The use of feminist approaches in management studies

Abstract

It is our intention to show alternative approaches regarding feminist research. It is based in one of the authors’ questionings on how to make an “invisible” person be seen, i.e., express oneself and what this person has to say. What would happen if they could present themselves as “others”, as different. How women can express themselves outside the colonial dichotomies of male/female discourses? This paper presents different feminist approaches and their methodologies, and sees the multicultural approach as the one that can better answer how women build their thoughts in a pos-colonial world. It is also our aim to show that knowledge production is a way to legitimize colonialism, since it assumes what the “other” thinks (CALÁS; SMIRCICH, 1999; TONG, 1998), demonstrating also the difference on heterogeneous subjects, different racial images and gender as “occidental” categories (such as ‘women’ or ‘black woman’) (CALÁS; SMIRCICH, 1999; FONSECA, 1999; TONG, 1998).