Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper tracks the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in post-independence India between 1950s-70s. It follows managerial experiments conducted across rural and urban settings by Indian industrialists, UN developmental pedagogues, and Ford Foundation consultants.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to trace the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in post-independence India between 1950s-70s. It follows a team of textile industrialists from Ahmedabad (western India), UN-funded developmental pedagogues trained in psychology and rural sociology, and Ford Foundation consultants as they conducted experiments across the rural-agrarian and urban-industrial regions to establish the putative validity of managerial leadership. It tracks the discourses and practices of certain key figures who traversed the overlapping worlds of the state administrative offices on the one hand, and private businesses and industries on the other hand. The paper will trace the global shifts in the post-World War II period—fraught with Cold War anxieties—which generated the emergence of managerialism as an abstract organizational norm, as opposed to bureaucracies, for forming modern/rational capitalist democracies. Further, the paper aims to understand how such global frameworks emerging from the world of private companies and big business were translated within the context of the developmental discourse in post-independence India, and the relationship of the then emerging field of managerial studies with the concerns of the postcolonial state, filial networks of capital, labour productivity, and industrial efficiency. The first half of the paper will track certain experiments conducted by the aforementioned experts in the factory sheds of Ahmedabad. The second half will reveal how this Ahmedabad-based global network of technological, developmental and managerial expertise spilled over to the western Indian countryside and produced peculiar managerialist reflections on the social constitution of the rural society.