Management and Development

On a broader scale, my paper is in conversation with the emerging body of scholarship on the history of post-independence India.Footnote ¹⁶ One particular strand of arguments charted by such scholarship is concerned with the early to mid-twentieth-century histories of neoliberalism. These arguments are intended to unsettle the teleological narratives associated with the conceptualization of the “Nehruvian consensus,” which often assume a sharp contrast and a direct transition from the era of the developmental state to the inevitable and putative triumph of the market economy in 1991.Footnote ¹⁷ Nicole Sackley thus criticizes popular historical and cultural narratives for the ways they cast the developmental state, inaugurated by the first prime minister of India—Jawaharlal Nehru—in 1947, as associated singularly with centralized economic planning, an overregulated private sector, an inefficient and corrupt public sector, and an inward-looking economy.Footnote ¹⁸ Meanwhile, the economic reforms mobilized in 1991 have been hailed as a moment of redemption for the Indian economy. In this teleological framing of “reforms,” the developmental state is pitched in opposition to a market-friendly economy, and the gradual erosion of the former is perceived to be an indication of a universal shift toward neoliberalism.Footnote ¹⁹ Aditya Balasubramanian similarly challenges the aforementioned sweeping historical narratives by exploring in detail the history of the economic right in post-independence India, and the business and aristocracy backed political party it floated to challenge the state-led mandate of developmentalism.Footnote ²⁰ While the party was short lived, Balasubramanian provides us with important insights on the global circulation of ideas emerging from the Mont Pelerin Society, especially within the context of the postcolonial global South. Drawing insights from such critiques, my paper is intended to challenge the binaries of the developmental and the post-reform eras. However, it does so by charting a somewhat different historical terrain. I focus on the early decades of independence and examine the modes and rationales through which the concepts and organizational techniques emerging from the world of private enterprise attempted to acquire a footing in the postcolonial project of nation building.

I thus show how these concepts simultaneously functioned as normative prescriptions for not just reforming the private firm but also the bureaucratic state. Managerialism, as Amy Offner argues, arrived in this world as a “creature of modern corporations,” and by the mid-twentieth century, it was increasingly being promoted as a mode of governance that could be applied for generating efficiency in any organizational structure, from industries, to firms, to the bureaucratic state, and even to the abstract realm of society.Footnote ²¹ In this pursuit of organizational reforms, managerialism sought to reshape society and its institutions in the image of a private firm.Footnote ²² And it is by tracing this specific history of managerial ideas in the case of India that I wish to present a possible genealogy of binaries that have come to define the post-1990s world order, in which private enterprise represents the abstract promise of efficiency and the state, on the other hand, represents an embodiment of inefficiency.

It is important to highlight here that the colonial and the postcolonial state in India was hardly uninterested in the question of efficiency and/or productivity, given the increasing interest taken by the government in industrial production throughout the two world wars and since at least the time of the Indian Industrial Commission (1916–1918).Footnote ²³ Moreover, articulations of private business interests like the “Bombay Plan” of 1944 also demanded that the state not rescind but rather serve such private interests through critical emendations of its modes of functioning.Footnote ²⁴ The formation of the National Productivity Council in 1958 further exemplified the Planning State’s direct investments in questions of efficiency and industrial production.Footnote ²⁵ However, it is important to note that the mid-twentieth-century managerial ideas that I discuss in this paper were nonetheless interested in maintaining the aforementioned binary plotting.

The managerial discourse’s relevance was sought by presenting a less-than-optimal state bureaucracy that needed to absorb new ideas and techniques of bettering productivity and efficiency as espoused by private industrial enterprises. While engaging with the plotting of this binary, I also interrogate its claims about creating depersonalized organizational functioning through the logic of a professional manager and “leader” and the very conflicted reasonings involved in posing the realm of private industry as the more efficient counterpart of state institutions.

As noted earlier, the historical analysis of management in India has often adopted the critical lens of neocolonialism. Within this framework, the focus is primarily on the role of American experts in institution building in postcolonial India and their attempts at displacing the erstwhile British colonial influence.Footnote ²⁶ The analyses have also sought to employ a postcolonial theoretical framework to argue that management schools in India historically began by mimicking Western models of pedagogy. Eventually, this mimicry led to the process of revivalism, which was concerned with finding “Indian” equivalents that were—not surprisingly—soaked in sweeping ahistorical cultural tropes of tradition and antiquity.Footnote ²⁷ Building upon these conversations, recent scholarship has focused upon the tensions underlying the collaborations between the Indian elites and the American experts. The arguments rightfully challenge the top-down logic of knowledge transfer and thus reveal the contestations between postcolonial actors and the Western pedagogues.Footnote ²⁸ This mid-twentieth-century process of knowledge transfer has been further critically analyzed by Lourens Van Haaften in his paper on the IIM in Ahmedabad.Footnote ²⁹ He reveals how the field of management emerged as a “boundary object” in such exchanges between the Indian and American experts.Footnote ³⁰ Management as a result could be fungible enough to adapt itself to the specific Indian political and social frameworks while still maintaining the same significations it carried within with the American context.Footnote ³¹ Thus, while the classroom adopted the Harvard case studies method, the cases often involved state-led projects of development, such as population control and infrastructure building. Such historical accounts help us to disaggregate the larger processes of knowledge transfer in the mid-twentieth century by highlighting important details through which management institutions established themselves, acquired legitimacy, and designed their curricula in India. However, by primarily anchoring their attention on the knowledge transfer question, the aforementioned arguments in some sense still continue to use “management” as a relatively underanalyzed term. They do not necessarily delve into the specific normative charge of “reform” it carried or interrogate the self-evidence of the claims to adaptability across multiple sites that allowed management to morph into managerialism.

A new addition to this engagement with the history of management education has been made by Dinyar Patel.Footnote ³² His article presents the historical case of commerce education in colonial India as an important antecedent of management education in mid-twentieth-century India. According to him, commerce education in early twentieth-century colonial India strove to create an interdisciplinary curriculum by focusing on industrial, technical, and management expertise. This reimagination of commerce education in the early twentieth century directly intersected with the Swadeshi sentiment of the time and, as a result, sought to cultivate “Indian” leadership for various business, commercial, and industrial enterprises. Through this account, Patel contends that business education in India never operated in a politically neutral environment; instead, it was always intrinsically tied to economic questions emerging from nationalism and its accompanying state-building aspirations. He also contextualizes the claims made by scholars of the mid-twentieth century who highlight the active participation of the IIM in the nation-building projects of post-independence India.

While taking cues from such emerging literature, my paper urges us to step away from the knowledge transfer question momentarily or even the focus on the possible nationalist/political lineages of management. In the process, I also hope to make an argument beyond the institutional and classroom accounts of management. Instead, I relocate the management problematic in relation to one of its core concerns: factory organization. Within the context of post-independence India, I thus focus on the early avatars of management in the form of human relations experiments in the factory sheds of Ahmedabad and the promises of reform and efficiency such experiments embodied. I further examine the articulation of these promises in the language of managerialism. Even when, in most cases, the experiments did not succeed in achieving their ascribed goals, managerialism continued to proliferate and reproduce its relevance in the form of experiments and institutions—often functioning as a solution in search of a problem. Here, I attempt to show how managerialism prospered in independent India by tautologically reading societies and institutions in the framework of organizations that needed the prescription of management to resolve their operations.

Management and the Concept of Leadership

The leading institutions of management in India were established during the 1960s with the guidance, expertise, and funding provided by an American philanthropic organization, the Ford Foundation. The foundation’s activities in the rural community development programs of postcolonial India have been well documented.Footnote ⁴⁵ What remains relatively understudied is how the debate and concerns regarding leadership and managerialism emerged simultaneously during this time, often leading to cross-fertilization between the managerial discourse of leadership and the rural development programs.

Douglas Ensminger, a rural sociologist by training, was the head of the Ford programs in India between 1951 and 1970. As one begins parsing his visions, one finds the concept of leadership at the core of his articulation of development. In the late 1960s, toward the end of his career in India, Ensminger retrospectively claimed that “most of the Foundation’s activities in India are concerned with developing India’s leadership, and many of our grants are specifically designed to produce better leaders. In attacking the leadership problem, we were typically responding to a situation in which a clear shortage of a specific capability could be identified.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Ensminger further elaborated upon this stance by stating that “a society changes or remains static, develops or decays, progresses or retrogresses based on the orientation and the mass acceptance of its leadership.”Footnote ⁴⁷ However, according to him, the Five-Year Plan model had created a slow and heavily centralized state machinery that had thwarted the process of change.Footnote ⁴⁸ In his account, the Indian Administrative Service, modeled after the colonial administrative body called the Indian Civil Service, was incapable of offering any competent leadership.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the light of such observations, the incapacity of the business community also emerged as an important concern during both the Nehruvian decades and the Indira Gandhi–led era of the 1960s.

Such discontents with the official administrative machinery and the failure of business organizations had been expressed earlier by many of Ensminger’s colleagues who traversed the postcolonial geographies of development. One of the most prolific writers on leadership during this period was Rolf Lynton, who could be understood to have in many ways prefigured Ensminger’s concerns and emphasis on leadership. He worked with various organizations and institutions, including the Ford Foundation, during the 1950s and 1960s, and conducted extensive studies on leadership models in industries, shop-floor management, and rural development projects.Footnote ⁵¹ With help from UNESCO, Lynton had established an experimental institute called the Aloka during the 1950s to train individuals hailing from various regions of Asia and Africa. The institution was first set up in Sri Lanka, and eventually moved its premises to India.Footnote ⁵² The main goals of the institute were to teach participants the skills of efficient management—how to lead large technological projects or social/developmental organizations in both rural and urban areas of the global South in a “democratic fashion.” According to Lynton, the main purpose for the experiment was to not replicate the top-down mandate of authority as exemplified by the Planning State and its bureaucratic machinery. The experiments instead prescribed an approach that allowed the participants to deploy technological projects by creating an “amenable” and “democratic” environment of leadership. Lynton was an advocate of what he called “sensitive leadership training.”Footnote ⁵³ The Aloka programs aimed to train individuals to become leaders who were capable of being “sensitive to the needs and feelings of others,” while also not veering into becoming “local demagogues.”Footnote ⁵⁴ According to Lynton, “Asia and Africa are, as it were, maps dotted with pools of resources that are not flowing.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The problem, he continued, was not with “under-developed nations, but under-developed people.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In his view, it was because of people who lacked leadership skills in both government and business organizations that resources had failed to reach the development projects. Moreover, Aloka diagnosed that the problem among the people in charge of the developmental projects was that they often resorted to submissive or rebellious behavior when it came to negotiating hierarchies. The institution instead claimed to cultivate among its participants the skills of cooperation. Lynton argued that modern societies and their complex socioeconomic worlds demanded a specialized form of knowledge that was explicitly concerned with the cultivation of leadership, and the field of management studies addressed this concern.Footnote ⁵⁷

Andrew Towl of the Harvard Business School, another Ford consultant and a pioneer of management education in the United States, also posed the framework of effective leadership within the vocabularies of management and democracy.Footnote ⁵⁸ In a public speech at Ahmedabad in 1960, Towl declared that management was both a concept and a class.Footnote ⁵⁹ As a concept, he considered management to be an essential norm for modern societies, and he claimed that “every man needed to understand management in order to become a man.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He elaborated upon this sweeping contention by stating that management as a concept encompassed the two most important tenets of modern societies: “specialization” and “democracy.”Footnote ⁶¹ Meanwhile, the elemental milieu of democracy in this imagination was described as “the basic requirement of a living and vibrant democracy is a well-developed individual, who will decide matters not by authority or tradition handed down to him but by exercising his own intelligence and judgement.”Footnote ⁶² Managerial training was important for generating leadership that was able to instill the growth of such democratic necessities and sustain the supposed modern culture of specialization. Towl’s real concern, however, was to find a pedagogical method through which such leaders were created in developing nations at the level of both modern industries and administrative offices and thus to also create a managerial class. In fact, he claimed that once managerial leaders were established at the industrial and administrative levels, the society at large would inexorably benefit from their skills and democratic wisdom. Management, in such imaginations, became a specialized concept and logic through which contours of effective leadership for organizing the modern society were determined.

The Group, the Leader, and the Field of Human Relations Management

The task for the leader in Lynton-style leadership training camps was to divide the assigned communities into groups, examine the behavioral patterns of each group, and coordinate and steer them in a particular way to achieve the desired ends. If the leader had to be cultivated pedagogically, the group too emerged in tandem, as a category through which the leaders gained their acceptance. However, words such as “groups” and “leaders” were not just self-explanatory terms used by the Ford Foundation consultants to describe their activities and interests. Instead, as Matthew Hull has argued, the vocabulary used by the foundation was embedded in a deeper genealogy that could be found in the processes that reorganized social sciences around the discipline of social and behavioral psychology in the twentieth-century United States.Footnote ⁶³

The group as a unit of psychological analysis first emerged out of studies that were conducted in the factory sheds to manage laborers and their work patterns.Footnote ⁶⁴ The psychological evaluations of the workforce gave rise to the new field of human relations, which sought to create harmony and cooperation at various strata of the industry by classifying workers into systematic groups and cultivating leaders who could manage these groups in a democratic fashion. As is well documented, on a broader historical scale, human relations as a field has moorings within practices and ideas concerned with the organization of industrial spaces and labor efficiency in Europe and America. The theory of scientific management proposed by the American engineer Frederick Taylor set the most well known precedent for such discourses/practices on generating labor efficiency.Footnote ⁶⁵ Through time and motion studies, Taylor specifically analyzed the laboring body and aimed to recalibrate the body in such a way that it functioned in the most optimal and productive manner.

The modern field of human relations management, with its specific focus on behavioral psychology, however, entailed a shift from the body to the mind of the laborer, and was consolidated as a management concern during the global upheavals and warfare of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the United States, the Hawthorne experiments, which bestowed Elton Mayo with the paternal originary title of the “founding father” of the discipline, were conducted at Western Electric’s factory at Hawthorne, a suburb of Chicago in the early 1930s. To keep up the momentum of industrial production after World War I, the Hawthorne experiments aimed to develop a psychologically informed management practice.Footnote ⁶⁷ These experiments attempted to understand the motivations, expectations, and group dynamics through which workers functioned in the production units of the industries, and the kind of leadership to which they responded.

The “group” and the “leader” as units of social analysis continued to acquire further momentum in the following decades. In the aftermath of World War II, the fear of an irrational leader swaying the impulses of an irrational crowd had left social scientists perplexed. Emerging human relations scholars once again deployed the conceptual handles of the “group” and the “leader” to understand the social, arguing that the lessons learned from the factory shed also had the potential for reorganizing larger society. In this reconstruction, the behavior of groups and leaders could be studied, classified into patterns, predicted, and most importantly, corrected.Footnote ⁶⁸ Such prescriptive behavioral models made it possible to tame the unpredictable behavior of the crowd into quantifiable groups that could be organized and supervised by a rational and democratic leader.Footnote ⁶⁹

As expected, the global experts who advocated leadership training (of various kinds) as a major intervention essential to strengthening the developmental trajectory of India were also deeply invested in the field of human relations, including Rolf Lynton, who worked at the Human Relations Department at the Harvard Business School. However, before the more general deployment of the human relations and leadership framework to the evaluation and prescribed redirection of the Indian postcolonial regime, the framework was already being tested in its more natural habitat, the industrial workplace.

In the following section, I will therefore focus upon an experiment on labor efficiency and human relations management that was conducted in the textile industries of Ahmedabad. I will then show how these experiments formed the palimpsest for the establishment of management as a professional discourse and a form of expertise in post-independence India.

The Alienated Family and the Intimate Laborer: Industrial Management in Ahmedabad

Some of the first experiments with modern forms of managerialism in postcolonial western India were conducted under the supervision of the London-based nonprofit organization, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in Ahmedabad. It is important to note that the presence of Tavistock in Ahmedabad did not necessarily suggest the continuing presence of an imperial agenda. Instead, the British organization at that time was also eager to be in the good books of the American funding agencies. This can be gleaned from correspondence between two Tavistock officials who were working in Ahmedabad in 1954.

The Tavistock Institute worked in collaboration with Human Relations scholars from the United States, and by the end of World War II, it emerged as one of the key institutions that offered management consultancy to business firms and industrial organizations. However, the early history of Tavistock was not explicitly concerned with industrial productivity. Instead, the institution was interested in regulating military personnel and their productive capacities. During World War II, the institute functioned as a psychiatric clinic for shell-shocked soldiers.Footnote ⁷¹ Tavistock incorporated the group studies method to map the behavioral pattern of fatigued soldiers and boost their morale, both during and after the war. The institution officially began functioning as an Institute of Human Relations in 1947 and shifted its focus from soldiers to laborers by experimenting with labor psychology in the coal-mining industry of Britain. In 1947, Tavistock also launched the journal Human Relations in collaboration with the University of Michigan’s Research Center for Group Dynamics.Footnote ⁷² The journal primarily studied industrial and organizational concerns regarding workplace management from the perspective of applied psychology. Eventually, the institute began looking for more opportunities to expand its expertise and reputation, and the first, as Eric Trist—one of the founders of the institute—recalled, came not only from another industry, but also another “culture.”Footnote ⁷³ The Ahmedabad experiments at the textile mills, Calico Mills, launched Tavistock’s trajectory within the global field of developmentalism. Trist asserted that the experiment aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of democratic organizations, wherein workers would themselves participate in decision making, take initiatives, and form small groups out of volition.Footnote ⁷⁴

Kenneth Rice, a group studies specialist from Tavistock, visited Ahmedabad in 1953 upon the request of Gautam Sarabhai—the chairman of Calico Mills and one of the heirs of the Ambalal Sarabhai textile empire—to study the working conditions in the family’s nineteenth-century textile mills. Gautam Sarabhai described the immediate problem facing his company in the language of organizational and leadership failure. He lamented that the introduction of modern machinery in the mill had generated social and psychological problems for both managerial leadership and the workers.Footnote ⁷⁵ The chairman of the Calico Mills was hopeful that a study of the management structure and behavior, accompanied by a study of workers and work organization, would create an amenable environment in the industry and stimulate the slacking production.

Kenneth Rice thus spent several months in 1953 in Ahmedabad conducting observations on the relationship between machines, laborers, and the managerial body. This collaboration eventually led to a report titled Productivity and Social Organisation: The Ahmedabad Experiment, Technical Innovation, Work Organisation, and Management. Footnote ⁷⁶ In the Ahmedabad experiment report, Rice discussed how his primary goal was to organize the working sheds in the textile mills of Ahmedabad according to the then-new findings regarding the industrial space being a “socio-technical unit.”Footnote ⁷⁷ As the report suggested, the term referred to the field of study concerned with the interrelations of the technical and sociopsychological organizations of industrial production systems.Footnote ⁷⁸ It rested upon the assumption that the increasing mechanization of industries and societies at large require more, rather than less, attention to the social dimensions of production system. Rice contended that if the psychosocial demands of the workforce were not adequately addressed, the workers’ attitudes to task performance would deteriorate and eventually inhibit the “full realization of the technological potential.”Footnote ⁷⁹

However, the moment Kenneth Rice set foot in Ahmedabad, he realized his task was a challenging one. He confessed in his field diary that he had completely underestimated the scale at which labor unrest had captured the city. There were thirty court cases mounted by the acting labor union against Calico, and not one had yet been resolved. Because of the closure of certain workshops that the new labor-saving machines had caused, the secretary of the union, in Rice’s words, had “declared an open war” against management.Footnote ⁸⁰ Gautam Sarabhai also had been adamant in his refusal of arbitration. The voluminous field notes that Rice made during his stay described the chaos that had overtaken the textile industries. As he observed, textile trade was in a complete slump—and by giving notice, mill owners could close whole shifts or whole sections.Footnote ⁸¹ Rice was notably shocked when he learned that the president of the most powerful labor union of Ahmedabad, the Gandhi-inspired Textile Labour Association (TLA), was the sister of Ambalal Sarabhai, Anasuya Sarabhai, who lived in a “multimillionaire’s mansion.”Footnote ⁸² Despite this imbroglio of kinship webs, Calico ended up being one of the few mills in postcolonial Ahmedabad that had refused to follow the terms of arbitration set by TLA. The managerial classes—at all levels, from the senior-most to the intermediaries—were ill-equipped, rife with internal conflicts and familial suspicion, and had more interest in “fighting with the union, than producing textiles.”Footnote ⁸³

The Tavistock consultant attempted to process and sketch in his diary the almost hyperbolic state of conflicts that the textile world of Ahmedabad encapsulated, especially in the industries run by the Sarabhai family. “They all need the dead Gandhiji. The violent contrast in poverty and luxury, in Ambalal the tycoon, and his wife, the gentle and spiritual regressive, in the presidential aunt Anasuya and the luxury estate, air-conditioned managerial offices and the hot and sticky typist offices … The brother as the leader of the oppressive employers, the sister as the champion of workers.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Rice narrated these impressions to his stenographer in an apartment located in the mill compound—provided by the Sarabhai family and fully staffed with an entourage of servants and cooks. His narration described the multiple paradoxes that he found himself confronted with in the industrial city.

The promise of modern managerialism was expected to disentangle such knots of contradictions—its cultivation of democratic leadership and effective group mobilization through the study of human relations was perceived to be a process through which the textile industries of Ahmedabad could redeem themselves. Rice, along with his colleague Eric Trist, spent several months in Ahmedabad, reorganizing labor work shifts, recalculating wages, restructuring shop-floor infrastructure, lighting, and seating arrangements, reshuffling managerial duties, and arbitrating between employers and union leaders. The logic of productivity and efficiency was emphasized by reconstituting the contours of both labor and existing management, and along with new professional managers and intermediaries, marketing and advertising departments were set up.Footnote ⁸⁵ Rice and Trist sat through the Sarabhai family battles and meetings, documented their exasperation, and along with the textile industrialists of Ahmedabad, experimented with the principles of modern managerialism. As Rice described it, Gautam Sarabhai perceived Tavistock’s visit as an “essential part of his education.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Both of them, according to Rice’s field notes, spent hours discussing the semantics of leadership, the exercise of authority, the differences between democratic and autocratic positions, and the responsibility of making decisions, maintaining efficiency, and handling the manifestations of hostility in hierarchical and subordinate situations. While tension continued to brew underneath such seamless representations of collaboration and pedagogy, both the Tavistock representatives and Indian industrial elites continued to assert the significance of “solving” the industrial crisis in Ahmedabad through managerial experiments.

The goal for these experiments was to strengthen the executive command by reducing the multiple intermediary authorities that crowded the industrial strata and to develop a chain of trust across the newly designed hierarchies. In this imagination, the workers formed the starting point for Rice. He believed that if the workers were able to develop a sense of trust for their supervisors, eventually, the sociality of trust would expand to include the managing agent as well. The task for the Tavistock consultants during their time in Ahmedabad was to study the psychology of the workers and the managers and find democratic solutions that could instill trust and a sense of belonging across all the sections of the industry.Footnote ⁸⁷

The question of caste was broached as well and dissected through the organizational lens of efficiency. Rice observed that in many departments, workers belonging to different castes were assigned tasks that demanded them to work in proximity. For instance, management lamented that the quality of work produced in the winding and warping section had deteriorated significantly, hindering production at the preparatory stage itself. Tavistock investigated the complaint and found out that all the winders belonged to the oppressed caste. The warpers on the other hand belonged to the upper castes and had no respect for the winders. Meanwhile, the oilers, whose task was to oil the machines and supervise the winders and warpers, were also dalits. Caste resentment and tension within the winding and warping department, according to Rice, contributed to inefficiency. For him, the solution to stimulate efficiency was simple: regroup the workers in a way that such caste antagonisms on the shop floor were avoided and retrain the workers if the regrouping demanded different task assignments. However, Rice continued, the winders, in particular, were extremely anxious—they often complained about constantly being marked absent because of the assumption that their work would always be below the expected standard. This generated chronic insecurity on the shop floor, making it nearly impossible to work with the winding–warping department and thus undermining the desired simplicity of the organizational “solution” at hand.Footnote ⁸⁸

However, the Tavistock consultants considered the organizational observations they carried out in the weaving shed of the Calico Mills as their most successful intervention in Ahmedabad. To test their observations, they first organized an experimental weaving shed. Their immediate task was to make the weavers’ shed their identity associated with the craft—as, according to Rice, the weaver in a mechanized factory, was no longer a weaver. It was the machine, instead, which performed the role of the weaver. In the experimental shed, new tasks were assigned to the erstwhile weaving laborers. They were regrouped according to these new tasks, and old titles were abandoned by assigning each group a letter of the alphabet (A, B, C, etc.). The alphabetical order in turn determined the hierarchical locations of the groups. Moreover, in this shed, new working hours were introduced intermittently, and workers, largely belonging to the upper castes, were made to work under different forms of supervision and timekeeping methods. A problem that hindered the logic of productivity, according to Rice’s observations, was idle labor. Casual and uncontrolled time-out sessions, according to the Tavistock observers, were not compatible with the new automation and the precise control the machines demanded. However, Rice observed that workers in Ahmedabad expressed satisfaction and avoided taking breaks when they were made to work in small groups, as opposed to being structured in big groups or no groups at all. This conclusion was based on a claim that the workers were marked by a deep psychological loss, which began manifesting while they were making the transition from the village to the city. The observation further delineated this condition by citing that most of the workers in the textile mills of Ahmedabad had migrated from small villages to the city in search of jobs and were not used to living in the hyper-atomized and dispersed urban settings. According to the Tavistock official, the workers, as a corollary, exhibited well-being when they were made to function in small, intimate, and close-knit groups. These observations led to the conclusion that working in small groups cultivated the feeling of self-discipline among the workers, as they felt accountable to their groups.

Rice qualified his conclusion by stating that the efficiency that such group reorganization generated provided pleasure to the workers and made it easier for them to adjust to their new task performances. We have no way of knowing exactly how the Tavistock expert arrived at this conclusion, as no reference to interviews or methodologies demonstrating the workers’ response to the experiments was included in Rice’s documentation.

Concern regarding such kinship affinities continued to percolate through all the organizational prescriptions. While in the case of the workers, familial bonds become a register for an organizational order, for the creation of managerial leadership, such kinship networks were thought to be an impediment. Rice criticized the managing agency system, which had come of age in colonial India to govern and finance Indian business companies and continued to exist in the early years of post-independence. This system of management, according to Rice, was embedded within an extensive web of family, and as a result, the relationships within the business organizations tended to be governed more by personal than by task considerations.Footnote ⁹⁰ If group studies formed the palimpsest upon which organizational and leadership prescriptions were made, the unit of the family became one such group entity that invoked scrutiny and analysis. One of the fundamental questions that troubled Rice while contemplating families was “Why cannot a family change.”Footnote ⁹¹ He further elaborated upon this query and outlined certain features: “The family acts as gangsters, offering each other mutual protection, against each other’s violence…. The highest ethic of the familial nexus is reciprocal concern. Each person is concerned about what the other thinks, feels, does.”Footnote ⁹² Despite such reservations, he observed that some Ahmedabad families had been at the forefront of economic transitions in the region, animating the processes of modernization. Such commercial families, in his narrative, had set in motion the first stages of transition from village crafts to urban mechanization. However, he continued, the changes in technological, economic, and social conditions that had taken place in the past years called for specialized and exclusive forms of knowledge and experience, and only those with training could undertake the new functions of management.Footnote ⁹³

This new phase of specialization was identified as the dawn of development, which endemically required the cultivation of what the Ahmedabad report called a “machine culture.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Management was construed as an organizational framework for maintaining this machine culture —ownership, a largely familial concern, and management, a professional form of expertise, had to be separated. “Ownership,” a Tavistock essay argued, “is concerned with providing general means and conditions for the production of goods and services, management on the other hand, is concerned with the specific use of these means and conditions by a group of managers with different skills and responsibilities.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Most importantly, the essay continued, managerial skill involved “the capacity to take the stress of continuous working relations with a group of subordinates.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Such observations, it must be pointed out, were not articulated in an orientalist framework—which identified postcolonial India as some reservoir of traditional-familial ethic. Instead, the studies were distinctly cast in the twentieth-century parlance of modernist development, governed by stage theory, wherein the global pattern of capitalism had already set in motion similar changes in other regions. As Eric Trist stated, in Great Britain, too, families had often been the mainspring of industrial development. However, for him, there came a point in history, when capital grew beyond the capacity of one family.Footnote ⁹⁸ In a discussion in London in 1956, with some of the acting members of the Sarabhai family present, Trist, however, ironically declared that the primary task for the Tavistock consultants in Ahmedabad had always been the protection of the commercial family and its interests—to equip them with the tools required to navigate the changing winds of capital in postcolonial India. Furthermore, he argued, one of the main findings of the Tavistock Institute through the experimental shed at Calico Mills was that families, despite their rigidities, constituted the potential for a restructuring of boundaries. Inefficiency, in such analyses, could be resolved not by identifying some flaw in a particular individual in a group, but by reorganizing the entire group to create productive psychological conditions.Footnote ⁹⁹ Against a backdrop of growing resentment, tension, and resistance from the Sarabhai family, we find Trist continually asserting that managerialist interventions never aspired to completely disrupt the commercial familial institution. Instead, he makes the assurance that the focus on managerial expertise—and the separation between ownership and management it entailed—aimed to “improve the quality of family-life” and “secure its capital,” not dissolve it.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Eric Trist continued to intermittently visit Ahmedabad to follow up on the institute’s activities in the city. In 1973, almost two decades after the Calico experiments, the Human Relations pedagogue was disappointed to see that the institute’s findings and prescriptions had not been able to mobilize long-term changes. While the TLA as an acting union had offered cooperation, the left-leaning unions had begun challenging the hegemonic status of the TLA and had developed a substantial objection to the Ahmedabad experiments. Trist finally declared in exasperation that it was not only the laborers, the managers too were unwilling to let go of their powers and familial bonds.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But importantly, such declared failures did not necessarily disrupt the normative charge upon which managerialism had acquired legitimacy. Instead, the discourse continually sought out new subjects and institutions to establish its validity and promise of efficiency.

Management and Its Interlocutors

The Ahmedabad experiment happened within a conducive environment where similar studies were being conducted by Indian interlocutors of the new management sciences. Foremost among them in the Ahmedabad context was Kamla Chowdhry.Footnote ¹⁰² Trained in psychology at the University of Michigan, she headed the Psychology Division, which eventually became ATIRA’s Human Relations Division.Footnote ¹⁰³ Established in 1947 with support from the new government, ATIRA sought to encourage cooperation among various private textile mills in Ahmedabad to promote industrial research. From its inception, ATIRA was invested in organizing studies on applied social sciences that were emerging within the field of industrial and organizational management. For example, when the idea of ATIRA was being discussed among the mill owners of Ahmedabad, Ambalal Sarabhai—the textile baron and the patriarch of the Ahmedabad-based Sarabhai commercial dynasty—stated rather explicitly that his group of mills (Calico Mills and Jubilee Mills) would be willing to participate in the new initiative only “if the scope of work included not just scientific and technological research but also work relating to the human factor and the introduction of social change.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Kamla Chowdhry’s account of ATIRA further delineated the association’s investment in the socio-technical approach toward management (like the Tavistock experiments that we have already discussed).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ ATIRA, as a result, hosted many programs for engaging with the field of management, including some of Chowdhry’s own organizational studies conducted in the 1950s in the factory sheds of Ahmedabad.

However, as in the case of the Tavistock experiment, Chowdhry’s own evaluation of her endeavors was very clear: “The experiments had ended in ‘failure.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As she recalled, her initial experiments were exclusively concerned with shop-floor management. The experiments sought to map and adjust the “fatigue curves” of production workers and evaluate the role of rest pauses in increasing efficiency by creating a psychologically amenable environment. She noted exasperatedly that these endeavors were ineffective, as it was impossible to separate workers in distinct groups and ensure that these groups functioned as experimental units in themselves. She provided another example of how in one instance, the “experimental group” that was given a cup of tea during their rest period inevitably ended up sharing the tea with the so-called “normal” group, which did not have the scheduled rest period.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Such interactions among workers across the groups made it impossible to measure and optimize efficiency in coordination with the scheduling of rest periods.

In another instance, she explicitly deployed a human relations framework to discuss the organizational structure of two mills across various levels of middle management and supervisory staff.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ According to her, the mill that only focused on the “technical” aspects of industrial organization did not perform well. However, the mill that was able to combine “close human association” with the technical aspects was able to maintain efficient production. Her essay reiterated the socio-technical approach of being attentive to social relations in a hierarchical-industrial enterprise.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Without providing any clear prescriptions for reorganizing work relations, the essay ended on a somewhat tautological note, claiming that efficient reorganization can be achieved by paying “greater attention to problems of organization and organizational practices.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Chowdhry explained her failure and inconclusiveness in these earlier experiments by observing that there was an unreflective application of concepts from American organizational theories to very different Indian realities.Footnote ¹¹¹ In a quest to gain a better understanding of organizational matters, she left ATIRA in 1961 and joined the Harvard Business School to work under Fritz Roethlisberger, a professor of human relations.Footnote ¹¹² She claimed to have returned to India from Harvard with a “greater understanding” of organizational matters.Footnote ¹¹³ But it is unclear to us whether any of this new understanding was reapplied to the same industrial context and factory sheds in which she had developed her initial observations. Instead, what one can discern from the contents of her publications is that the new management techniques of group studies and leadership were now being used to assess new objects of management. In the 1960s, as she moved on to become the program coordinator of the IIM in Ahmedabad (established in 1961), we find her writing less about industrial matters and more about issues concerning organizational management in public administration and public institutions of India. For example, in one of her essays, she studied experiences of management in private industrial enterprises of the United States and India to understand the management concerns of public universities in India.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the article, she specifically proposed the need to transfer management insights from the industrial world to the administrative world of public institutes. In another essay, she analyzed the management structures of textile factories in Ahmedabad, along with ATIRA’s management practices, and presented them as templates for working out an efficient model of institution building and organizational management in post-independence India.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Many of these articles were also being published in the Indian Journal of Public Administration. Footnote ¹¹⁶ Broadly, what one can find from these publications is that her writings repeatedly discussed the need for creating better and more efficient public administrators by using insights and examples from cases relating to executive business leadership and/or larger organizational concerns of industrial enterprises.

This snippet of Chowdhry’s career when read together with our account of the Ahmedabad experiment evinces one probable trajectory. While management, especially its human relations–oriented knowledge and practices, remained largely ineffective in bettering Ahmedabad’s factory and industrial environment, the relevance of such knowledge and practices was nonetheless being replotted around and through other fields, specifically, public administration.

This becomes even clearer when we look at the career of Vikram Sarabhai—the brother of Gautam Sarabhai and a key collaborator of Kamla Chowdhry who went on to become India’s most celebrated technocrat. In the early 1950s, Sarabhai was closely following the workshops and camps that were being conducted on democratic leadership and organizational management across India. The Aloka experiment run by Lynton had caught his attention. He noted enthusiastically, “the Aloka experiment is of great significance to all those who were interested in the problem of change in industry, agriculture, public administration, and education.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ In 1956, Sarabhai invited Rolf Lynton to ATIRA to hold classes on leadership training and human relations. The participants were drawn from local industries and comprised professionals who had spent several years in “managerial jobs and were to now occupy leadership in their organizations.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ However, in the foreword that Sarabhai wrote for Lynton’s book, he very openly stated that Lynton’s courses in ATIRA had largely been ineffective, as they failed to invoke a positive response from the participants.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Yet, rather paradoxically, this did not dampen Sarabhai’s enthusiasm for the promise of such management education.

Vikram Sarabhai—who later was one of the founders of the IIM in Ahmedabad—was one of the most vocal admirers of management and its leadership pedagogies within the Ahmedabad circle of commercial elites. In his public lectures, he often recounted his biographical trajectory and explained how it seemed to have led him directly to the world of management. While trained as a scientist, upon his return from Cambridge in the United Kingdom—where he pursued his PhD in physics—Sarabhai found himself immediately in charge of the multiple chemical and textile industries owned by his family. According to his biographical reflections, the turning point in his professional career came during his time in ATIRA. As the director of the institute, he began developing “a deep sense of concern” regarding questions of administration.Footnote ¹²⁰ According to him, one of the main problems restricting the growth of industries was the pervasive sense of animosity toward the arrival of new machines—among both the laborers and the technicians. He noticed that despite the installation of modern technologies in the mills of Ahmedabad, there was reluctance in using these machines. He recalled that while the machines were present in the factory, all the automatic controls had been disconnected and “two new corks” were being consistently manipulated.Footnote ¹²¹ This realization piqued his curiosity, and upon further investigation, he arrived at the conclusion that “the biggest obstacles did not arise from the lack of financial resources or technical knowhow, but from social factors inhibiting the introduction of these things.”Footnote ¹²² Echoing Chowdhry’s views, Sarabhai stated that such observations led him to acknowledge the defining role of human behavior and psychology in organizations.

By the early 1950s, Vikram Sarabhai and Kamla Chowdhry had therefore become crucial exponents of management ideas. In fact, in 1957, Sarabhai and Chowdhry headed the official Indian delegation to Japan to study new management techniques that were being used to stimulate production in Japan’s industrial enterprises.Footnote ¹²³ For the Indian delegates, management and organizational reforms as practiced in Japan could help industries in India to increase their productivity and achieve the national goals set by the Planning State.Footnote ¹²⁴ The report summarized lectures, talks, and meetings with leading business figures of Japan and discussed their engagements with the question of industrial productivity.Footnote ¹²⁵ As the Report of the Indian Productivity Delegation to Japan suggested, human relations continued to be an integral component in this transnational circulation of management knowledge. In the report, Taizo Ishizaka, a leading industrialist of Japan—associated with the Tokyo Shibaura Electric Co. Ltd. (now Toshiba Corporation)—highlighted some of the key features of the “new management philosophy” of the era.Footnote ¹²⁶ According to him, “the first one is human relations, the second is the public nature of business, the third is exchange and cooperation.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In such iterations, human relations as a field continued to be enthusiastically presented as a method that could harmonize the interests of workers and capital and “democratize” organizational hierarchies.Footnote ¹²⁸ Simultaneously, management was presented as a public-minded profession that could have a much larger social, political, and even national role to play in society beyond the industrial enterprise.Footnote ¹²⁹

Importantly, in such official Indian government reports, we find figures such as Vikram Sarabhai and Kamla Chowdhry navigating the world of private businesses/industries and the world of public policy with remarkable dexterity. They became interlocutors through which ideas emerging from the transnational circuits of private industries were being translated in the language of public policy, public administration, and nation building. Here, of course, the irony cannot be overlooked that both Sarabhai and Chowdhry had not long before been witness to the apparent shortcomings of the various organizational experiments that sought to remodel the textile industry’s concerns in Ahmedabad through the new knowledge and practice of human relations.

Across the 1960s, Vikram Sarabhai’s public lectures continued to assert the need for managerial expertise in India. As discussed earlier, his own professional trajectories and experiences often framed the arc of his lectures. According to Sarabhai, when he was invited to serve the government by taking over the chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1966, he was once again confronted with administrative challenges. However, this time around, as opposed to his administrative role in ATIRA, he found himself in charge of a colossal organization controlled entirely by the Indian government. Here we find him specifically reflecting upon the need for management expertise to not only engage with issues of private industrial enterprises but also with the public sector and state administration. Through the dissemination of managerial pedagogy, one of his desires, he claimed, was to make the government perform the role of an entrepreneur.Footnote ¹³⁰ In this framework, the public sector had to ensure that financial profit continued to be the orienting logic for its operations, a goal that was often compromised, according to him, in bureaucratic settings. Managerial reforms, for him, involved the emphasis on assigning leadership roles to professionals who had specialized training in their fields, an overall decentralization of power and democratization of hierarchies, and the introduction of principles of competition.Footnote ¹³¹

The logic of the family meanwhile continued to be a leitmotif around which narratives of managerial reform were articulated. While not directly alluding to his own position as the son of an affluent mercantile family of Ahmedabad, Vikram Sarabhai argued how business enterprises have for generations been owned by kinship networks.Footnote ¹³² In his vision of managerialism, family became an overbearing encumbrance, an excess that needed to be contained within the private realm of the domestic household, with all its passions and affects. In an almost oedipal move, Sarabhai’s speech declared the demise of the patriarch—his authority being displaced by the arrival of the modern managerial expert. Concomitantly, to ensure that the state does not reproduce the mistakes of the commercial dynasties, Sarabhai asserted that the state-run public enterprises also must learn from the failures of the private sector, that is, ownership and management must be separated. In doing so, he metaphorically identified the state as a family who owned businesses and had bred sons, in the form of bureaucrats, who were eventually appointed to manage the public enterprises.Footnote ¹³³

Managerial Solutions and Bureaucratic Discontents

We can discern from the professional trajectories of Sarabhai and Chowdhry that the normative rationale of management was gradually radiating out of the realm of private industries to other more public concerns. As Sarabhai’s lectures and Chowdhry’s writings reveal, attempts were being made to translate management’s promise of efficiency in the public realm of administration as well. Management was often posited as an answer to the disenchantment associated with bureaucracy. For instance, a 1953 issue of the All India Congress Committee’s (AICC) Economic Review called the Indian administrative machinery “a jungle” that was inherited from the “foreign rulers.”Footnote ¹³⁴ The essay remarked that according to Paul Appleby (the Ford Foundation consultant for India on administrative reforms), the Indian administration “has too much feudalistic heritage” and “too little human relations orientation.”Footnote ¹³⁵ A different Economic Review issue from the same year contended that democratic governments must develop a standard of efficiency and leadership to which the public can hold the governing machinery accountable. The essay further stated that while experiments on efficiency and leadership were being tested in private textile industries, the government had been slow to learn from its mistakes.Footnote ¹³⁶ Such concerns about administration in both the public and private sectors thus generated a matrix of institutions and activities that were explicitly concerned with the training and dispersal of human relations studies, leadership programs, executive decision making, and the accompanying managerial reforms. One offshoot of the circuit of such ideas and practices was the development of the IIM. In the late 1950s, while the Tavistock consultants were working in Ahmedabad, Douglas Ensminger from Ford was busy campaigning and gathering funds for the establishment of management institutions in India.Footnote ¹³⁷

In April 1949, the All India Council for Technical Education had already appointed a committee to examine the question of education and training in industrial administration and business management.Footnote ¹³⁸ Initially, the Indian government looked to the British administrative staff college at Henley-on-Thames in England for inspiration. The Henley staff college was built toward the end of World War II for training government servants and equipping them with leadership skills. Under the chairmanship of T. T. Krishnamachari, then the Indian minister of commerce and industry, a proposal was made to establish a similar administrative staff college in Hyderabad. The purpose of the college was to bring together “men and women from different walks of life such as private industry, commerce, and public service—facilitate the maximum interchange of ideas and experiences, and enrich the personalities of the participants leading to greater administrative efficiency in individual enterprises and higher productivity at the national level.”Footnote ¹³⁹ The planning committee of the institution was composed of members such as Ambalal Sarabhai and G. D. Birla, who also happened to be the primary funding source for the college. The curriculum sought to introduce the new principles of group dynamics to an already established team of administrators and generate pedagogical discussions around the complex interrelations of trade unions, industries, and local and central governments and how they impacted the execution of managerial authority. Moreover, new specialized managerial branches on marketing and finance were added to the course work. After almost a decade of planning, the administrative staff college was built in 1957 and identified itself as an “all India centre for management development.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The institution followed the British staff college structure in its entirety—and even ensured that the first administrator of the college was a retired army chief, like its counterpart in England. The pool of students it attracted came from various institutions, including the civil services, armed forces, education, local government, and trade unions. Simultaneously, many small and big industrial houses across India sent their managers and business heirs to the new college. In its early years, the Ford Foundation offered assistance to the institution. However, the foundation soon became vocal in expressing its criticism of the staff college. Ensminger found the staff college model to be ineffective and outdated.Footnote ¹⁴¹ According to him, the college continued to reproduce bureaucratic logic, as the institution was primarily concerned with training an already established team of public servants. The Ford Foundation instead began asserting the need to develop a separate institution that followed the American model of expertise, wherein younger generations from the beginning of their higher education years were trained in the language of leadership and decision-making skills. Ensminger further argued, with some frustration, that the staff college’s interest in private enterprises had become marginal over the years, and instead it ended up focusing primarily on training civil servants. As a result, it left the private offices devoid of efficient administrators. Management was presented in such articulations as a field that enabled generation of new ideas and allowed the development of democratic values, while ensuring that the quest for efficiency was not compromised. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, represented for Ensminger a structure shackled by rules, nepotism, and colonialism.Footnote ¹⁴² The criticism pitched an antagonism between an apparently outdated British model of modernism that had failed to keep up with its promise of rational governance, and an American model of corporate efficiency that could potentially replace the inept structures of (Weberian) bureaucracy.

The IIM emerged out of such debates on efficiency, leadership, and bureaucracy and sought to address the limitations of the staff college. The first IIMs in India were established in Calcutta and Ahmedabad in 1961. Kamla Chowdhry and Vikram Sarabhai played a central role in setting up the institute in Ahmedabad and helming it during its initial stage in various capacities. The focus for the IIMs was not on the private sector alone. Instead, as an IIM Ahmedabad grant report suggested, one of the primary goals for the new institution, along with training managerial experts for the private sector, was “to assist in the application of modern management principles in all sectors of the economy.”Footnote ¹⁴³ This claim was reiterated a decade later by Ravi Matthai, who was invited by Vikram Sarabhai to be the director of the IIM Ahmedabad in 1965. Matthai specifically defined management as an applied form of knowledge that “integrates hierarchical levels of activity in a system to achieve the system’s objective.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Importantly, according to him, “these ideas can be applied to any sector of organised activity to change and improve performance.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Matthai elaborated upon this definition by underlining the role of managerial leadership and the importance of its problem-solving approach in various fields, spanning across rural development, agricultural development and policy making, public administration, the banking sector, and so on.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In this explanation, we find a clear inclination toward a universalization of management in the form of managerialism, wherein certain notions of efficiency, leadership, and specialization—fundamentally concerned with business and industrial enterprises—present themselves as universal techniques for organizing various aspects of the society.

Meanwhile, by the time these new institutions of management were established, the textile mills of Ahmedabad had lost their standing in the imagination of the developmental economy. The rise of the power-loom sector had significantly altered the fate of the textile industries—generating a steady decline in the composite textile mills since the 1960s and eventually culminating in mill closures in the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ While the textile industrialists of the city continued to play a role in the administration and funding of these new institutions, the programs for studying efficiency and productivity that were being introduced in IIM at the time were gradually shifting focus to address very different objects—whether it was the infrastructural realm or, more importantly, the agricultural realm, which had come into the spotlight during the 1960s owing to the “Green Revolution.” With funding from USAID, new agro-business and rural cooperative management training programs were introduced to conduct research on managerial issues generated by the processes of “farm mechanization.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Simultaneously, a rural analogue of managerialism was being designed to address the issues of agricultural productivity and efficiency in the rural economy. These activities eventually culminated in the formation of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) in 1979, in the neighboring agrarian and dairy-producing region of Anand.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In 1980, Michael Halse, who had helped set up the Agriculture and Cooperatives group at IIM Ahmedabad in the 1960s, hailed “rural management” as a new developmental discipline. According to him, this new discipline sought to promote efficiency, productivity, and professional leadership in rural economies by merging the collective ethic of cooperatives with the operational culture of private business enterprises.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

The institutionalization of management education also opened a new trajectory of elite middle-class professional ambitions in postcolonial India. The aspirational value associated with specialization in industrial and managerial expertise was encapsulated by Gulzarilal Nanda—who went on to become the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission—in a speech at a conference on textile industries in Ahmedabad in 1951, a decade before the formation of the IIMs. “The government when it desires can steal the wealth of the capitalist, but this cannot be said of knowledge.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ According to him, the technician and the manager were the embodiment of this knowledge, upon which the future of national productivity depended. He added, “There was no place for class struggle in this country … there are only two classes in the country, one working for the nation, and the other which did not do anything.”Footnote ¹⁵² In this hypernationalistic rhetoric, the new intermediary class of (industrial) experts was presented as ideal citizens.