Mestizo Management: Building Management Models from Latin America

For decades, Latin American companies have looked to the world’s most successful management models for inspiration. From lean manufacturing, developed in Japan, to the agile methodologies born in Silicon Valley, as well as design thinking and open innovation, the ideas of contemporary management circulate globally with the promise of boosting productivity, accelerating innovation, and strengthening leadership.

More recently, with advances in artificial intelligence (AI), many companies have been investing in the digitalization of their data to automate processes and even replace humans in complex activities and decision-making. However, business practices that work in a particular context do not always produce the same results in other geographies, as the Latin American case illustrates.

Many attribute differences in the performance of management models to factors such as resistance to change or failures in execution. Yet perhaps the main reason lies in Latin America’s own culture and history. At the same time, the region may be able to find competitive advantages in the age of AI precisely because of its history of mestizaje. This is the main conclusion of the article “A Mestizo-inspired vista for organization studies: reconciling science and aesthetics in Latin America” (Culture and Organization, 2026), coauthored with Pablo D. Fernández (IAE Business School), which deliberately explores the region’s capacity to integrate science and aesthetics. 

More than a mixing of cultures

The article argues that business research tends to interpret Latin America from two opposing perspectives. The first, based on a universalist approach, assumes that management theories—usually developed in Europe and Anglo-America—are valid in any context and simply need to be applied correctly to reproduce the same results. This is the most common perspective in the region’s business schools, which seek, directly or indirectly, to emulate business schools in the developed world. The second, more closely aligned with decolonial theories, challenges the dominance of Western thought by arguing for the need to value local knowledge, including the thinking of Indigenous cultures, a topic that has recently gained prominence in discussions around sustainability.

Although both approaches offer valuable perspectives, they also have limitations. The first tends to minimize the importance of history and context, assuming that Latin America should automatically follow international theories and trends; the second often reduces Latin America to a history of domination and resistance by minorities and excluded groups. Faced with this dichotomy, our study proposes a third path: understanding that the region’s greatest strength lies neither in copying external models nor in rejecting them, but rather in its historical capacity to transform them through embodied human relationships—relationships of flesh and blood—as demonstrated by the history of mestizaje.

The history of mestizaje in Latin America

The term mestizaje is associated with the biological and cultural mixing of Europeans, Indigenous peoples, and African populations that took place after the conquest of the Americas. This process involved the encounter—often violent—of different ways of understanding politics, economics, religion, social organization, work, art, and knowledge.

Unlike other colonial experiences, where populations tended to remain more separate—as in India and Africa—Iberian colonization, carried out by Spain and Portugal, fostered constant interaction among cultures across the political, social, and intimate spheres of human relationships. Over more than three centuries, Latin America received millions of European and African migrants who lived alongside Indigenous populations in a continuous process of exchange, conflict, and adaptation, creating new racial and cultural forms.

Thus, the result of mestizaje was not the replacement of some traditions by others, but the creation of new cultural forms that remain present in language, cuisine, music, architecture, institutions, and even in the ways people interpret reality and conduct business.

In this sense, rather than determining whether mestizaje was positive or negative, it is necessary to recognize the profound imprint this historical process left on the way Latin America produces knowledge in the field of organization studies. The region did not develop by fully copying European institutions, nor did it preserve its original traditions intact. Its history is one of combining, adapting, and transforming diverse influences to generate its own solutions.

Innovation born at the frontier

This idea finds support in the reflections of two fundamental figures in Latin American thought: Gloria Anzaldúa and Octavio Paz. Although they come from different intellectual traditions, both suggest that creativity in the region emerges at the frontiers. Anzaldúa describes the mestizo as someone who simultaneously inhabits different cultural worlds. Paz, meanwhile, argues that the Latin American experience never completely separated scientific rationality from artistic sensibility; the two coexisted and transformed one another.

Historically, knowledge in Latin America has not emerged from the literal reproduction of external models, but from their reinterpretation and creative transformation, adapting influences from different places to create new, vivid, and ambiguous worlds filled with sensuality, experience, and meaning.
Applied to the business world, this idea challenges both the widespread practice of adopting supposedly universal recipes based on the best management methodologies and the use of radical political discourses to interpret the region. Instead, Latin America is a place where managers constantly explore the frontier between two poles: the scientific—seeking an objective reality grounded in empirical data, as scientists do—and the aesthetic—exploring individual subjectivity arising from embodied relationships and emotions in order to experience beauty, as artists do.

From mestizaje to business strategy in the age of AI

To bring these concepts into the field of management, our study draws on the concept of anthropophagy, introduced by Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade in 1928. He argued that, when faced with the choice between imitating foreign cultures or rejecting them altogether, Latin America, through its sensual capacities, instead “devours” them.

This logic is illustrated by Petrobras in a widely cited study by Prado and Sapsed (2016). The Brazilian oil giant adopted a conventional data analytics strategy and failed conspicuously in its attempt to implement it. The company had to change its data-driven innovation strategy and intentionally and explicitly incorporate embodied human relationships. This enabled the company to organize its innovation activities in a way that was far better adapted to the regional context, because its people and teams were unable to “disembody” themselves and think about data solely through dashboards and screens, as conventional data-driven innovation strategies encourage. The way these ideas were subsequently brought into discussions at different levels and transferred individually and collectively through human relationships proved fundamental to the company’s creative processes.

In an environment where organizations are constantly incorporating AI, agile methodologies, digital platforms, and new leadership models, this ability to value relationships and emotions becomes a historically rooted strategic advantage. Innovation in Latin America is no longer simply about identifying the best available practices and replicating them; rather, it should become the ability to transform them through “embodied” human relationships until they are compatible with the reality of each company and the context in which it seeks to create value.

A new way of thinking about innovation

For a long time, the management debate in the region has oscillated between importing models developed in the United States, Europe, or Asia in the expectation of replicating their results, and arguing that Latin America needs to build entirely different ways of managing its organizations. Yet after five centuries of exchanges, influences, and transformations, the region’s strength does not lie in choosing between the global and the local, but in its ability to articulate both worlds.

This idea also challenges those who research and teach management. Rather than merely testing whether theories developed in other countries work in Latin America and teaching them without critically examining them, our study calls for the integration of scientific methods—which value objectivity and rigor—and aesthetic methods—which value subjectivity, relationships, and emotions—to generate new concepts and new ways of understanding innovation, leadership, and knowledge transfer.

One of the main lessons that the history of mestizaje offers contemporary organizations is that the most innovative companies are not necessarily those that are best at copying successful practices from elsewhere, but those capable of turning them into something new and relevant to the context in which they operate through the integration of science and aesthetics. This ability to transform external influences into locally grounded solutions has accompanied Latin America for centuries and, far from representing a historical burden, can today become one of its greatest competitive strengths at a time when the prevailing trend is to replace humans in processes of adaptation to AI.