Toward a global history of management education: The case of the Ford Foundation and the São Paulo School of Business Administration, Brazil

Abstract

This article presents an archival history of the relationship between the U.S. Ford Foundation (FF), and Brazil's preeminent business school, EAESP (the São Paulo School of Business Administration), and assesses its lessons for today. Contributing to the literatures on the FF and the Americanization of management education, we show how the aspirations of Thomas Carroll, a leader in postwar management education for the FF's idealized, and still prevalent, form of 'scientific' business school were thwarted in Brazil. We also show that Carroll secretly engaged with the U.S.-supported Brazilian military dictatorship, suggesting the FF was actively supportive of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Yet, while Brazilian EAESP actors shaped the school according to their own priorities and ignored Carroll's, they managed to spend the FF's money. Broader understandings of the FF as a 'dominating' power in management education, must therefore, be nuanced, taking this subversion into account.More generally, this 'first wave' case in the internationalization of management education has lessons for today's management educators, particularly given the burgeoning interest in global management and global management education. Not least, we argue, historic, as well as cultural, reflexivity is an essential requirement of the global management educator. © Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2015.