Abstract
Research on the international development of management education after World War II has focused mainly on the role of key U.S. institutions such as the US government, business schools, and the Ford Foundations (e.g. Engwall, Kipping, & Üsdiken, 2016; Gemelli, 1998). This perspective has recently been challenged by extending the international perspective to include the Global South, and by accentuating the role of local actors (Kumar, 2019; Wanderley, Alcadipani, & Barros, 2021). In this paper we challenge the dominating perspective by exploring how the International Labour Organisation (ILO) with headquarters in Geneva contributed to promote the idea of management education in developing countries from the mid-1950s to around 1970. Just after the war, ILO engaged heavily in initiating productivity projects in several developing countries. This work included the idea of vocational education. ILOs 42nd conference in 1958 represented a shift in this work, when the organization declared that the productivity project should include management development programs to train top executives. This led to several ILO projects on management development in more than 40 developing countries, very often in cooperation with UN.
This paper will analyze how ILO’s initiative matched other processes of developing management education in Latin America by focusing on Argentina. This focus is relevant since ILO prioritized Argentina highly in this context, and in some documents are mentioned as the most important country in addition to Poland. We also know that the role of national institutions and actors in Argentina was strong and independent versus relevant U.S. actors. In this way, the paper will challenge the conventional U.S.-European focus in the literature on the post-war development of management education. The paper is based on archival research at ILO’s archive as well as Argentine sources.