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Understanding the development of business culture in India: a contemporary history analysis of the content and the impact of Business education

Management and business schools constitute a dense cross-border network of knowledge institutes that are responsible for training significant parts of populations. The theories, tools and methods taught at management schools have been diffused on a large scale and have impregnated different levels of social organisation. Management schools have played a significant role in the legitimation of new knowledges that are co-productive to the economic, social and political norms of the modern world and have been enmeshed with the creation of new identities and subjectivities. Yet, we lack a historical understanding of how the rise of management education has transformed societies in uneven ways and across polities and periods. This dissertation provides a situated account of how a management institute in the city of Ahmedabad, India, evolved, since its establishment in 1962, as a site that was entangled with the production of India as a socio-political and economic complex. It explores how the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad formed a space where a new and modern India could be imagined and implemented. The study described how management science and education at IIMA gave rise to new identities, discourses and institutions in the Indian society. This micro-historical study, based upon field work, interviews and archival research in India and the US, contributes to our understanding of how higher educational institutes form powerful sites in the transformations of societies and the development of national identities.

The first chapter describes the coalition building process that preceded the start of the IIM in Ahmedabad and breaks down the dominant narrative that the IIMs were constituted in reply to a natural and large demand of the industrialising Indian society. During the 1950s, the first initiatives were taken to formalise management education in the academic realm, though this met considerable resistance. To make scientific management acceptable and attractive to India’s political elite, a narrative was constructed in which capitalist connotations with the concept of management education were carefully removed or avoided. The concept of management science was aligned to the dominant ideological orientation in Indian politics, which was aimed at state-led development and the principle of a mixed-economy (a system combining state and private enterprises).

The   chapter describes how the educational practices of the institute were focused on creating a new managerial elite that was envisioned to replace the ‘traditional’ forms of management and to break down the thick social structures that governed India’s business communities – organised around the lines of kinship, religion and caste. Psychological and sociological knowledge was mobilised to propagate less authoritarian modes of governing and a decentralisation of power at the Indian workplace. Aligned with socialist discourses, management education was presented as an emancipatory project that could develop a new type of manager who transcended the ‘premodern’ boundaries and could reshape and democratise India’s business structures and practices. The third chapter examined how management education and research in Ahmedabad developed during the period 1966-1991. The start of this period is marked by the coming to power of Indira Gandhi, who set in an era of what is labelled as the high days of ‘economic leftism’ and the rise of populism in historiography of India. The chapter described how this changing political atmosphere affected the practices at the management institute in Ahmedabad significantly. Management education was envisioned as instrumental to enhancing social mobility and emancipation in the upper domains of the private and public sectors, by educating India’s future managers recruited from all segments of society. Hence, the manager was imagined as the progressive national ‘change agent’ that formed a vital element in developing India as a technologically advanced, socially just, democratic, and prosperous society.

The final chapter examines how management education in Ahmedabad evolved in the period from 1991 to 2008.  In the 1990s, after the significant change in the macro-economic policy pursued by the Indian government, the environment in which management education developed changed dramatically. IIMA formed an important site for the construction and implementation of a particular vision of India, this time rooted in a neoliberal Utopia. With the embracement of the growth and development models proffered by the dominant international organisations, management education was increasingly understood as instrumental in embedding India into the globalised knowledge-based economy.

Date:1 Oct 2017 →  30 Nov 2021
Keywords:missionary history, business management education, history of education, India
Disciplines:Curatorial and related studies, History, Other history and archaeology, Art studies and sciences, Artistic design, Audiovisual art and digital media, Heritage, Music, Theatre and performance, Visual arts, Other arts, Product development, Study of regions
Project type:PhD project