Management control, gender and postcolonialism: the case of Sri Lankan tea plantations

摘要

Management accounting and control research in developing countries has neglected gender issues. Focusing on management controls over marginalised female workers in Sri Lankan tea plantations, this thesis tries to fill this gap. It takes a postcolonial feminist perspective to theorise ethnographic accounts of mundane controls. The findings illustrate that there are 'embedded‘ controls through colonial and postcolonial legacies, which made the female workers 'double colonised‘. The notion of subalternity captures these repressive forms of controls in their work as tea pluckers. However, postcolonial transformations created a space for resistance against these controls. This shaped a subaltern agency and emancipation and gave rise to a more enabling form of postcolonial management control. The thesis contributes to debates in postcolonial feminist studies in organisations and management control research in general, and management control research in developing countries, in particular.