"ILO and the productivity and management development missions: the experience of the Productivity Center of Argentina (1958-1967)"

The 42nd ILO conference in 1958 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 the United Nations Special Funds, which funded the projects. Argentina’s position as one of the pioneers’ projects worldwide on management development programs makes it highly relevant to explore how ILO’s initiative was received and matched with other local initiatives to develop the Argentine system of making managers. Considering this, the paper will analyze the concrete experience of the ILO’s designed Productivity Center of Argentina (CPA, from now) from its origin in the late 1950s to 1967, when the CPA was absorbed into the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. Especially two processes invite us to explore the matching between the international ILO initiative and local conditions. In this specific period, both the productivity question and the need to institutionalize management education and development programs were put on the agenda, both by the government, business, and labor unions. The paper is based on Argentine sources and documents from the UN’s and ILO’s archives