"Making Managers in Asia. India and the Philippines in a Geopolitical Context, 1950s-1970s"

Recent business history research on post World-War II management education has extended the geographical scope by exploring countries outside the US-Western European axis. One of these countries is India (e.g. Kumar, 2019), but other countries in Asia has so far been unexplored. In both India and the Philippines multiple Western organizations, such as the Ford Foundation, Harvard Business Schools, Henley Administrative Staff College in the UK, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) were strongly involved in establishing programs for educating and developing managers in higher positions in cooperation with national organizations, such as the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) and the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) outside Manila.
Based on a comparative study of these processes in the two countries¸ which both had a distinct position in a Cold War context with the Philippines closely linked to the US and India cooperating closely with the Soviet Union, the paper addresses the question how the geopolitical position influenced the system for developing mangers in developing countries from the 1950s to the 1970s. It shows that the impact of the geopolitical factors was moderated by the strength and character of relevant national institutions.
The paper draws on research at relevant archives in the US, Europe, and Asia. The paper will also contribute to new knowledge within management studies literature on management education in the Global South (Wanderley et al., 2021).
References:
Kumar, A. (2019). From Henley to Harvard at Hyderabad? (Post and Neo-) Colonialism in Management Education in India. Enterprise & Society, 20(2), 366-400.
Wanderley, S., Alcadipani, R., & Barros, A. (2021). Recentering the Global South in the Making of Business School Histories: Dependency Ambiguity in Action. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 20(3), 361-381