FGV researcher receives Professor Anshuman Prasad Award

Alex Faria, a professor and researcher at Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (FGV EBAPE), received the Professor Anshuman Prasad Award at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, the foremost conference in the field of management, which was held in Chicago. The prize for the article “Decolonizing Diversity-Driven Responsibility Education with Praxis” was awarded by the academy’s Critical Management Studies Division and sponsored by the journal “Organization” (rated A1 in Qualis, a Brazilian journal ranking system).

In his paper, the professor argues that the knowledge and management education systems led by the Global North will remain incapable of promoting a pro-diversity agenda of responsible education in different parts of the world if they do not attempt to radically undo the “colonial/racial matrix” that professional academics and the producers of “responsible” management curricula incorporate and internalize.

Highlighted in LSE Business Review

The paper, written together with colleagues from India, Australia and South Africa, was also highlighted in the LSE Business Review as a reference in the field of management for the decolonization of academia and organizations.

In “Decolonising management and organisational knowledge (MOK): Praxistical theorising for potential worlds,” the opening article in a special edition of Organization, the editors note that as business schools and universities around the world are swept by a diverse range of decolonizing movements that go beyond conventional agendas focused on diversity and inclusion, theoretical disputes have generated more problems than solutions for organizations and academia. In this special issue, academics from different corners of the world explore decolonization as a practice in the field of management and academic organization.

According to Alexandre Faria, the result is an innovative, collective and international project that goes beyond the notion of decolonization as a theoretical project that predominates in the Global North. The editors and authors claim decolonization as a radical praxis of “(un)doing academia” that transforms us at the same time as it transforms the ways in which we understand and practice management, do research, and produce and disseminate knowledge.