ABSTRACT
The Introduction of this volume started with a question that has been asked repeatedly in recent years: What is international management (IM)? The question has been answered in many ways, but no clear consensus has been reached concerning exactly which subjects should be included in this discipline or its use when it comes to studying realities that are different from those on which this knowledge has been built (Contractor 2000; Acedo and Casillas 2005). We are referring to how IM should be useful in terms of understanding the geo-economic and geo-political relationships that are demonstrative of the asymmetries between centers and peripheries.1 I would like to make my contribution to this debate by making some considerations and arguments from the margins or borders of modernity, that is, empowering subaltern knowledges as a way of thinking and acting from the exteriority (Mignolo 2000). This means assuming a critical border thinking (Walsh 2005, 29-30) that assumes an epistemic and political posture for knowing, discussing and acting from (and beyond) the tensions produced between our imposed condition as modern citizens and our denied inheritance as communities nourished by previous cultures from before the modern age.
