Sustainable management and managing sustainability: The continued challenges of the African continent

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/cjas.1400
• Date: 01 September 2016
• Author: Benson Honig,Moses Acquaah
• Published date: 01 September 2016

Sustainable management and managing

sustainability: The continued challenges of the

African continent

Introduction to the special issue: Sustainable development in Africa

through management theory and research

Benson Honig*

McMaster University

Moses Acquaah

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Leadership and management in Africa is receiving in-

creasing scholarly attention. Such research is now presented

at almost all major conferences and f‌inds an audience at and

beyond the Africa Academy of Management. As recently as

2014, CJAS published a special issue focusing on leadership

in Africa (Lituchy & Punnett, 2014). This current special is-

sue examines management in Africa, and more specif‌ically,

it focuses on two highly important areas in management:

(1) the issue of sustainability as it pertains to management

theory and scholarship and (2) the empirical context of the

African continent. The motivation for this special issue

emerged from the 2

nd

Biennial Conference of the Africa

Academy of Management (AFAM) in Gaborone, Botswana

in January 2014. As a result, the theme of the conference

“Sustainable Development in Africa through Management

Theory, Research and Practice”was leveraged as the topic

of this special issue. The call for papers to this CJAS special

issue was developed as a result of the quality and breadth of

the papers presented at the conference. However, the call for

papers was not limited to the papers that were presented at the

conference and was also designed to cover research work on

management issues that f‌it with the topic of the special issue.

Following a double-blind review process, f‌ive of the pa-

pers were accepted for inclusion in this special issue. The

topics of the papers cover a broad spectrum of management

issues that have the potential to affect sustainable develop-

ment on the continent and include tribal diversity and human

resource management practices; strategic capabilities and

performance in women-owned entrepreneurial ventures;

gender diversity and performance in the microf‌inance indus-

try; the establishment of corporate social responsibility

initiatives at the workplace; and business strategy implemen-

tation in the construction industry. The papers focus on mul-

tiple African countries (Zoogah; Augustine, Wheat, Jones,

Baraldi, & Malgwi) and specif‌ic African countries as Kenya

(Kimosop, Korir, & White), Tanzania (Poetz), and South

Africa (Oyewobi, Windapo, & Rotimi).

We were very pleased to have attracted considerable at-

tention to the issue, and the f‌ive selected submissions that

satisf‌ied the peer review process represent the “state of the

art”regarding the conf‌luence of these two arenas. Before

reviewing and positioning these important contributions,

we provide a short and instructive overview to assist the

reader in the interrelationships between management

research and sustainability in Africa.

The “Rise”of Africa

The “dark”continent of Africa has long been depicted

as a chaotic vacuum, long on resources, short on productiv-

ity. Systematically exploited over the centuries for slave la-

bour and raw materials, our mental map of Africa is often

shaped by the common world map that depicts the continent

as somewhat smaller than Europe or the United States. In re-

ality, the world map most non-Africans grew up with is a

distorted misrepresentation, as the surface of the African

continent would absorb 13 countries, including all of China,

India, the USA, the entirety of Eastern Europe, UK,

Germany, France, Sweden, Japan, Italy, and an additional

nine other large countries (Turvill, 2013).

Africa has only recently been identif‌ied as more than the

world’s strategic backwater “junkyard.”Classic images

portrayed in African novels such as Achebe’s“Things Fall

Apart”and V.S. Naipaul’s“A Bend in the River”have

given way to an asserted “rise”of Africa well documented

*Please address correspondence to: Benson Honig, DeGroote School of

Business, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON,

L8S 4 M4, Canada. Email: bhonig@mcmaster.ca

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences

Revue canadienne des sciences de l’administration

33: 177–181 (2016)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/CJAS.1400

Can J Adm Sci

33(3), 177–181 (2016)Copyright © 2016 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 177