ABSTRACT
Africa is a continent with many nuances, challenges, opportunities, diversities, histories, and cultures. It has over a billion people, covers about 14% of the earth’s available land surface, has over 50 different independent nations, four main regions (North, South, East, West)—each with peculiar peoples and histories-and over 1,000 known large language groupings. Africa has a history of major kingdoms with relics, values, cultural artifacts, symbols, and realities that still dominate many African peoples through the traditional chieftaincy system. No other continent has suffered such a sustained period of pillage and emaciation as Africa through some 300 years of slavery perpetuated by Europe and perhaps 1,000 years of slavery through the Sahara and East African routes (Arnold, 2006; Reader, 1998). It is perhaps the only continent where for much of the modern era its economy has been dominated by business and political interests that are foreign to its people. In recent times, scholars are increasingly waking up to the reality that Africa is insufficiently researched and poorly understood (Kamoche, 2011). What is interesting though is that despite the recognition, scholars are as yet to tackle the equally difficult problem of the lens through which we frame the difficult research agendas and the methods with which we operationalize and carry out research in Africa. Without compromising or taking away from the established principle of rigor-that the research questions and the theory behind said questions must direct researchers’ design and methodswe argue in this paper that the sheer range of issues, nuances, and diversities call for out-of-the-box approaches to research. We argue that the dominant positivist traditions, valuable as they are, must not necessarily be the starting point of our research; neither must they necessarily constrain our judgment as to what is acceptable. We argue that researchers interested in Africa must show methodological reflexivity (Johnson and Cassell, 2001) and a willingness to challenge the status quo. To this end, this paper suggests four research approaches that scholars may consider as viable tools for researching management and organizations in Africa.
