Pedagogies of Development, Conceptions of Efficiency: Modern Managerialism in Industrial Ahmedabad, 1950s–1960s

This paper aims to trace the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in the post-independence period in India during the 1950s and 1960s. It tracks the discipline’s formative interests in the management of industrial labor, the views of its major proponents, and the processes through which the discipline sought generalized relevance within the postcolonial regime. It also discusses the intersection of managerial concerns with the globally emergent discourses on development and industrial reform and follows the eventual institutionalization of the discipline as an educational concern through the setting up of management schools. In doing so, the paper examines the modes and rationales through which managerialism established its own normative vocabulary and deployed it for assessing not just the objectives of industrial capital but also the newly consolidating postcolonial state and its developmental ambitions. This circulation of management ideas is analyzed by following the experiments that were conducted in the industrial enterprises of Ahmedabad by a group of textile industrialists, UN developmental pedagogues, and Ford Foundation consultants. Even when, in most cases, such studies on management did not succeed in achieving their ascribed goals, the paper demonstrates how managerialism maintained its relevance by parallelly turning its focus onto the postcolonial state and its developmental activities. Broadly, the paper argues that management in the mid-twentieth century functioned as a solution in search of a problem. It eventually acquired prominence by tautologically reading institutions and various aspects of the society as organizations that needed the prescription of management to resolve their operations.