The Ford Foundation, Harvard Business School, and the Creation of the Indian Institute of Management, 1960–70

This paper examines changing American-Indian relations during the 1960s, when elite management schools were first being established in India. During the late 1950s, a significant convergence emerged between American and Indian policy-makers about the value of “management education” in India’s development. Indian leaders, such as the atomic scientist Vikram Sarabhai and the business executive Prakash Tandon, felt that Indian firms needed to break with the family business model to create more efficient and knowledgeable managers who would spearhead advanced Indian industrial organizations. Prominent American figures, such as Douglas Ensminger, head of the Ford Foundation in India, and Harry Hansen, head of the Harvard Business School’s Division of International Activities, advocated with almost missionary zeal for the creation of formal management education. As a result of negotiations between the two parties, the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad was created with significant Ford Foundation funding during the early 1960s. Harvard sent out scholars, some very junior, to play advisory roles in the initial academic programs. The new business school also became committed to the case study approach championed by Harvard; collection of case studies became a major priority of the institution. Clashes between the Indian leaders of the IIM Ahmedabad and the Americans (who were sometimes backed by some of the new faculty) over a host of issues soon became rampant. Within a few years, IIM had decided to eliminate the role of American advisers. But IIM remained dependent on Indian faculty almost exclusively trained in the United States (particularly Harvard), and the hegemony of Harvard pedagogical models persisted in the curriculum. The paper explores how post-colonial nationalism prompted not an abandonment of affiliations between Indian and American actors but a reconfiguration of the character of these global relationships outside a Cold War framework.