Unveiling a Postcolonial Neoliberalism: Hybridised controls and emancipatory potentials for tea-plucking women in Sri Lanka

Seminar abstract

Drawing on the ideas of postcolonial hybridity and postcolonial feminism, this presentation explores a contextual variant of neoliberalism, which here is called postcolonial neoliberalism.

It unpacks the peculiarities of hybridised practices of management controls therein to reflect on it construction and consequences. 

A 7 month ethnographic study was carried out in a Sri Lankan tea estate to understand both nature and the practices of these controls.

Postcolonial neoliberalism has been animated by a hybrid form of management controls encompassing colonial action controls, postcolonial culture controls, and neoliberal results controls. This created an emancipatory space for female workers to engage in some confrontations to attain some compromises.

The message is that the hybridised controls are central to the construction of this form of postcolonial neoliberalism and to its reproduction. However, as these controls accompany a gendered form, female workers find a condition of possibility for some emancipatory potentials with the neoliberal development policy.

Booking

This seminar is free to attend with no need to book in advance. We warmly invite you to share with your friends, colleagues and classmates.

Speaker bio

Professor Danture Wickramasinghe is the Chair in Management Accounting and the Director of PhD programme in Accounting and Finance at Adam Smith Business School.

Previously, he was a Chair in Management Accounting at Hull University Business School and Lecture/ Senior Lecture at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester.

Before moving to the UK, he was the Dean of the Faculty of Management and Finance and the Head of the Department of Commerce at the University of Colombo, Head of Department of Business Administration and a Lecturer/ Senior Lectures at the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka.

Professor Wickramasinghe has been in academia for over 37 years and is a renown critical researcher in accounting in developing countries.

His research has also been published in several reputed journals including;

• Accounting, Organisations and Society, Auditing and Accounting Journal
• Critical Perspectives on Accounting
• Accounting and Business Research
• Accounting and Organisational Change
• Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management
• Accounting in Emerging Economies

He also serves on editorial boards of these 6 journals.

Professor Wickramasinghe has also co-authored/edited books in accounting and contributed to several edited collections with monographs on accounting and development issues an presented at many international conferences and workshops.