U.S. Philanthropy’s Shaping of Management Education in the 20th Century: Toward a Periodization of History

Scholarship on U.S. philanthropic foundations and the Americanization of management education has hitherto focused on specific nations or regions or on particular historical moments. We build on this scholarly corpus to present—for the first time—a meta-history of the 20th century role of U.S. philanthropy in shaping management education around the world. Having outlined the meaning and purpose of “periodization,” we propose three periods. First, within the US from the 1920s post-Progressive Era up to the 1960s, where philanthropic foundations used management education to address U.S. internal social problems and establish its economic preeminence worldwide. Second, Europe post-WWII to the 1980s, where management education was intended to enable Western European reconstruction and fight communism, and later to integrate the Soviet Bloc into the west. Third, the Third World from the post-1945 development era up until the onset of neoliberal globalization, where U.S. foundations’ management education interventions sought the technocratic modernization of former subject nations. In each of these, we conclude, the U.S. foundations’ programs for management education worked to preserve U.S. international interests, and promote U.S. “soft power,” in ways unique to each time/place as well as in ways common across them.