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Indigenous Textbooks and Case Studies as Effective Tools in Business and Management Education: A Comparative Analysis of Indian versus African Business LiteratureAbstract: Indigenous knowledge is that home grown, sustainable form of knowledge that is capable of triggering creativity and innovation, due to the spontaneity and familiarity it is synonymous with. In teaching and learning, it is widely recognized that building an indigenous knowledge based curriculum is essential to getting the active attention and sustained interest of students. While in several parts of the world, academic literature, for the most part are products of everyday, lived realities of the students, in Africa, that is not the case. Most African textbooks are exacts replicas of European and American texts, replicated without any form of alteration, whatsoever. This article focuses on select business literature in India and Africa, to state that while India has bridged the indigenous knowledge gap in business and management education by ensuring the strong presence of indigenous knowledge in the prescribed textbooks for students, African universities still prescribe foreign, and therefore, alien textbooks to business and management students. The end result is G. R. Woodman and B. Morse’s (1987) observation that the difficulty of designing viable development strategies in Africa is based on the fact that the region’s modern development thinking is not the direct descendant of, or an adaptation of the indigenous knowledge of the continent.
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