Management and Marketing - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemListening to "Her" Unheard Voice: Using a decolonial lens to make visible institutional work efforts to disrupt gendered violence in India( 2022)How would you recognize efforts to challenge an oppressive institution like gendered violence when they are subtle and “non-heroic”? In this dissertation, I take the reader on a decolonizing critical ethnographic journey, in India, to look at the efforts of an organization, its beneficiaries (the women who faced the violence), and its network of actors (politicians, police etc.), to understand how processes of change occur in contexts other than the West. In doing so, I adopted the institutional work literature to guide my understanding of these institutional processes to address the following research question: i) How does an organization, and related actors, including its beneficiaries, and elites, engage in institutional work to disrupt the oppressive institution of gendered violence? In trying to answer this question, I developed three papers. The first paper was driven by the recurring theme of affect that emerged during my data collection and data analysis. Therefore, I wanted to understand: ii) What role do affective processes play in the reproduction and challenging of oppressive institutions? Specifically, I theorize that over time apathy aggregates through emotions like grief, relational shame, and false hope, that entangles the beneficiaries within oppressive institutions, like gendered violence. This, however, can be destabilized through affective intrusions and encounters with particular actors that allows them to reimagine an alternative life. The second paper emerged from a conundrum that I kept facing during my research journey, and that was: iii) Would we recognize institutional change if we saw it? This paper argues for a more fundamental rethinking of epistemological and ontological assumptions to develop a location-sensitive institutionalism. Here, I theorize that, as institutional scholars, we have to radically engage with location and where knowledge is produced, specifically turning to decolonial theory. Using “Western” knowledge, and theoretical frameworks, may not always help us understand the lived realities of certain people, and the knowledge they produce. Therefore, situated institutionalism, and conceptions of space and place, could help us recognize institutional work processes in particular contexts. The third paper then built on this by reflecting on my methodological journey, seeking to answer the research question: iv) How does the colonial influence, and perpetuation of Western hegemonic knowledge, exclude knowledge from the Global South, and how do we as researchers begin to remedy this exclusion? I provide scholars doing research in contexts, other than the West, a toolkit to decolonize themselves, so that they can engage in the critical reflexivity needed to do justice to the knowledge being produced.