The Colonial Cartography of Business and Society Research: Towards a Collective Epistemic Responsibility

Business and society scholarship routinely treats geographic and social categories as neutral analytical descriptors. We argue that these terms are inheritances of colonial cartography and racial hierarchy whose unreflective circulation in our journals, citation practices, and editorial processes actively reproduces the inequalities the field examines. Drawing on Mignolo’s epistemic disobedience, Spivak’s epistemic violence, and Butler’s performative naming, we demonstrate that the problem is grammatical, not lexical: substituting one term for another leaves the colonial architecture intact. We propose collective epistemic responsibility as a practice of delinking and offer four reorientation practices (citation justice audits, defamiliarization of Western cases, reviewer accountability prompts, and convening practices) to help the field interrogate the colonial grammars structuring its shared work.