Americanization, Colonialism, and U.S. Foundations

The United States has exercised disproportionate influence on management studies across the globe.^{Footnote 22} Commonly understood as Americanization, its predominance in management (education, research, theory, and even practice) has led to a reduction of other societies and nations to mere “field experiments in the global laboratory of universalizing US management theory.”^{Footnote 23} Americanization gained impetus in the context of the Cold War, where management was deemed crucial for maintaining a strong and growing American economy, and by extension the United States’ place in global political and economic order in comparison to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.^{Footnote 24} H. Rowan Gaither Jr., FF’s president from 1953 to 1956, and later the chair of its board, recognized as much in July 23, 1958, in a speech at Stanford University, when he argued, “The Soviet challenge requires that we seek out and utilize the best intelligence of American management—and in turn puts on management a national responsibility of unparalleled dimensions.”^{Footnote 25} Management, therefore, was imbricated in the United States’ related pursuits of its war against communism and in installing itself as an economic and political exemplar for the Rest of the World to follow. In its importation, of which the third world is the focus here, management studies took different foci, form, and trajectories in different geographies and historical eras.^{Footnote 26} Notwithstanding such significant differences in the Americanization of management education, it has always been crucial to serving the country’s domestic and global interests and foreign policy objectives.^{Footnote 27}

The responses to the Americanization of management knowledge and education, Kipping Engwall, and Üsdiken suggest, tended to be more extreme in countries located on the global periphery,^{Footnote 28} which vacillated between enthusiastic adoption informed by development and modernization and rejection based on nationalism with limited attempts at adaption or translation into specific contexts. The former is commonly understood, as noted earlier, as mimicry, which involved transplanting American theory, choice of issues, curricular resources, and pedagogy, although not always successfully, into third world countries such as Brazil and India.^{Footnote 29} It was framed through, and legitimated in the name of, international development, where management and development were twinned in the mid-twentieth-century third world in two related ways.^{Footnote 30} As a field of practice, management was required for the organization, delivery, and control of international development programs to rapidly transform rural, agrarian, informal third world economies into urbanized industrial economies.^{Footnote 31} As a field of knowledge, management was conceived as enabling third world countries to “catch up with Western nations in its scientific temperament and its political and cultural modernization.”^{Footnote 32} With the West installed as the exemplar, management promised a singular trajectory toward a predetermined goal, and it did not matter “where you [were] in the world or at what time in history you [came] from.”^{Footnote 33}

Imposed from the outside-in, the transplanting of management from the United States to third world countries led to, as Ibarra-Colado terms it, “epistemic coloniality.” It was based on the “totalitarian pragmatism of the ‘one best way’ and the supposed scientific character of a set of logical and highly formalized mathematical knowledge.”^{Footnote 34} In management’s pursuit of the one best way, people, communities, ecologies, geographies, and industries from the third world were commonly designated as deviant, deficient, or backward. Like colonialism, therefore, management worked to reinforce or reconfigure preexisting colonial binaries (modern versus traditional, for example) and order (developed industrial nations of North America and western Europe as exemplars) in the third world.^{Footnote 35} The postcolonial critique of management has, therefore, characterized management in terms of its continuities of colonialism: in its colonizing intent, gaze, and representations of the Other. It is worth highlighting here that the internationalization of management in the third world shared its colonizing characteristics with its twin: international development.^{Footnote 36} Both were not only characteristically modernizing and universalizing but also indexical in their expressions and representations of colonialism.

In the name of and as part of international development in the third world, management research and training institutions were established. Both U.S. academic institutions (such as HBS, Sloan School of Management, and Michigan State University) and philanthropic organizations (most notably the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) were involved.^{Footnote 37} They were part of the wider efforts of U.S. foundations to expand and consolidate American soft power.^{Footnote 38} In an early signal work, for example, Robert Arnove marked the motivations and programs of U.S. foundations in the production of public culture and policy as “cultural imperialism.”^{Footnote 39} Arnove and contributors in his anthology argued that foundations had a corrosive influence on democracy, contrary to the latter’s claims. From an international relations perspective, Parmar has argued that the United States’ Big Three foundations’ core investments were directed at creating and sustaining elite scholarly networks, which were crucial for serving U.S. foreign policy and global interests.^{Footnote 40} During the Cold War, for example, these networks were involved in promoting Americanism and combating anti-Americanism while sharing “close cooperation, shared convictions and worldviews” with the United States.^{Footnote 41} However, the foundations’ programs were hardly static; they frequently mirrored the shifts in U.S. foreign policy. Like Parmar, Gemelli has argued that the changes in FF’s policies and programs on management education in western Europe during the 1950s and 1960s reflected the changes in U.S. foreign policy as it moved from fighting communism to fighting the impending internationalization of the Soviet bloc countries and their economies in the 1970s.^{Footnote 42} Still later, the networks worked to promote neoliberal globalization strategies in third world countries. This complemented U.S. foreign policy even as it shifted over time and across geographies.^{Footnote 43}

As part of their efforts at expanding U.S. soft power, these foundations sponsored programs to support specific disciplines and fields across the globe through international institution- and network-building.^{Footnote 44} In India, for example, FF identified management and public administration as its chosen fields of intervention. This choice reflected not only the needs India’s overloaded and small administrative capacity to lead its postcolonial development but also the mutual significance for industrial development and private enterprise.^{Footnote 45} In 1957 FF commissioned Charles A. Myers to investigate which Indian institutions could be supported for their teaching in “industrial relations and industrial management”; his report identified ASCI as a potential recipient.^{Footnote 46} In addition to ASCI and the IIMs in Ahmedabad and Calcutta, FF supported the founding of a third IIM in Bangalore in 1975 focusing on public-sector management, and of the Institute of Rural Management in Anand in 1979 on cooperative management. At each of these institutions, FF financed technical support of other U.S. B-schools in the adoption of an autonomous business school model in India. Characteristic features of such a model included autonomy from accredited universities, postgraduate teaching in a trimester format, and case-based teaching with the objective of insulating management institutions in the country from contrasting imperatives of Indian universities.^{Footnote 47}

Pedagogic Approaches

Before proceeding further, it is worth outlining the historical development, key features, and pedagogic effectiveness of syndicates and the case method. The latter is now widely known and highly regarded; less is known about the former.

Making Henley at Hyderabad

As part of the post-World War II development in India, the imperial government’s Central Advisory Board of Education suggested that technical education in the country should be organized on a national, not provincial, level.^{Footnote 64} As part of this, an All India Council for Technical Education was established in 1945 to support higher technical education for industrial development in the country. After attaining independence in 1947, the post-colonial government of India began exploring the possibility of training its incoming cadre of civil servants at Henley starting in 1948. This was soon found to be unfeasible. In 1949 the council appointed a joint committee to plan for the organization and development of management training institutions in the country. The committee recommended that an Administrative Staff College of India should be established as a collaboration between India’s government and private business community. A separate planning committee was setup under T. T. Krishnamachari, the minister of Commerce and Industry, who invited prominent members from the industry sector.^{Footnote 65} The committee’s joint secretaries visited Henley in 1953. The following year, Hall (as noted above, Henley’s founding principal) visited India to offer further advice. ASCI was formally registered on May 18, 1956, with Gen. S. M. Shrinagesh as its first principal and with syndicates as its choice for delivering management training. Before taking charge at ASCI, Shrinagesh spent six weeks at Henley studying, among other things, their use of syndicates. Impressed with what he witnessed, Shrinagesh found syndicates “so relevant in the Indian environment” that he was convinced that ASCI ought to adopt it as far as possible. For its first session, he arranged for the secondment of J. W. L. Adams, a member of Henley’s directing staff, as ASCI’s director of Studies.^{Footnote 66}

Launched in December 1957, ASCI’s syndicates were modeled closely on those used at Henley, with adaptation of some features to accommodate the specificities of the Indian context.^{Footnote 67} Like Henley, ASCI’s program catered to midlevel managers who had recently moved into––or were likely to do so in the near future––senior administrative positions and/or had accepted an expansion of their administrative duties. Mimicking Henley’s syndicates, the midlevel managers were selected based on interviews; the fifty successful candidates were then divided into five syndicates, each with ten members. To ensure diversity within each syndicate group, the division was also based on their functional specialisms and the types of organizations they came from. As at Henley, the members were expected to learn from their prior experiences and contrast it with those of others through dialogue. There were minor differences, though. Unlike at Henley, and reflective of the post-colonial Indian economic structure, where the public sector played a significant role, the majority of ASCI trainees were from governmental agencies and public-sector industries.^{Footnote 68}

At Hyderabad and elsewhere, Henley and its syndicates served as a template in a number of third world countries on which the latter’s development and administrative institutions and practices were modeled. Acknowledging this, Taylor concluded that the syndicates had come to be universally recognized for their efficiency in delivering management training, irrespective of the differences within these third world countries.^{Footnote 69} However, I would argue that the rise of syndicates to universal prominence—if that—was not simply an outcome of its effectiveness as a pedagogic method. Instead, it involved concentrated efforts from Henley’s staff. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Henley actively solicited nominations of members from third world countries on its own programs as well as the secondment of its staff to colleges in other countries. Hall and staff members from Henley toured Administrative Staff Colleges across the globe to provide advisory support as appointed consultants or on secondment from Henley. In 1963, for example, Henley’s J. P. Martin-Bates approached the Ford Foundation with a request for financial support so that Henley could continue to provide additional technical assistance to ASCI.^{Footnote 70} His request was declined because FF was actively engaged in making Harvard at Hyderabad via the case method, as detailed in the following section.

Drawing on the postcolonial critique of management, Henley’s attempts represented a colonial continuity in post-colonial India; their intent was to maintain British influence despite the formal demise of colonialism and its universalizing assumption that third world context did not matter very much. In the name of development, Henley’s import of syndicates represented attempts, as the postcolonial scholars Seth, Gandhi, and Dutton argue, at reinscribing the history of the third world into one that was not necessarily of its own making but based on received frameworks.^{Footnote 71}

Making Harvard at Hyderabad

Between 1958 and 1973, FF made four grants to ASCI that totaled US$1,266,143 toward institutional development, staff research and training, and development of a consultancy division. It is instructive to note that two-thirds of this funding was dedicated to technical experts; that is, costs associated with salaries, travel, and accommodation of various U.S. scholars who arrived for short- or long-term consulting and advisory assignments to Hyderabad.^{Footnote 72} There is no known archival evidence to suggest that Shrinagesh approached FF for help with the case method per se; however, according to FF internal documentation from 1960, he approached FF for support to introduce case method-based teaching “following the Harvard pattern” at Hyderabad.^{Footnote 73} Cases were expected to help develop a focus on decision making among members of ASCI’s syndicates and support its faculty members to develop “their own ideas on management.”^{Footnote 74} Given that cases were already being used alongside lectures, site visits, and simulations in syndicates at Henley as well as Hyderabad, FF’s support was earmarked for guidance and technical expertise in combining the two in its training.^{Footnote 75} However, before case method-based teaching could be adopted at ASCI, there was a need for researching and writing cases relevant to the Indian context. As part of its Grant 59-21A, FF approached Andrew R. Towl at HBS. Initially interested in only a short-term position of six months, Towl was persuaded by Douglas Ensminger to accept an eighteen-month assignment to help ASCI develop the case method at Hyderabad. Ensminger, FF’s representative in India from 1951 to 1970, was widely influential among senior members of Nehru’s cabinet.^{Footnote 76}

Towl began his ASCI assignment on September 15, 1960, not in Hyderabad but in Henley, where he met with Hall and R. L. Gupta, ASCI’s principal. They discussed Hall’s understanding of administration (as it was known in the U.S. context) and experience of syndicates. Arriving at ASCI in Hyderabad shortly afterward, Towl began looking for ways in which syndicates and the case method might complement each other, especially as he believed there existed a number of institutional and programmatic similarities between the Advanced Management Program at HBS and the management training at both Henley and ASCI. In a letter to Ensminger, for example, Towl discussed that the programs at all three institutes lasted for the same duration, typically attracted 40-year-old men with extensive practical experience, emphasized self-directed learning, and envisaged faculty members as instructors and not teachers.^{Footnote 77} Elsewhere, he outlined still other similarities, including their shared recognition of autonomous enterprise and belief that learning ought to challenge individuals.^{Footnote 78} Both methods, Towl believed, were committed to “administration as an internal process” and to “exposing members to the emotional requirements of management as well as to the intellectual.”^{Footnote 79} He initiated a biweekly program at Hyderabad to discuss possible ways of using the case method in syndicates. The active participation of ASCI’s faculty members in the program led Towl to believe that the problems of merging the two pedagogic methods “seem[ed] manageable.”^{Footnote 80}

Despite Towl’s optimism, senior leadership and faculty members at ASCI, particularly Gupta, remained skeptical about merging the two methods.^{Footnote 81} Nevertheless, FF’s advisors coerced Gupta into the writing of cases. In April 1961, Towl wrote—self-admittedly—a rather tactless and blunt letter to Gupta. Written on FF’s letterhead stationery, Towl reminded Gupta that FF’s grant to ASCI Hyderabad was conditional on its acceptance of case method-based instruction.^{Footnote 82} Responding to Gupta’s concerns, Towl argued that cases could always be discussed as “the eleventh experience at the syndicate table” because its design permitted “the feed back [sic] of faculty research without violating the fundamentals” of syndicates. Towl’s somewhat terse response was copied to Ensminger and C. D. Deshmukh, who until 1956 had served as the Indian finance minister and was known for proximity to Nehru and FF. Attached to Towl’s letter to Gupta was the draft of a separate letter—to be sent later on Gupta’s behalf—to various Indian universities and companies encouraging faculty members and senior managers, respectively, to join Towl’s training program on casewriting.^{Footnote 83} Particularly revealing here is the extent to which FF exercised its power as a dominating institution in drafting a communique on Gupta’s behalf and coercing him into sending it out, despite his strong reservations about merging the case method with syndicates.

Following this, a special task force comprising senior leaders from industries, banks, industrial associations, and academia was assembled by June 1961. It toured India’s major industrial centers to gather data for casewriting. As a result of this work, more than seventy-five cases were written over the following six months. Sixty cases were completed, of which fifty-five were compiled in a book titled ASCI Case Collection: Series I, with a note from Towl on writing and using cases.

Notwithstanding the seeming progress on the development of cases, uncertainty about its use in ASCI’s training programs continued. In 1962 Gupta voiced his reservations again. Possibly afraid of losing FF’s support, he continued to indicate his interest in finding ways to merge the case method within syndicates. Thus, Gupta requested FF to fund a separate travel grant for him. He proposed spending six to eight weeks with Towl and Ernest C. Arbuckle, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, to gain a “good deal of knowledge and insight” and to “co-ordinate the Case Studies with the Syndicate method and to get the best out of the new type of the Staff envisaged.”^{Footnote 84} It is worth mentioning that Gupta’s reservations about such a merger were also shared within FF. Robert Greenleaf, an FF-appointed consultant and a leading proponent of “servant leadership,” expressed reservations about the use of cases within syndicates.^{Footnote 85} He said that the case method was an excellent procedure under a “gifted teacher,” but under a mediocre teacher it would be “a pretty muddled kind of thing and not much good comes out of it.”^{Footnote 86}

Nevertheless, FF went from making a limited argument for the use of the case method in training to its adoption institution-wide at Hyderabad. FF personnel did so by posing ASCI’s problems—perceived or real—with training as a wider institutional problem. Looking back, Dennis Gallagher (FF staff in its India Office) suggested in his evaluation report from 1970 that there had been an absence of integration of research and teaching.^{Footnote 87} The absence of an institutional integration at ASCI had failed to create any scope for faculty growth. He argued such an integration was not possible, in any case, through syndicates. In a letter to N. P. (Potla) Sen (ASCI’s principal), Harold Howe (program advisor in Education at FF’s New Delhi Office) repeated that the quality and utility of its syndicate-based teaching had grown to become “the major institutional problem” confronting ASCI.^{Footnote 88} Even though ASCI had made progress in consulting and research, teaching continued to lag in quality and effectiveness. To sort the institutional difficulties confronting ASCI, Greenleaf recommended a consultancy and applied research division (CARD), which was finally established in 1964 through FF’s Grant 59-21C. Promoted as a source of additional income for ASCI, CARD was expected to resolve the reservations at Hyderabad over the use of the case method. The division proposed to integrate all of ASCI’s institutional functions: consulting, research, and training in their use of the case method. CARD was expected to identify and provide data on which cases could be researched and developed, which could later be used in the training programs. CARD developed rapidly, and by 1966 leading FF staff believed that both Gupta and ASCI’s governors had ultimately, although belatedly, come to an “understanding and appreciation of the philosophy of the integration of the training and research programs”; that is, the case method.^{Footnote 89} Such assessments, however, proved to be premature as ASCI’s training programs continued to use syndicates.

As uncertainty over FF’s support to ASCI grew, the latter’s principal Sen wrote a detailed letter to Howe in September 1970.^{Footnote 90} Before commenting on FF’s priorities for ASCI, Sen wrote about teaching methodology and the role of research. Arguing that ASCI was not “indissolubly wedded” to Henley’s syndicate method, he downplayed its use at ASCI and cited the variety of teaching methods used at Hyderabad; and he included that FF’s support was important in the development of cases at ASCI. In 1972 ASCI submitted a request to the foundation for a four-year grant for INR10,087,000 (approximately US$328,200 at the time).^{Footnote 91} In it, Sen reiterated the use and relevance of syndicates in training senior executives. He argued that Towl’s understanding of the subdivision of management in syndicates as its key weakness was incorrect; instead, such a subdivision was practical, necessary, and even beneficial. The participation of members from governmental, public, and private organizations in the syndicates, he noted, had been useful in comparing experiences and examining and forming their actions, and was more absorbing than academic theory. Additionally, the use of syndicates had aided in the “development of the member’s personality and on making him more adept in handling tools and procedures” by improving skills in group thinking, decision making, self-expression, and so on.^{Footnote 92}

Despite making a strong case for conserving its Henley-style teaching in syndicates and their values, ASCI’s leadership continued to signal its openness to other teaching methods, including the case method, possibly in order to secure FF’s financial support in the near future. In its Prospective Plan for the following decade, which was appended to the above grant request in 1972, they restated ASCI’s openness to “innovations that will be suggested as greater depth of knowledge about Indian administrative problems emerge” from CARD.^{Footnote 93} ASCI’s case for conserving the past while expressing a willingness to change in the future was recast in terms of its autonomy as a distinct and Indian institution. The plan stated that ASCI wished to “evolve into a truly Indian institution that will not be regarded as an adaptation of a foreign model although it will obviously use any superior techniques that others have developed.” Any change, such as the imposition of the case method should not involve a “sudden abandonment of the old and substitution of the new” but should be a gradual development toward more rigorous, specific, systems-oriented, and demanding individual work.^{Footnote 94}

The case for making Harvard at Hyderabad began with FF’s proposal to merge the case method into syndicates. Even as ASCI’s leadership and faculty resisted, arguments for the use of the case method were widened and presented as the mechanism for future institutional integration. Nonetheless, at ASCI the use of Henley’s syndicates persisted. Throughout this situation, FF staff and consultants continued to engage in the stigmatization of syndicates and the legitimization of the case method and their contexts. This is discussed in the next section.

Not This Modernization; That Modernization

After India won its independence in 1947, its higher education institutional complex—largely modeled on the British system––turned back to Britain, expectedly so, for the training of administrative cadres in the public and private sectors. As with other third world countries, Henley served as a template for ASCI in India. The concluding chapter of Taylor’s book, which reflects of the belief in the universal applicability of Henley’s syndicates, outlined Henley’s objectives, curricula, and pedagogy (i.e., syndicates, constitution, staffing, and conditions of work) as exemplars for other Staff Colleges to follow, with some flexibility to accommodate local conditions.^{Footnote 95} Accompanying this were outlines of specific institutional practices from other Staff Colleges in India, Iran, Pakistan, and the Philippines. These, however, were framed as exceptions or deviations, only relevant to their own specific contexts. Therefore, while Henley was framed as a universally relevant template for others to emulate, institutional practices from other Staff Colleges from the third world were mobilized to demonstrate the flexibility that Henley and its syndicates offered.

The expected affinity toward British institutional imaginary and practices at Hyderabad was acknowledged by FF-appointed staff and consultants. Looking back at the long and extensive historical connections between Hyderabad and Henley, Greenleaf noted that when ASCI was founded in 1957, it did “as much as could have been done in India at that time.”^{Footnote 96} Further, he argued that although he would have urged the Indians against mimicking Henley’s syndicates, he was certain his advice would have been ignored as the Indians were “still basking in the glow of their new-found freedom, and their development strategy was one of quickly adopting the ways of the Western world.” The mimicry of Henley at Hyderabad was aided, Greenleaf said, by the limited prerequisites involved in running syndicates: a charismatic leader, an idyllic setting, and non-specialist staff as discussion leaders. He was amazed at the “minutiae of procedure that had been taken over from Henley.”^{Footnote 97}

Emphasizing the mimicry of Henley’s syndicates, Gallagher argued that ASCI’s choice of syndicates was influenced by the contemporaneous “general attitude” toward management in India.^{Footnote 98} This attitude, according to Gallagher, was the result of:

Along with the stigmatization of Henley’s connections with Hyderabad, as discussed above, FF staff and consultants also engaged in the stigmatization of Henley itself. In a letter to Ensminger, for example, Towl argued that Hall’s pattern of syndicates at Henley, and subsequently at Hyderabad, was based on “staff as his ‘eyes and ears.’”^{Footnote 100} It was, therefore, hardly an exemplar unlike Harvard’s “self-governing community of scholars.”

Apart from Greenleaf’s problematic characterization of Indian freedom as “found,” which runs counter to the history of the Indian political independence, there are two further points to note here. First, even though the characterization of Indian management education as mimicry is commonplace and extensive in scholarship, it has been used mainly in the context of Americanization.^{Footnote 101} Agreeing with Srinivas, I would argue that it is important to remember British influence on India’s management community, which has received comparatively less attention in the history of Indian management education.^{Footnote 102} This British influence was notably channeled through the civil services, expatriate managers, and managing agencies. Second, and significant for the discussion here, was that the stigmatization of syndicates—as not demanding very much, which was considered to be a reflection of the “underdeveloped” state of management outside of the United States—was based on a wholly mistaken premise.

FF staff and consultants stigmatized the organizational practices at Henley and ASCI as the received template for post-colonial India’s development, and they also engaged in stigmatizing Indian society. Channeling the developmentalist trope of modernization, they argued that the role of management education in India was to support the rapid development of India’s backward economy and society, which was frequently labeled traditional. Indian culture, Towl argued, was characterized by “deeply embedded” stratification and autocratic relations that had resulted in a time lag in understanding and using managerial concepts and knowledge.^{Footnote 103} While ideas were often promptly accepted at the policy level in India, their adoption and practice required long-term support for “assimilation.” The purpose of management, therefore, was to help “young men who have been growing up in a rural bazar family business society prepare for an early responsibility in organized industry.”^{Footnote 104} Greenleaf also characterized Indian society, economy, and management as backward, deficient, and “grade B,” and which needed to be thoroughly dismantled and replaced with modern (i.e., American) management techniques and practices.^{Footnote 105} Given the developmental challenges confronting India, it could not rely on the development of its managers by trial and error, he argued, as it had in the past.

To legitimize FF’s interventions, Towl argued that a quick and deliberate intervention from outside was necessary as leaving the task to India’s elites would result in perpetuation of their own values and character.^{Footnote 106} Modern management in India, I argue, therefore ought to be understood as the “modern moment”; “by its appearance creates a dramatic and unprecedented break between past and present.”^{Footnote 107} Much like international development, in whose name FF’s programs in management education in India were organized, management required a breaking-away from the past, both for ASCI and India. In engineering this break, FF—as a dominating institution—was involved in the stigmatization of British management, Henley, and its practices; and Indian society and its management were recast variously as traditional, hierarchical, clinging to its colonial connections with Britain, and lagging. It was thus in urgent need of reform, particularly its bazaar-based economic structures and family businesses that relied on administrators from Britain and their management practices. The legitimacy of FF’s interventions were, therefore, based on the double need to modernize ASCI and Indian society and its economy.

To overcome the persistent resistance to the case method at Hyderabad, FF staff and consultants engaged in efforts to denaturalize syndicates by posing them as alien to the Indian context and calling for the development of indigenous pedagogic approaches. In a letter to Ensminger, Towl argued that given the economic challenges confronting India, ASCI needed to develop an “innovation appropriate to Hyderabad.”^{Footnote 108} He suggested that ASCI combine faculty-led research with teaching and training, much like at HBS. The case method, Towl noted elsewhere, was capable of dealing with the specifics of the Indian condition; this resonated with his conception of administration that could not be “satisfied with ‘truth in general.’”^{Footnote 109} Similarly, Arthur N. Turner from HBS also argued against mimicry (British or American) and called for an organic approach to emerge while suggesting FF’s support for the development of an appropriate (research and teaching) methodology (i.e., the case method).^{Footnote 110} Downplaying the “outsider” status of the case method, Towl argued that cases did not require external experts and could be organized “within and among” management institutes in India.^{Footnote 111} Greenleaf, who remained unconvinced about merging the case method with syndicates, also argued for developing an indigenous approach. However, he only went as far as to suggest the use of systems analysis or an industrial dynamics approach, both of which were widely used in the United States.^{Footnote 112} Even as FF’s consultants pushed for an indigenous or Indian approach to management, the case method was presented as an organic approach that was potentially responsive to the specifics of Indian conditions and could be developed internally relatively easily.^{Footnote 113} Moreover, FF consultants argued that if the case method could not be used at ASCI as it lacked “gifted” teachers, U.S. management had other approaches to offer.

Revealing in all of the above is that FF staff and consultants’ criticisms of syndicates and their endorsement of the case method were not drawn from any scientific evaluation, research, or systematic review of the literature. Neither did they engage with questions of cultural alienation, participation, and voice––all of which can be found extensively in contemporary scholarship on the use of syndicates.^{Footnote 114} More so, they stigmatized syndicates without ever having attended one and despite having commended them for their impact on ASCI’s graduates. Although Greenleaf admitted that he had never attended a syndicate, it did not prevent him from calling them “a grade B idea even for England where it started and certainly not a prudent step for India.”^{Footnote 115} Towl complimented the syndicates’ success elsewhere by noting, “The remarkable growth many of these men revealed from the time I first met them on arrival until they left twelve weeks later.”^{Footnote 116} He acknowledged that while the program’s impact on the graduates may not be immediate, this was only because the new practices and attitudes “did not flower until the man got back on the job.” Curiously, even as FF continued to denounce syndicates and Henley, Henley’s H. J. B. Taylor had, as far back as 1952, published a research report comparing the teaching methods used at HBS and at Henley.^{Footnote 117} In it, Taylor found that Henley’s syndicates were “much more suitable” than methods used at Harvard or any other U.S.-based institution Taylor had studied. The case method, he concluded, was not essential, although it could be used for specific, limited and specialized purposes; thus, the comparison was not only illogical but also meaningless.^{Footnote 118} There is, however, nothing in the archival material to suggest FF staff or consultants took note of Taylor’s study or commissioned one of their own.

Discussion and Conclusion

FF’s involvement in India, least of all in management education, was carried out in the name of international development. It was part of the wider global expansionism of the United States during the Cold War in its fight against communism; combating anti-Americanism; and promoting Americanization, in which it sought to consolidate its soft power in the battlegrounds of the third world.^{Footnote 119} As with other third world countries, management studies was deemed crucial to the United States’ presenting itself as an economic exemplar for India’s post-colonial development and modernization.^{Footnote 120} FF played a significant role in the establishment and institutionalization of management education in India by establishing autonomous business schools outside the governing imperatives of Indian universities, such as the IIMs at Ahmedabad and Calcutta. Unlike ASCI, FF had a more formative and lasting influence on the institutional design, approach, and direction of these new institutions. The propagation of the case method at IIMs, and to a lesser extent at ASCI, was particularly significant here. Organized around the mutually reinforcing ideologies of managerialism, institutionalism, and U.S. capitalism,^{Footnote 121} the global diffusion of the case method provided the means for fulfilling the global expansionist ambitions of the United States’ soft power.

Compared to the IIMs, FF’s efforts at propagating these ideologies at ASCI via the case method were less successful. FF staff and consultants recognized that ASCI had already “derived much of its direction and inspiration from British rather than American models of management training.”^{Footnote 122} Although its initial efforts at ASCI were directed at merging the case method within syndicates, the ongoing use of the latter at Hyderabad led FF staff and consultants to stigmatize Henley, ASCI, and even Indian society and economy. Simultaneously, it attempted to legitimize the use of the case method and HBS. FF’s efforts at ASCI were driven, I argue, by the pragmatic need to distinguish U.S. neo-colonial developmentalism from British colonialism. FF’s President Hoffman acknowledged as much when he noted the distrust and suspicion with which the Americans were seen in India. Their distrust, Hoffman believed, grew out of “a century old bitterness directed at us because we are mistakenly identified with the Western imperialism of a bygone generation.”^{Footnote 123} Such suspicion, he argued, was likely to be exploited by the communist Russians, from whom India––from FF’s standpoint––needed to be saved. Thus, FF’s financial support to ASCI was driven by the need to distinguish the United States from the earlier British institutions on which India’s postcolonial institutions were modeled; and by establishing the United States as the model, and its institutions and practices as templates for India’s development and modernization. Although FF never commissioned any scientific or systematic evaluations of either teaching method, the adoption of the case method at Hyderabad was backed by experts (e.g., Towl, Greenleaf, Gallagher, etc.) and capital; and following Hoffman’s formulaic resistance against communism.^{Footnote 124}

My argument on the role of FF staff and consultants in distinguishing themselves from British colonialism in establishing the United States as the neo-colonial power is not alone, and is not restricted to India, or for that matter FF alone. Discussing his experience in Pakistan, for example, A. T. Cornwall-Jones, a staff member at Henley from 1950 to 1970, revealed similar tensions between consultants from Henley and from Syracuse’s Maxwell School (of Citizenship and Public Affairs).^{Footnote 125} Brought together through FF’s financial support, studies’ courses that had been agreed to by both staff were not adhered to; they were replaced entirely by the Syracuse staff later without any input from those from Henley. Attributing it to misunderstandings and mistakes, Cornwall-Jones downplayed the differences between Henley staff and Syracuse staff. The latter, he noted, “regarded themselves as being in charge of everybody and everything, including me.”^{Footnote 126} Unlike Cornwall-Jones, I argue that FF’s role as a dominating institution and its consultants’ ongoing efforts at distinguishing themselves from the British were significant and part of the United States’ ascendancy as a neo-colonial power. This claim is corroborated by the actions of other large U.S. foundations’ programs in third world countries. In Latin America, for example, the Rockefeller Foundation played a crucial role in breaking up earlier academic links between Latin America and Europe, and to establish instead the United States at the center.^{Footnote 127}

Greenleaf’s letter to Gupta shortly after his departure from Hyderabad in 1964 provides a final telling anecdote of FF’s attempts at severing third world countries’ colonial connections with Britain and offering the United States as the template for their post-colonial development, in which management education had a crucial role to play. In it, he wrote: “We have completed an interesting five days in Pakistan and we are now immersed in a totally new situation here in Kenya. (…) I have reviewed their agenda and it is quite a blend of several things. (…) It is interesting that they do not feel that they had the talent to do this with an African staff, so it is mostly foreigners. The Director is from the U.K.”^{Footnote 128} Problematizing the presence of British leadership and seemingly calling for the involvement of Africans themselves in management education, Greenleaf singularly failed to reflect on his own and the wider American presence in Kenya. Despite making frequent arguments for indigenous leadership of management education in third world countries, both Towl and Greenleaf continued to tour the globe promoting the case method and U.S. management education. Towl, for example, visited thirty-seven countries, some as many as fifteen times during his lifetime, in his role promoting the writing of and use of the case method.^{Footnote 129} In a way, then, it did not matter if they were in India, Pakistan, or Kenya. FF was complicit in securing the United States’ place in the neo-colonial global order among the “free” nations by making U.S. institutions and practices as exemplars. It required displacing—and distinguishing themselves from—the earlier colonial connections with Britain’s institutions and their practices.

This article makes three key contributions. The history of management education in India, limited no doubt, has focused on the IIMs, most significantly the first two in Calcutta and Ahmedabad. Hill, Hayes, and Baumgartel posited that ASCI was part of the second of three phases of development of management education in the country, suitable for low-level training. This was followed by its apogee in the form of the IIMs.^{Footnote 130} Elsewhere, ASCI is often presented as a minor stage in the development of management education in the country.^{Footnote 131} The lack of attention to ASCI has resulted in the somewhat straightforward characterization of management education in India as mimicry of American management institutions.^{Footnote 132} The article’s first contribution is the discussion of the earlier mimicry of Britain’s institutions and their practices in post-colonial Indian management institutions. Not unexpectedly, British institutions, following imperialism, served as the template for post-colonial development and its institutions across the third world. Departing from the characterization of Americanization of management in third world countries as a colonial continuity, I argue that FF-led Americanization at ASCI was not straightforward. It involved, first, a displacement of syndicates and, second, the establishment of the case method from HBS. This brings me to my second contribution.

From an Indian perspective, management education was imbricated in related but distinct forms of colonialism. Placed in its contemporary context of the Cold War and the ensuing deployment of programs to combat communism, the use of Hoffman’s twin solutions of capital and technical expertise at ASCI were aimed at establishing the United States’ neo-colonial power. I depart from Khurana et al.’s straightforward narration of dominance, and agree with Cooke and Alcadipani’s challenge about FF’s role as a dominating institution in the Americanization of management education in Latin America. In this article, I have also outlined the limits of its dominance.^{Footnote 133} Just as FF’s interventions were subverted by their Brazilian counterparts, syndicates continued to be used at ASCI despite all efforts to remake Hyderabad into Harvard via the case method.

My third contribution is on contextualizing the instructional methods. Much of the prior scholarship on case methods and syndicates has focused on their value and limitations, their potential for future managers to learn, and what they make invisible or silent. Such debates are commonly framed around questions of effectiveness, relevance, merit, and scientific evidence.^{Footnote 134} Without detracting from their significance, I argue that such debates often ignore the historical and global geo-politics that can and have affected the choice of instructional method in management institutions. At Hyderabad and elsewhere, FF engaged in a struggle over, among other things, pedagogy and curricula. These struggles were to secure the United States’ place as the dominant neo-colonial power at the helm of global political and economic orders. This argument is supported by the point discussed earlier that FF stigmatized one method and legitimized the other without conducting a single systematic or scientific study of pedagogic methods; the only contemporaneous study was conducted by Henley staff. Thus, the rise in use and prestige of the case method, which has become one of the defining feature of management education in India––particularly at IIM, Ahmedabad––and elsewhere can be explained by global geo-politics. The contrary fortunes of syndicates and the case method mirrored the United States’ rise as a neocolonial power that, according to the renowned postcolonial scholar Edward Said, “replaced the greater earlier empires as the dominant outside force.”^{Footnote 135}