ABSTRACT
While most studies of skilling processes focus on subordinate groups, this chapter examines skill formation among elite managers trained in India’s business schools, particularly the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (IIM-A), and the role of these managers within the Indian business world between 1964 and the early 1980s. Management education was part of a massive societal project to retool members of the Indian service elite, which had historically worked in government and other educated professions, for participation in the structures of capitalism. It emerged not from the needs of Indian business but out of the political visions of leaders who embraced managerialism as key to the country’s development. Management schools sought to provide students with knowledge of the latest fields of business education, but also to remould student sensibilities and modes of social comportment necessary for ‘leadership’. I focus on the adoption of the case method, a pedagogical approach drawn from the Harvard Business School in IIM-A; this method involved class discussion of reports on specific firms in order to arrive at recommendations for improving the firms’ operations.
