted in practice accounts. Second, a documentary analysis of curricular materials from foundational management programmes across five Latin American countries illustrates how teaching-as-practice stabilises Anglo-Eurocentric canons while marginalising alternative genealogies of management knowledge. The Decolonising Practice Approach offers a coherent analytical posture for strengthening practice-based research in Management and Organisation Studies, Management Learning, and Management Education by specifying how practices are made possible, contested, and unevenly lived under historically sedimented relations of power.