A discussion on Brazil-focused publications

Abstract

Purpose – The aim of this article is to carry out a critical analysis of the view that core countries’ knowledge holds sway over that of the periphery and to offer a reassessment of Lahiri’s Anglo-Eurocentric point of view and the implications this has for scientific discussion in the field of management. To do this the authors made use of both Lahiri’s (2011) comments as a representative of mainstream thought and the existing literature on this issue. Design/methodology/approach – In this research, the authors used the methodology proposed by Lahiri (2011), but with some adjustments that they thought were necessary. They also analysed scientific production on management in the most important Brazilian journals to put the field of organizational studies in Brazil in context and to situate the reader as regarding their criticism of the North-centric viewpoint. This is because the authors consider organizational studies as a synonym for management studies. Findings – The results presented in Lahiri’s (2011) article “Brazil-focused publications in leading business journals” are invalid because the sample on which the article is based is limited to 14 academic journals, of which 7 are American, 6 are British and 1 is German. It can be questioned whether this particular selection of journals accurately represents the corpus of publications that deal with Brazil, given that Lahiri does not include any articles published in Brazil and thus reinforces his North-centric standpoint. Moreover, the article emphasizes authors with ties to English institutions and concludes that the most relevant academic contributions on Brazil have been produced at non-Brazilian institutions. Moreover, the authors also discovered a contradiction in the sample that is important for the thesis presented in this article because, in fact, the scholars selected for the sample emphasized in that work have ties to both a foreign and a Brazilian institution. Originality/value – The originality of this article lies in the fact that it proposes to discuss the production and consumption of knowledge in the area of administration in such a way as to reassess North-centric hegemony in this field.