"The Harvard Business School, the Case Method and the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, 1959-1970"

This paper analyzes the relationship between the Ford Foundation and the Harvard Business School (HBS) on the one hand and the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad (IIIMA), perhaps India’s leading management school, on the other. Harvard’s role in IIMA’s early years is frequently celebrated by representatives of both institutions as evidence of a smooth and successful collaboration. On the other hand, critics have sometimes seen the establishment of Indian business schools as reflecting a neocolonial relationship and the exertion of a kind of cultural mimicry in which American actors came to occupy a dominant influence over Indian educational practices. The adoption at IIMA of the case method, the dominant pedagogical approach from the HBS, has particularly been seen as evidence of cultural imposition. Such arguments, however, have often been developed without considering local politics and the Indian actors involved in the establishment of Indian management education. This paper examines how key leading Indian figures associated with IIMA repeatedly outmaneuvered representatives of the Ford Foundation and the HBS to achieve their central goals, seriously limiting American power and control. Still, the Institute adopted the case method as its core pedagogical approach. Key to this development was the ways the case method addressed the emerging self-definition of key founding figures (like Vikram Sarabhai) and the Institute’s young Indian faculty as “change agents” combatting traditional social practices and hierarchies. Actions taken by the Ford Foundation and HBS – the allocation of foreign exchange, the sponsorship of educational peregrinations between Ahmedabad and HBS, and American involvement in formulating the initial curriculum of IIMA –can be seen as exerting a kind of “soft power”. Most importantly, however, the institutionalization of the case method appealed to the interests of key Indian actors and elevated them to positions of influence in independent India.