Hegemony and its discontents: a critical analysis of organizational knowledge transfer

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Findings -We analyze our data in light of the theoretical construct of hegemony, and theorize three themes that underlie the process of knowledge transfer. These include knowledge loss at the local level, the coercive practices that ensure knowledge transfer, and the invocation of imperial subjectivities by the headquarters of the MNC when dealing with subsidiaries from poorer nations. Permanent repository linkOriginality/value -This study goes beyond the mainstream approaches into organizational knowledge transfer, by analyzing these issues in light of political economy, and the changing landscape of industrial accumulation. It offers in some measure, the building blocks of a different organizational theory, one that is sensitive to those subjects who are consigned to the periphery of mainstream organizing. Keywords -multinational corporations, knowledge, hegemony, ideologyPaper type -Empirical We do not govern Egypt, we only govern the governors of EgyptLord Cromer, British Imperial Proconsul, 18852 If you took a taxi from Mumbai airport, and traveled due east through some of the most congested traffic in the world for around two hours, you would reach the suburb of Malegaon. Malegaon, which used to be a village of dairy farmers, has now been claimed by the ever-sweeping sprawl of Mumbai, and is now serviced by a two-lane "highway." This highway is lined with several workshops, where under leaky roofs and oppressively hot interiors, resides a community of some of the most skilled machinists in India. Give them a machine part, and they will replicate it to submillimetric precision. Give them a machine that manufactures 350 units a minute, and they will figure out a way to upgrade its output to 600 units a minute.Travel past the makeshift tea stalls, across the perennial puddle in a pothole on the highway, and you will enter one of the bigger workshops, which a modest, rusty sign identifies as "Bhavnani How does an artifact such as a mission statement physically travel across geographic and organizational barriers, and how does it attain legitimacy across dispersed spaces and among diverse groups? What are the processes by which globally scattered organizational beings and extra-organizational subjects such as Bhavnani & Sons "learn" to venerate and display this artifact? In this paper, we address these questions through a critical analysis of organizational approaches to "knowledge transfer" and by reporting the results of an ethnographic study of the practices of knowledge transfer in an MNC. We argue that representations of knowledge transfer in organizational studies fail to record the manner in which this process is implicated in the historical experiences of power differences and economic imbalances that undergird the international encounter. Despite the explosion of research in the field of knowledge management 3 over the last decade, relatively little attention has been paid to the dynam...

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