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Pedagogies of Development, Conceptions of Efficiency: Modern Managerialism in Industrial Ahmedabad, 1950s–1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2023

Kena Wani
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Abstract

This paper aims to trace the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in the post-independence period in India during the 1950s and 1960s. It tracks the discipline’s formative interests in the management of industrial labor, the views of its major proponents, and the processes through which the discipline sought generalized relevance within the postcolonial regime. It also discusses the intersection of managerial concerns with the globally emergent discourses on development and industrial reform and follows the eventual institutionalization of the discipline as an educational concern through the setting up of management schools. In doing so, the paper examines the modes and rationales through which managerialism established its own normative vocabulary and deployed it for assessing not just the objectives of industrial capital but also the newly consolidating postcolonial state and its developmental ambitions. This circulation of management ideas is analyzed by following the experiments that were conducted in the industrial enterprises of Ahmedabad by a group of textile industrialists, UN developmental pedagogues, and Ford Foundation consultants. Even when, in most cases, such studies on management did not succeed in achieving their ascribed goals, the paper demonstrates how managerialism maintained its relevance by parallelly turning its focus onto the postcolonial state and its developmental activities. Broadly, the paper argues that management in the mid-twentieth century functioned as a solution in search of a problem. It eventually acquired prominence by tautologically reading institutions and various aspects of the society as organizations that needed the prescription of management to resolve their operations.

Keywords

BureaucracyManagerialismLaborManagement

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Article
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Enterprise & Society , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , September 2024 , pp. 728 - 761
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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References

Bibliography of Works Cited

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Chowdhry, Kamla. “Institution Building and Social Change: The Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association.” Indian Journal of Public Administration 14, no. 4 (1968): 943–961.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chowdhry, Kamla. “Developing Administrators for Tomorrow.” Indian Journal of Public Administration 15, no. 2 (1969): 221–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chowdhry, Kamla. “Organizational Innovation in Universities: Relevance of Industrial Experience.” Economic and Political Weekly, Review of Management 4, no. 35 (1969): M97–100.Google Scholar
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D’Mello, Bernard. “Management Education: A Critical Appraisal.” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 48 (1999): M169–M176.Google Scholar
Francombe, Joseph. “Propagating and Practicing ‘Horizontal Control’: Vikram Sarabhai, Management and American Social Science.” Current Science 118, no. 8 (2020): 1207–1212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilman, Nils. “The Prophet: Peter Drucker and the Legitimation of the Corporation.” In American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Lichtenstein, Nelson, 109–132. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Haaften, Lourens Van. “Management Science and Nation Building: The Sociotechnical Imaginary Behind the Making of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.” Indian Economic & Social History Review 58, no. 3 (2021): 333–359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halse, Michael. “A New Institute of Rural Management—and a New Development Discipline.” Indian Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), Occasional Publication 1 (1980): 1–28.Google Scholar
Haynes, Douglas. “Harvard, the Case Study Method and the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, 1959–1970.” American Historical Association Conference, January 2020.Google Scholar
Hoopee, James. “Managerialism: Its History and Dangers.” Historically Speaking 5, no. 1 (2003): 6–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, Matthew. “Democratic Technologies of Speech: From WWII America to Postcolonial Delhi.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20, no. 2 (2010): 257–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jammulamadaka, Nimruji. “A Postcolonial Critique of Indian’s Management Scheme.” In Management Education in India: Perspectives and Practices, edited by Thakur, Manish and Babu, R. Rajesh, 23–42, Singapore: Springer, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klikauer, Thomas. “What Is Managerialism?” Critical Sociology 41, nos. 7–8 (2015): 1103–1119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kudaisya, Medha M. “‘Reforms by Stealth’: Indian Economic Policy, Big Business and the Promise of the Shastri Years, 1964–1966.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 205–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kumar, Arun. “From Henley to Harvard at Hyderabad? (Post and Neo-) Colonialism in Management Education in India.” Enterprise & Society 20, no. 2 (June 2019): 366–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menon, Nikhil. “Developing Histories of Indian Development.” History Compass 19, no. 10 (2021): e12689.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patel, Dinyar. “Making Swadeshi Managers: The Antecedents of Professional Management Education in India, 1860s–1950s.” Enterprise & Society (2023), doi:10.1017/eso.2022.53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. “Social Psychology as a Science of Democracy.” In Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, 116–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Tirthankar. “Development or Distortion? ‘Powerlooms’ in India, 1950–1997.” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 16 (1998): 897–911.Google Scholar
Sackley, Nicole. “The Road from Serfdom: Economic Storytelling and Narratives of India in the Rise of Neoliberalism.” History and Technology 31, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 397–419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sondhi, Krishan. “Dr. Vikram Sarabhai,” The Illustrated Weekly of India, February 6, 1971, 17.Google Scholar
Srinivas, Nidhi. “Mimicry and Revival: The Transfer and Transformation of Management Knowledge to India 1959–1990.” International Studies of Management & Organization 38, no. 4 (2008): 38–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tumbe, Chinmay. “Kamla.” FiftyTwo. 2020. https://fiftytwo.in/story/kamla.Google Scholar
[ATIRA] Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association. Proceedings of the First Management Conference. Ahmedabad: ATIRA, 1955.Google Scholar
Anonymous. The Indian Industrial Commission Report 1916–1918. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Press, 1919.Google Scholar
Anonymous. Gujarat Vepari Mahamandal: Gujarati and English Annual Report 1959-1960. Ahmedabad: Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 1961.Google Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Ninth Annual Report: 1970–1971. Ahmedabad: IIMA, 1971.Google Scholar
Sarabhai, Vikram, Chowdhry, Kamla, Bhaduri, S. N., Majumdar, N., Mankiker, N. S., Shodhan, Navnitlal, Shourie, H. D, Sreenivasan, K., and Subram, E. R.. Report of the Indian Productivity Delegation to Japan. New Delhi: Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, 1957.Google Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Archives, Ahmedabad.Google Scholar
National Archives of India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi.Google Scholar
Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), Sleepy Hollow, NY.Google Scholar
Wellcome Library, London.Google Scholar
Braverman, Harry. Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Breman, Jan. The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class: Sliding Down the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India. Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Chibber, Vivek. Locked in Place: State Building and Late Industrialization in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Chowdhry, Kamla. Change-in-Organisations. Bombay: Lalvani Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Chowdhry, Kamla, ed. Management for Development: Vikram Sarabhai, A Collection of Papers. Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1974.Google Scholar
Cowen, Deborah. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickson, William, and Roethlisberger, F. J., with the assistance and collaboration of Wright, Harold A.. Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939, reprint 1964.Google Scholar
Drucker, Peter. The Future of Industrial Man. New York: John Day Company, 1942.Google Scholar
Engerman, David. The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Guillén, Mauro F. Models of Management: Work, Authority, and Organization in a Comparative Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Immerwahr, Daniel. Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaffrelot, Christophe, Kohli, Atul, and Murali, Kanta, eds. Business and Politics in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Lewin, Kurt. Resolving Social Conflicts: Selected Papers on Group Dynamics [1935–1946]. London: Souvenir Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Lynton, Rolf. The Tide of Learning: The Aloka Experience; Incorporating a Study Carried Out Under the UNESCO System of Associated Youth Enterprise. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960.Google Scholar
Lynton, Rolf, and Udai, Pareek. Training for Organizational Transformation. Part 1, For Policy-Makers and Change Managers. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1967, reprint 2000.Google Scholar
Markovits, Claude. Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931–39: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Offner, Amy. Sorting Out Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Rice, A. K. Productivity and Social Organisation: The Ahmedabad Experiment, Technical Innovation, Work Organisation and Management. London: Tavistock Publications, 1958.Google Scholar
Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sarabhai, Vikram. Control and Management of Public Sector Enterprises; Foundation Day Lectures. Hyderabad: Administrative Staff Colleges, 1970.Google Scholar
Sarabhai, Vikram. Science Policy and National Development, edited by Chowdhry, Kamla. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1974.Google Scholar
Spodek, Howard. Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth-Century India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Trist, Eric, Murray, Hugh and Trist, Beulah. The Social Engagement of Social Science. Vol. 2, The Socio-Technical Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Ahuja, Ravi. “A Beveridge Plan for India? Social Insurance and the Making of the ‘Formal Sector.’” International Review of Social History 64, no. 2 (2019): 207–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anonymous. “The Eight All India Textile Conference.” Indian Textile Journal (May 1951): 514.Google Scholar
Anonymous. “Clearing the Administrative Jungle.” AICC Economic Review 5, no. 14 (November 15, 1953): 4.Google Scholar
Anonymous. “Efficiency and Its Measure.” AICC Economic Review 5, no. 3 (June 5, 1953): 5.Google Scholar
Balasubramanian, Aditya. “Contesting ‘Permit-and-Licence Raj’: Economic Conservatism and the Idea of Democracy in 1950s India.” Past & Present 251, no. 1 (May 2021): 189–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chowdhry, Kamla. “Institution Building and Social Change: The Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association.” Indian Journal of Public Administration 14, no. 4 (1968): 943–961.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chowdhry, Kamla. “Developing Administrators for Tomorrow.” Indian Journal of Public Administration 15, no. 2 (1969): 221–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chowdhry, Kamla. “Organizational Innovation in Universities: Relevance of Industrial Experience.” Economic and Political Weekly, Review of Management 4, no. 35 (1969): M97–100.Google Scholar
Chowdhry, Kamla, and Pal, A.. “Production Planning and Organizational Morale: A Case from India.” Human Organization 15, no. 4 (1956): 11–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D’Mello, Bernard. “Management Education: A Critical Appraisal.” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 48 (1999): M169–M176.Google Scholar
Francombe, Joseph. “Propagating and Practicing ‘Horizontal Control’: Vikram Sarabhai, Management and American Social Science.” Current Science 118, no. 8 (2020): 1207–1212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilman, Nils. “The Prophet: Peter Drucker and the Legitimation of the Corporation.” In American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Lichtenstein, Nelson, 109–132. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Haaften, Lourens Van. “Management Science and Nation Building: The Sociotechnical Imaginary Behind the Making of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.” Indian Economic & Social History Review 58, no. 3 (2021): 333–359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halse, Michael. “A New Institute of Rural Management—and a New Development Discipline.” Indian Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), Occasional Publication 1 (1980): 1–28.Google Scholar
Haynes, Douglas. “Harvard, the Case Study Method and the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, 1959–1970.” American Historical Association Conference, January 2020.Google Scholar
Hoopee, James. “Managerialism: Its History and Dangers.” Historically Speaking 5, no. 1 (2003): 6–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, Matthew. “Democratic Technologies of Speech: From WWII America to Postcolonial Delhi.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20, no. 2 (2010): 257–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jammulamadaka, Nimruji. “A Postcolonial Critique of Indian’s Management Scheme.” In Management Education in India: Perspectives and Practices, edited by Thakur, Manish and Babu, R. Rajesh, 23–42, Singapore: Springer, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klikauer, Thomas. “What Is Managerialism?” Critical Sociology 41, nos. 7–8 (2015): 1103–1119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kudaisya, Medha M. “‘Reforms by Stealth’: Indian Economic Policy, Big Business and the Promise of the Shastri Years, 1964–1966.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 205–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kumar, Arun. “From Henley to Harvard at Hyderabad? (Post and Neo-) Colonialism in Management Education in India.” Enterprise & Society 20, no. 2 (June 2019): 366–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menon, Nikhil. “Developing Histories of Indian Development.” History Compass 19, no. 10 (2021): e12689.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patel, Dinyar. “Making Swadeshi Managers: The Antecedents of Professional Management Education in India, 1860s–1950s.” Enterprise & Society (2023), doi:10.1017/eso.2022.53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. “Social Psychology as a Science of Democracy.” In Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, 116–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Tirthankar. “Development or Distortion? ‘Powerlooms’ in India, 1950–1997.” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 16 (1998): 897–911.Google Scholar
Sackley, Nicole. “The Road from Serfdom: Economic Storytelling and Narratives of India in the Rise of Neoliberalism.” History and Technology 31, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 397–419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sondhi, Krishan. “Dr. Vikram Sarabhai,” The Illustrated Weekly of India, February 6, 1971, 17.Google Scholar
Srinivas, Nidhi. “Mimicry and Revival: The Transfer and Transformation of Management Knowledge to India 1959–1990.” International Studies of Management & Organization 38, no. 4 (2008): 38–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tumbe, Chinmay. “Kamla.” FiftyTwo. 2020. https://fiftytwo.in/story/kamla.Google Scholar
[ATIRA] Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association. Proceedings of the First Management Conference. Ahmedabad: ATIRA, 1955.Google Scholar
Anonymous. The Indian Industrial Commission Report 1916–1918. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Press, 1919.Google Scholar
Anonymous. Gujarat Vepari Mahamandal: Gujarati and English Annual Report 1959-1960. Ahmedabad: Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 1961.Google Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Ninth Annual Report: 1970–1971. Ahmedabad: IIMA, 1971.Google Scholar
Sarabhai, Vikram, Chowdhry, Kamla, Bhaduri, S. N., Majumdar, N., Mankiker, N. S., Shodhan, Navnitlal, Shourie, H. D, Sreenivasan, K., and Subram, E. R.. Report of the Indian Productivity Delegation to Japan. New Delhi: Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, 1957.Google Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad Archives, Ahmedabad.Google Scholar
National Archives of India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi.Google Scholar
Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), Sleepy Hollow, NY.Google Scholar
Wellcome Library, London.Google Scholar