Developing countries and the poor within them (i.e., the other) receive scant attention in management and organization studies (MOS). The field, thus, suffers from both ethnocentric and class biases. This research effort seeks to reduce these biases, particularly in the conversation on power taking place between MOS' critical management studies and interorganizational collaboration research streams. / Articulating a case study of the Sialkot soccer ball child labour project in Pakistan (1995-2003), the thesis explores the communication constraints that are faced by weak actors in interorganizational domains (a social problem and a set of organizations having a stake or interest in that problem) located in the developing world. Relying on both written documents (private and public) and field interviews, especially with women soccer ball stitchers at the village level, a typology of communication constraints is developed. These constraints are examined from the perspectives of those at the bottom of the international supply chain and the injuries these groups suffer from them are documented in the thesis. It is found that the ability of weak actors to use communication to influence a domain is highly contingent on how space and time are configured in a domain. Domains have temporal rhythms and spatial configurations. The thesis identifies two types of temporal rhythms (technocratic and subsistence clocks) and a spatial configuration (imperial space) that severely militate against weak actors exercising agency in a domain through communication. Strategies (e.g., emergent collective struggle) that can prevent weak actors from becoming subalternalized (voiceless) in a domain are also discussed. The case study permits an investigation of contemporary transnational activism that often sires interorganizational collaboration projects in developing countries. The thesis identifies two types of transnational activism (thick and thin), delineates the various elements constituting them, and shows how thin activism can lead to interorganizational projects hurting weak and powerless groups that are intended to be assisted.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.85175 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Khan, Farzad Rafi |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Faculty of Management.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002209142, proquestno: AAINR12869, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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