A DICTIONARY of GREAT IDEAS IN NON-WESTERN MANAGEMENT: Concepts Leadership, Work, Trust and Stewardship from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Indigenous Pacific Worlds

A Dictionary of Great Ideas in Non-Western Management gathers more than two hundred concepts of leadership, work, trust and stewardship from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Indigenous and Pacific worlds, and treats each as a serious theory of organizing rather than as cultural background. Every entry runs to under five hundred words and follows the same structure: the plain meaning in ordinary language, the origin as far as the record supports it, the specific claim the concept makes about coordinating human effort, at least one documented case of the concept doing visible work, and the objections, including the occasions when the idea has served exclusion, coercion or fraud. The entries run in a single alphabetical sequence and are cross-referenced to concepts that support and contradict them, with finders at the back arranged by region and by management question. The book is written for students who suspect the syllabus is smaller than the field, for practitioners who work across borders and need to understand why a counterpart's behaviour is rule-governed rather than irrational, for researchers looking for hypotheses that have never been tested, and for readers from these traditions who would like to see their grandparents' practices given the standing of theory. It argues neither that the Western management canon should be discarded nor that other traditions should be admired from a distance, but that management knowledge becomes better when a wider set of ideas is available to be argued with.