Indigenous Management Theory

With this perspective paper, we seek to help open up an additional and, we believe, especially promising avenue for indigenous management research.  We explore the potential for progress through the investigation of executive rationale, an institutional logic guiding managerial action and enabling strategies, structures, and formal integration mechanisms.  Drawing on interviews with an elite group of executives including some of the world’s most powerful managers, we illustrate variance in executive rationale across five major economies – Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States – and suggest that action and structures in these economies are broadly aligned with the respective expressions of executive rationale.  We consequently hold that indigenous management research may benefit from a focus on executive rationale in particular, and we propose a concrete research agenda.