Workers and Margins: Grasping Erasures and Possibilities Within Management Studies

Abstract

This chapter argues that the omission of engagement with workers from the informal and unorganized sector is a serious erasure in management and organization studies. Scholars in the South (souths in the South and souths in the North), even though participating in a Eurocentric imported discipline of management and organization studies can ill afford to be complicit in this erasure because their societal contexts have an overwhelming predominance of workers from informal and unorganized sectors. Extending conventional management approaches such as industrial relations to informal and unorganized sector workers is problematic. Engaging with these workers is part of decolonial praxis for scholars in the South. The chapter then introduces the rest of the chapters in the volume.