Laboring over Standards

In the early 1950s, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) launched a project to improve productivity in developing countries. The inclusion of the productivity task in addition to ILO’s work on human rights and fairness led to several productivity missions to various developing countries. In 1958, ILO’s congress decided to expand the productivity project by stating that developing management training programs should be a new separate task that arose from the productivity work. In the same way as ILO had sent productivity missions from 1952 to countries such as Israel, India, Egypt, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, Greece, Hong Kong, and Ceylon from, ILO now sent mission to promote management development and training to countries such as Argentina and Poland from 1959.
There are similarities between these programs and for example efforts made by the Marshall Plan and the European Productivity Agency (EPA) in Europe after the end of World War II. While the European experiences have been analyzed in numerous publications, few historians with the exception of Kott (2018, 2019) have paid any attention to ILO’s project on productivity and management development. This session offers a collection of four papers on the topic and represents a first attempt to create a framework for comparative analyses of ILO’s initiative to promote management development and productivity in developing countries