The Lions Mark Their Territory: The African Thought System

Nadine Mendelek Theimann

Chapter 5 in Diversity in Africa, 2007, pp 93-105 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The causes of important aspects of African managers’ thinking are to be found in fundamental national sociocultural and political elements. African organizations function very often in an environment of acute resource scarcity, economic uncertainty and highly centralized political power. These organizations tend to retain the major characteristics of structures developed in the colonial era, namely, rather rigid bureaucratic, rule-bound hierarchies. During such times, managers were few in numbers and were mainly European traders who undertook economic activities with little, or no, knowledge of the art of management. The Africans, however, viewed these foreigners as experts in management, and tried hard to imitate their managerial skills. Colonialists, in order to maintain their dominance and elitist role in society, chose to import managers from Europe, rather than to train Africans.

Keywords: Work Behaviour; Social Intelligence; African Society; African Culture; High Power Distance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-62753-6_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230627536

DOI: 10.1057/9780230627536_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().