Decolonising management education: mechanisms for challenging colonial legacies and other intersecting hierarchies of knowledge in a neoliberal context

Abstract

Management education remains deeply entrenched in colonial and neoliberal epistemic traditions, and privileges Eurocentric managerial paradigms while marginalising alternative knowledge systems. This paper outlines two levels of decolonisation: (a) surface-level interventions that introduce non-Western perspectives without challenging dominant frameworks and (b) deep-level transformations that fundamentally restructure curricula, pedagogy and institutional priorities. Drawing on decolonial and critical management studies, we identify three key mechanisms through which management education reproduces colonial and neoliberal hierarchies: (1) epistemic colonialism, (2) the exclusion of decolonial management models, and (3) the hegemony of Anglo-American institutional frameworks. We propose a decolonial approach which integrates Indigenous, feminist, and Southern epistemologies and challenges the neoliberal metrics governing management education. We adopt a multilevel perspective, as disrupting the reproduction of coloniality and neoliberalism demands coordinated epistemic, curricular, and institutional interventions. We highlight that decolonisation must go beyond tokenism to dismantle the ideological apparatuses sustaining racial capitalism and global economic asymmetries. In this sense, business schools can serve as sites of epistemic justice, which would foster alternative economic rationalities rooted in sustainability, relationality, and communal well-being.