The International Labour Organization and Management Development in Argentina

Abstract

This article explores how the International Labour Organization (ILO) introduced management development programs in Argentina as a pilot project in developing countries in the late 1950s. By studying how the ILO worked together with actors at the national level, the article reveals how the ILO’s original idea to focus on top management development was reshaped through a dialogue with local actors within the context of tripartite cooperation between the government, business organizations, and unions. While the initiative was successful during the project period, it collapsed when Argentina’s government closed down the national productivity center with which the ILO was cooperating. While the tripartite principle was valuable for the first achievements, it was extremely vulnerable without the support of all partners.

Research on the international development of management education after World War II has largely focused on the role of key US institutions, such as the US government, business schools, and the Ford Foundation, and on how national institutions and actors, mainly in Europe, interpreted new ideas from the United States and acted accordingly within the context of formal degree-granting studies.¹ In business history research, this perspective has been challenged in several ways. Studies of the growth and internationalization of non-degree executive education and corporate programs have shown different patterns of national adaptation compared to studies of degree programs.² Business historians have also shown how ideas on management education have been disseminated through various channels to countries outside the geographical area that is strongly connected to the US, such as Finland.³ Scholars in business history and organization studies have extended the international perspective to include the Global South. They have shown how local actors have contributed to shape new institutions for making managers in contexts of efforts to introduce new ideas on management education from the US came later and were less coordinated than in many European countries.⁴ These studies ask for a critical re-examination of the relevance of the Americanization framework that perceives the US as a role model and explores how ideas and concepts from the US have been transferred and then implemented in different national contexts.

However, few studies have investigated actors who worked from outside the US to promote the idea of management education on a global scale. Based on a widespread understanding of a field consisting of management education, training, and development, we challenge the dominating perspective in the research literature by exploring how the International Labour Organization (ILO), headquartered in Geneva, contributed to promoting the idea of management development in developing countries from the mid-1950s, in addition to experts who circulated Western managerial knowledge during the Cold War.⁵ While several scholars have explored the history of the ILO in general, and the organization’s work on social and labor issues in particular, few have included the ILO’s efforts to introduce management development programs in developing countries.⁶

The ILO was established in 1919 as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. It was entrusted with the mission to represent the worlds of labor and to promote social justice in a universal way.⁷ Until 1940, the ILO functioned as a sort of technical agency for the League of Nations. It survived World War II, unlike the League of Nations, and in 1946, it officially became a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN).⁸ From the late 1940s, the ILO heavily engaged in initiating productivity projects in several developing countries. This work included the idea of vocational education as a tool to increase productivity and led to several initiatives directed at improving the quality of managers. The ILO’s 42nd conference, from June 4–26, 1958, represented a shift in this work when the organization declared that offering management development programs to train top managers should be defined as a new task for the organization.⁹ This decision led to several ILO projects on management development in more than 40 developing countries throughout the 1960s, typically in cooperation with the United Nations Special Fund (UNSF), which funded most of the projects.¹⁰

After the 1958 ILO conference, Poland and Argentina were the first countries to receive ILO missions dedicated to promoting management development. Poland had been active in attracting UN supported projects from the late 1940s.¹¹ It was regarded by the ILO as one of the most industrialized countries in Eastern Europe.¹² And it was followed by similar missions to several other countries in the region in the 1960s.¹³ Beginning in 1957, Argentina, which had previously hosted several ILO projects, specifically requested ILO assistance on productivity and management issues, a trend later followed by management development missions in Argentina and several other Latin American countries.¹⁴ Argentina’s position as one of the pioneering projects worldwide makes it highly relevant to explore how the ILO’s initiative was received and matched with other local initiatives, such as attempts to initiate a productivity movement and institutionalize a management education and training system.¹⁵

Our perspective is the work and development of the ILO mission in relation to its original objectives. We also include the variety of attitudes and actions of national actors in our discussion on how these objectives were modified and achieved. This article is based on research in the ILO’s archives in Geneva. We used the archives’ online database and searched for all digitized and non-digitized documents related to the keywords “Argentina” and “management development.” This resulted in 19 relevant digitized reports and 23 relevant non-digitized archive files (18 produced by the ILO mission in Argentina and five by the central administration in Geneva).¹⁶ In addition to minutes from ILO’s 42nd Congress, we have used open-access ILO reports, which we refer to as publications, and used internal reports and correspondence between ILO’s headquarters and the mission in Argentina. In the latter case, we use the sources’ archival reference and mention the creator and recipient, if relevant. We have also reviewed publications and reports produced by the Productivity Center of Argentina (CPA), as well as primary sources on productivity and management development held in several libraries.¹⁷

In the next two sections, we discuss the evolution of the new ILO policy on management development and analyze the ILO’s aims in Argentina; we also explore how these were received in the context of the Argentine productivity debates after 1955. In the following sections, the article describes the non-linear evolution of the project, focusing on the activities carried out from 1958 to the project’s end in 1966, the profile and role of the international experts, and the relationships among the leading players working in the tripartite structure of all ILO projects.

ILO and Management Development

At the 42nd ILO conference in 1958, the ILO decided to establish a new program for management development in developing countries.¹⁸ Already in the 1920s, the ILO had taken an interest in the scientific management movement and addressed the need for a productivity policy.¹⁹ One result of this effort was the creation in 1927 of the International Management Institute (IMI), headquartered in Geneva, where the ILO was located. The intention behind the organization was to strengthen scientific management ideas in Europe, with heavy involvement from the International Committee for Scientific Management, an international scientific management organization. During most of the IMI’s short history, its director was Lyndall Urwick, a UK-based consultant and promoter of neo-Taylorist ideas on management.²⁰ The IMI was dissolved in 1934, but management as an integrated part of productivity work was put on the agenda. The basic idea was that increased productivity would increase the workers’ purchasing power and was a precondition for increasing workers’ leisure time, which linked the productivity issue to the social profile of the organization.²¹

After World War II, productivity was again at the center of the agenda when the American David Morse took over as the ILO’s director general in 1949. An increased focus on productivity was seen not only as a way to achieve economic growth and improve workers’ living standards but also as an effective instrument for the Western bloc to position the ILO in its conflict with the Soviet Union.²² To support its productivity work, from 1950, the ILO cooperated with the new UN Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance, aiming to dispel some of the distrust surrounding the US’s influence in the organization, though without eliminating it entirely. A set of transformations characterized the period when Morse was the director general: in 1954, the Soviet Union re-entered the ILO and the number of developing countries grew exponentially, stimulated by the process of decolonization in Africa and Asia. From 1948 to 1970, the number of member countries increased from 55 to 121, forcing the ILO to readjust its policies and programs toward a stronger focus on developing countries.²³

The ILO’s program to improve productivity was strongly anchored in the organization’s efforts to protect human rights and ensure fairness.²⁴ All of its activities were based on the tripartite principle of support from the government, unions, and employees’ organizations at the national level.²⁵ Initially, the productivity program focused primarily on labor productivity, but the first productivity missions in Israel and India launched in 1952 included the objective of improving efficiency through better management by applying techniques from industrial engineering at the shop-floor level.²⁶ Other short-term and small missions were sent in the following years to Egypt, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, Greece, Hong Kong, Ceylon, Brazil, and Bolivia.²⁷

The ILO campaign was parallel to the US missions sent out by the European Productivity Agency (EPA), set up in 1953 to prolong the Marshall Plan’s technical assistance program.²⁸ In the context of the Cold War, the ILO’s missions reached developing countries in regions other than those covered by the EPA and Marshall aid. The lessons learned by its productivity missions significantly impacted the ILO’s overall policy throughout the 1950s; they laid the foundation for the new stage of ILO involvement in management development and, in some cases, resulted in new productivity centers. In both Israel and India, the missions saw that a focus on shop-floor management had some effects, although few were lasting; there was thus a need to address the top management level explicitly.²⁹ In Israel in the summer of 1955, the ILO organized the first residential seminar for top management, which included sessions on how to develop and change the attitudes and norms of the top executives.³⁰ Similar programs were introduced in Egypt and Pakistan.³¹

These experiences were fundamental for the ILO’s decision in 1958 to address management development in less industrially advanced countries as a new task for the organization. The program was proposed by the government delegation from India and was prepared by the director general. A majority of the delegates at the 42nd ILO conference supported the proposals, but some of the employer delegates from industrialized countries such as the US, Canada, and Australia were against it.³²

The new program for management development was established as a unique project with a clear focus on developing programs for top and middle managers. The main argument for the proposal was that developing management skills would improve both the productivity and the welfare of the employees. For example, the director general argued that a lack of skills and experiences in management, especially in less industrialized countries, had proven to be an obstacle to industrial growth and efficiency and to the development of “sound human relationships.”³³ Furthermore, the argument drew on the ILO’s tripartite vision and tradition, focusing on cooperation between government, employers, and employees. The UN supported the new program through the UNSF, which itself had been established in 1958.

One year after the ILO Congress in 1958, the ILO decided to send the first management development missions to Poland and Argentina.³⁴ At the beginning of 1960, a Management Development Unit was created at the ILO headquarters to manage the project as part of the ILO’s Economic Division. By the time the mission in Argentina ended in 1966, the ILO had sent similar missions to 37 countries, over half of which were financed by the UNSF.³⁵ By 1965, Asia was the main beneficiary region in terms of total expenditure on ILO assistance in management development.³⁶

The scale of these missions differed from country to country. In some cases, the ILO sent only a single expert, but Argentina and Poland, as pilot projects, required a considerable amount of assistance and more long-term planning. In comparative terms, the Polish project requested more equipment and fellowships for local personnel and fewer international experts.³⁷ Meanwhile, until 1966, Argentina was the largest mission undertaken by the ILO in the management development field in terms of experts, at a total cost, including agency costs, of $US1,132,100, paid by UNSF.³⁸

Originally, there were several indications of a strong impact from the US on the new management development initiative. The director general of the ILO and his governing body visited several “leading centers for training in business administration,” including US business schools, to draw upon their experiences.³⁹ The director general also appointed Donald K. David, former dean of Harvard Business School (HBS) and the present chairman of the Ford Foundation, as a consultant on the project.⁴⁰ During David’s presidency, HBS had launched the first modern executive education program—the Advanced Management Program (AMP)—in 1943; from then on, HBS also served as an international role model for the diffusion of the idea of executive education. The Ford Foundation also contributed heavily to finance the international diffusion of executive education.⁴¹

In August 1959, the ILO’s governing body decided on how to implement the congress’s decision to initiate a management development project, during which they discussed a plan that David had “fully endorsed.”⁴² The plan underlined strongly that projects should focus on two activities, one program for top managers and another for middle managers, similar to the logic of US executive programs. The programs should cooperate with but also operate independently from projects in vocational education and management–labor relations. On several occasions, in the initial period of the program, the ILO referred to US executive education, and HBS’s AMP in particular, as a reference entity, and started to plan the organization’s own top management programs: they followed the American rhetoric and named these Advanced Management Programs. The first was set up in Bangalore, India (1960), followed by Alexandria, Egypt (1961).⁴³

As a general principle, the ILO’s mission activities in the various countries were based on the tripartite framework.⁴⁴ However, beyond establishing institutional support from the government, labor unions, and employers’ associations, there were no detailed instructions on how the cooperation should be operationalized. In 1965, an ILO report that reviewed different national experiences with management development programs expressed deep concern, because the participation of employers’ and workers’ organizations was “unsatisfactory” and “a predominance of governmental officials leads to certain problems.”⁴⁵

A Contextualization of the Argentine Productivity Debates

When the ILO mission finally arrived in Buenos Aires in March 1960, headed by its first project manager, Mr. David Moushine, who came from a position as the director of the Israel Productivity Center, the idea of increasing productivity and economic growth by focusing on more competent and effective management was not new in Argentina.⁴⁶ Several processes at the national level were especially relevant for the reception, development, and outcomes of this mission.

First, Argentina was not an industrialized country, but since the early twentieth century it had experimented with a significant endogenous industrialization process driven by the dynamism of its export economy.⁴⁷ Economic development and modernization ideology were associated with expanding the so-called inward-looking industrialization model, strengthened after the 1930s. A second stage of the Import Substitution Industrialization was promoted under the presidency of Arturo Frondizi (1958–1962), an advocate of the so-called desarrollismo (developmentalist) approach. In this stage, public policies emphasized the internalization of all consumer goods manufacturing and the backward integration of intermediate products and capital goods.⁴⁸

Second, despite the coincidence in the need to promote industrialization and increase productivity, another feature that characterized Argentina during this period was its growing political and institutional instability. After 1955, when Peronism was overthrown, a period of alternating military and civilian governments and restricted democracy began, lasting until 1973. The succession of governments led to continuous changes in the rules of the game (and economic authorities), and the country experienced periodic crises and growing inflation.⁴⁹

Third, the programs of economic promotion launched by the developmentalist governments from 1958 brought about major changes in the profile of large companies in Argentina and promoted the need for new productivity and management development paradigms.⁵⁰ Consequently, several initiatives were simultaneously launched to develop undergraduate university programs in business administration, and several institutions were strengthened or organized to provide executive education programs for top and middle managers.⁵¹

Fourth, the productivity idea had been well anchored in many circles from the late 1940s, although it largely focused on labor productivity.⁵² In Argentina, the Peronist government (1946–1955) pushed the productivity debate further.⁵³ From the early 1950s, the government implemented several initiatives at different levels, including attempts to foster scientific and technological education, establishing the Centro Nacional de Documentación Científica y Técnica. The government also arranged two productivity congresses to address the problems in the workplace resulting from its labor policies. Along with the powerful labor unions, the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) and the Confederación General Económica (CGE), the government cosponsored the First Congreso de Organización y Relaciones del Trabajo in 1954.⁵⁴ This formative period of the productivity movement mainly focused on the labor and technical aspects of productivity, but it also included a debate about management. For example, some members of the CGE became interested in scientific management and organizational reforms, criticizing the Argentine Industrial Union for its “traditional management approach and paternalistic style of management.”⁵⁵

After the fall of Peronism in 1955, the debate on productivity continued but was reframed in the context of the implementation of developmental policies, as explained previously.⁵⁶ In this context, the National Institute of Productivity (INP) was created in 1957 as a decentralized agency under the Ministry of Commerce. From its inception, it aimed to link the state sector with the private sector and labor union representatives, following the ILO’s tripartite structure.

Fifth, the debate on productivity and management development should be inserted into the increasingly tense labor relations that characterized Argentina during this period.⁵⁷ Peronism strengthened the labor movement as a significant organization and a political force.⁵⁸ Previous research on the labor movement has noted that Peronism promoted a centralized union structure dominated by a single labor confederation (CGT). Another critical aspect of the Argentine labor movement after 1946 was the high degree of union-based representation on the shop floor, alongside the internal commissions.⁵⁹

After 1955, the labor movement was subjected to an authoritarian crackdown. The military government intervened in the CGT and declared all internal commissions dissolved and lacking in authority. Although there was strong resistance and opposition, there was a certain realignment of forces.⁶⁰ This manifested in signing new collective agreements with new rationalization clauses. In 1960, the power of internal commissions was further reduced with the implementation of the repressive Plan CONINTES (State’s Internal Commotion). From then, a new stage in the history of the Argentine labor movement began. It has been described as the bureaucratization of trade union leadership and characterized as a growing distance between the leadership and the rank and file.⁶¹

Sixth, the issue of productivity was also adopted among businessmen. From their point of view, it was necessary to tie wages to productivity, modify the clauses of agreements, and limit workers’ and unions’ authority in the factories.⁶² Simplifying a more complex scenario, the industrial elite, despite being a fragmented group in a polarized society, shared a common view: to discipline labor, apply policies of production reorganization, and increase productivity.⁶³ Meanwhile, some sectors in the armed forces agreed with this agenda, considering that these reforms would allow them to decrease the political power that the working class had achieved during Peronism rule.⁶⁴

The Beginnings of the ILO Management Development Mission

After the coup in 1955, the Argentine productivity movement developed closer ties to the ILO. In 1957, the ILO invited the new president of the INP, Carlos Burundarena, to visit productivity centers in 32 countries.⁶⁵ Upon his return to Argentina, Burundarena was convinced of the need for work on a national scale, and he encouraged the Argentine government to ask the ILO to send an expert to Argentina.⁶⁶ In November 1957, Hans Fahlström, an ILO expert, arrived to advise the Argentinian authorities on how to organize the INP. His main message to the ILO was that Argentina needed more trained managers and schools for training in management and productivity techniques.⁶⁷

Several visits to Argentina from other ILO experts followed Fahlström’s visit. For example, in September 1958, three months after the ILO Congress, Henry Vandries, deputy director of the ILO’s regional office in Lima, Peru, visited Buenos Aires to discuss Fahlström’s draft project with the Argentine government and also Argentina’s application for funding from UNSF for an ILO project.⁶⁸ The agreement was signed on December 4, 1959.⁶⁹ In doing this, the Frondizi administration placed managerial and technical education at the center of the productivity debate.⁷⁰

A cardinal ILO principle on these new management development missions was to be attached to institutions that “will ensure the continuation and expansion of the work after the experts have left.”⁷¹ As a consequence, the arrival of the ILO mission led to the creation of a new institution, the Productivity Centre of Argentina (CPA), which would be the new national center for offering management development programs in the context of coordinating previous uncoordinated national productivity efforts.⁷² According to local officials, the CPA should achieve this with the financial help of the UNSF and technical assistance from the ILO.⁷³ Reports from the CPA and the ILO mission demonstrate an open and flexible approach to defining and adapting CPA activities to meet local demands. Highlighting links between management development and productivity work did not preclude efforts to incorporate work on, for example, human relations. In fact, during the founding period, there was a discussion about the need to include human resources in productive work to reduce the technical emphasis of productivity work.⁷⁴ The CPA and its Argentine experts planned to run the operation without the ILO’s help within five years. The project was later prolonged by one year; in December 1966, the ILO mission withdrew from Argentina.

The ILO’s work on management development in Argentina started on March 30, 1960, with the arrival of the ILO’s first project manager and only expert in this mission for more than a year, the aforementioned Mr. David Moushine. His first task was to disseminate knowledge about the ILO mission to potential stakeholders in Argentina and to initiate joint activities with a small number of existing training organizations, such as the new private institute for executive education, Instituto para el Desarrollo de Ejecutivos en la Argentina (IDEA).⁷⁵

The initial phase of cooperation between the ILO and the CPA was somewhat troublesome. Budgeting and physical facilities challenged implementation of the plan of operations, and the CPA and the head of the ILO mission were concerned about the lack of sufficient “financial support by private industry.”⁷⁶ Moushine also reported that there was some initial resistance by “the local training organizations towards the Centre.”⁷⁷ However, the main challenge was setting up and staffing the project.

Concerning the CPA, it took several months to appoint a local director, engineer Antonio J. Vila, and as late as November 1960 the work had not yet begun.⁷⁸ In this first month, the CPA was attached to the Institute Nacional de Tecnología Industrial (INTI). Vila resigned as director after only a couple of months, and the institutional anchoring was strengthened by appointing a new executive committee, including representatives from the other two productivity organizations, the Argentine Productivity Association (AAPRO) and the INP, in addition to the INTI.⁷⁹ The reorganization granted INTI representation before the UNSF in all matters related to the ILO project.⁸⁰ This implied an institutional readjustment, because the INTI began to support the CPA financially, together with AAPRO and the INP.

According to the ILO mission, the project launch would have been less challenging if the project could have started without the involvement of the INP and the AAPRO.⁸¹ The AAPRO was a private association created in May 1959 to generate support from the business sector for the aforementioned initiatives. At first, the AAPRO had the support of a small group of industrialists, whose role would be to support and act as a link to the ILO project, while the CPA was an entity of mixed character. Other stakeholders, such as workers, were absent or only indirectly related to the first steps of the CPA. There were personal contacts, but as organizations, the unions, in the midst of the repressive turn of the government due to the implementation of the CONINTES plan, ignored this ILO project.⁸² In other words, the tripartite principle was not represented in the executive committee of the CPA.

The CPA and ILO Management Development Mission: Overall Activities

One ILO objective in Argentina was to establish management development programs and other related programs for public services and industry. Another was to work closely with corporations and public organizations to develop management and increase productivity through training and organizational restructuring.

The first ILO experts had expertise in management development, industrial engineering, and productivity issues. In 1963, new international experts on supervision training and vocational training arrived.⁸³ These experts should have all been assigned a local counterpart that they trained, who were then sent abroad as fellows for three- to six-month study tours.

The project started with a few courses and seminars in 1961 with 795 participants.⁸⁴ Then, the activities expanded to 1,463 participants in 1963, and to 2,507 in 1964, before gradually declining to around 1,300 in the final year of the project, 1966.⁸⁵ Most activities took place in Buenos Aires, but 25–30 percent of the activities were developed in six regional productivity centers. In 1964, 35 percent of the participants came from large firms, including some multinational enterprises (MNEs), 35 percent from small- and medium-sized enterprises, 12 from the government, and six from educational institutions.

The courses covered a much broader field than the original ILO vision intended and reached a varied group of participants. Among the participants, 18 percent represented top management groups, 9 percent were chiefs of personnel and training, 38 percent were middle managers, 13 percent were consultants, and 10 percent were supervisors.⁸⁶ Among the 3,961 course and seminar participants from 1964 to 1966, only 16 percent attended activities addressing top managers’ development. Moreover, 47 percent attended functional programs such as industrial engineering, management accounting, marketing, and office administration, while 26 percent attended activities focusing on training supervisors and 11 percent on vocational training.⁸⁷ The CPA also provided various training and consultancy services to the largest state-owned companies, including YPF (oil), YCF (coal), Fabricaciones Miliares, SEGBA (electricity), DINFIA (aeronautics), and BIRA (banking), among others.⁸⁸ In addition, the ILO mission developed a small number of corporate training programs, including programs for Argentine subsidiaries of MNEs. According to Moushine, the relatively large number of MNEs in the country implied that the ILO should target these groups in particular.⁸⁹ Among the MNEs that cooperated with this project in Argentina were Mercedes Benz, FIAT, and Pirelli.⁹⁰

Conferences and broadcast media campaigns supplemented these management development activities. From 1961 to 1965, the CPA published a monthly bulletin called Productivity, of which 43 issues were published. It also launched 17 technical reports and sectoral studies covering different topics and issues, such as theoretical perspectives on productivity and management development; technical reports on the measurement of productivity in cotton mills; and those dedicated to pressing issues at that time in Argentina, such as the “Productivity Clause in Collective Labor Agreements.”⁹¹ As part of their agenda, the experts organized and promoted hundreds of meetings with local personalities, institutions, trade unions, and other national and international organizations.⁹²

Within two years of its existence, the ILO mission reported that the CPA had also carried out surveys, visited factories, and developed pilot projects with private firms with the purpose of expanding “the circle of contacts of the centre with as many sections of the economy, and with as many factors affecting productivity in the Argentine, as local conditions permit.”⁹³ As a result, the CPA gradually expanded its activities in various directions, including promoting trade union cooperation and planning productivity projects in state enterprises (e.g., transport area) or in vocational training (e.g., agreement with the construction chamber). As the head of the mission, David Moushine, realized, the CPA, in the third year of its existence, was increasingly moving toward fieldwork, pilot and demonstration projects, surveys, and investigations.⁹⁴

These observations show that the ILO’s perception of management development was wide and included a great variety of activities with various foci. Activities designed as top management development programs with a focus on general management development existed alongside training in functional fields.⁹⁵ The activities were strongly anchored in the idea of productivity, broadly defined, and applied in a flexible and pragmatic way. It is striking that the reports from the ILO mission to its headquarters in Geneva increasingly emphasized the productivity question or, as a report from the second half of 1964 identified as its most important achievement, a “fast-growing national awareness of the importance of productivity.”⁹⁶

When the ILO mission ended its project in Argentina in December 1966, it left a country in which the ILO’s objective of introducing management development programs had been implemented relatively successfully. Overall, the output of the CPA cooperating with the ILO was impressive. They had offered 393 courses with 8,119 participants, in addition to many seminars. As observed, this was a dynamic process of reorienting and prioritizing activities due to the growing demands of various stakeholders in an increasingly challenging environment. In the next sections of the article, we will explore two areas that we perceive as decisive for this adjustment process: the dynamic between the ILO missions and the CPA during the project period and the match between the ILO project and the Argentine context from the perspective of the ILO’s tripartite principle.

Management Knowledge Transfer in Argentina: The Role of International Experts

Starting in autumn 1960, when the ILO mission and CPA began to cooperate on the management development program, several adjustments occurred. In the process of implementing ILO’s management development program, the foreign ILO mission was the strongest part. One striking characteristic of the ILO mission was the great variety of work experience and national backgrounds among the project leaders and experts who came to Argentina. When the first project leader, David Moushine, returned to Israel in 1963, he was succeeded by the Italian Dr. Enrico de Gennaro, who took up his duties on March 12, 1964, coming from the position of director of the Italian business school IPSOA. De Gennaro left on May 3, 1966, when the ILO asked him to be deputy director of the International Center for Professional and Technical Development in Turin.⁹⁷ De Gennaro was replaced as ILO project leader by Dr. Hans Wehner, a German expert in management development.⁹⁸

The ILO administration in Geneva, in addition to hiring the project leaders, also hired foreign experts from different relevant fields. The nationalities of the 26 experts who came between 1960 and 1966—typically for a period of one to three years—show a strong European dominance but from numerous European countries (Appendix). Only four of the 26 were from the US, one was from Israel, and one was from Australia; the others were from European countries, although most (seven experts) were from Great Britain, which was typical for all countries that received an ILO mission on management development in this period.⁹⁹ The experts were chosen and prepared for the assignment by the ILO in Geneva, while the ILO mission in Argentina was active in defining the areas that the experts should cover.¹⁰⁰

The experts, who had a wide range of expertise, represented countries with different traditions in management. Only a minority were general management and top management training experts. Still, most of them covered what the ILO perceived as “the area of management”: management, supervisory training, industrial engineering, management accounting, personnel management, and marketing.¹⁰¹ Others covered fields such as productivity measurement and vocational training. Among the 11 experts appointed by June 1962, there was one expert in general management, three in industrial engineering, two in management accounting, two in productivity measurement, two in supervisory training, one in management accounting, and one in vocational training.¹⁰²

At the management level, the ILO mission depended on good cooperation with CPA Director Gerardo Lassalle, who stepped down in December 1964, having served as the director since April 1961. He was replaced for a short period by Salvador del Carril, who was the president of the CPA. In December 1964, Fabio Capra became the CPA director and held office for two years, leaving in December 1966. In their reports, the ILO’s mission leaders often expressed that they were happy to work with the CPA personnel; but they also initiated several incidences of teamwork or made efforts to strengthen morale, indicating some challenging cultural differences. Still, the relationship at the top level was generally acceptable. From the perspective of the ILO mission, the main problem was that there were insufficient numbers of local counterparts to the ILO experts, making local staff development challenging.¹⁰³ Toward the end of the project, it was repeatedly reported that the “present staff is inadequate to meet the number of requests for advice and assistance entirely.”¹⁰⁴

Regarding local experts, as noted earlier, the aim was to appoint a local counterpart for each ILO international expert, who would train the counterpart in their field. Twelve counterparts were also appointed fellows and were sent abroad on study trips, typically for four to six months. Most of the 12 fellows visited three or four countries, mostly in Europe. Nine fellows visited France; seven visited the UK; five visited Italy, three visited Germany; two fellows visited Belgium and Israel; and one fellow each went to Spain, Switzerland, and the US. The fellow who visited the US also visited Germany and the UK. According to the individual plans, the fellows were to visit numerous business schools and management training centers. These plans were based on suggestions from the Argentine fellows before they were discussed with the CPA and the ILO mission. In some cases, the plans were adjusted by the ILO in Geneva, which offered replacements if the suggested institution was not able to host a visitor.¹⁰⁵ The fellows’ reports show that only three out of 12 visited institutions that were known for their management training (i.e., the business school IPOSA in Italy, the British Institute of Management, and Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London). Eight of the 12 visited productivity centers, and almost all visited corporations or business associations.¹⁰⁶ Thus, the fellows gained varied international experiences. What they had in common was a package dominated primarily by impressions from organizations with a strong practical approach to management development.

The fellows’ travel patterns reveal a close link between the strong interest in productivity in the 1950s and the management development project in the 1960s. In the initial phase, the project director, Moushine, strongly supported Jorge Héctor Meiers’s application for a fellowship to study “the Scientific Organization of Work,” which would be achieved by visiting England, France, “and other centers where productivity movement is being undertaken.”¹⁰⁷ The concern with the issue of productivity, whether it was focused on technical aspects such as the measurement of productivity or whether it included the role of human resources, remained vital throughout the project. Despite the varied streams of activities, the ILO mission continued to focus on offering courses and seminars on management development, including those for top positions.¹⁰⁸

Both the ILO experts and local counterparts “should influence the opinions of top management by informing them on the general conditions in the field of productivity in the Argentine industry”; and then the CPA should have, according to the ILO mission director, a “multiplier effect.”¹⁰⁹ ILO experts in Argentina highlighted that one critical factor was “the lack of qualified and competent instructors for training skilled workers both in schools and in the industry,” and for this reason “it would appear preferable to dedicate this activity to instructors’ teachers, thus obtaining a higher multiplying effect.”¹¹⁰ The CPA demonstrated its commitment to coordinating the efforts of the institutions dealing with management development and productivity by its active role in promoting CADOC, the National Committee for Scientific Organization, which represented all the organizations working in the field of management training.

One aim of the project was to have local people develop the skills to teach managers. According to the ILO’s expectations, the CPA should primarily initiate and develop institutions that offered management training and development and only do direct training if other institutions could not do it.¹¹¹ In this process, the activities developed by the ILO expert on management training were, as stated before, a key element. The ILO’s management development specialist in Argentina was Frank A. Heller, who was from the UK.¹¹² Before he went to Argentina to work for the ILO, he began a doctorate program in occupational psychology on management decision-making, writing a dissertation he defended at the London School of Economics in 1969. He then worked on industrial democracy at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, illustrating the link between the Tavistock Institute and the ILO in terms of ideas related to management development.¹¹³ The Tavistock Institute developed in this period their international activities on research and consulting on industrial democracy at the shop-floor level and on human relations, for example in India. This socio-organizational approach was also applied in the work on productivity.¹¹⁴

Shortly after Heller’s arrival in Argentina, he presented an ambitious plan to develop several management development programs, including seminars for top managers, together with the Instituto Argentino de Dirección de Empresas, IDEA, and AAPRO.¹¹⁵ Courses in general management focused on high-level managers were offered from April 1961 to January 1964. When Heller left Argentina in May 1964, he reported several achievements. The quality of the management courses had improved. He had assisted in the creation of the Uruguayan Management Training Institute and lectured at the Management Training Institute of Chile. He was also very happy with his two counterparts, Héctor Jasminoy and Juan C. Podesta, who had been actively involved with the training. In fact, Jasminoy had made himself an authority on management training, which led him to a position as a member of the professional staff at FAEDE, the largest management training institute in Argentina, and to his appointment as a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Buenos Aires. However, Heller also reported that the CPA was against the idea of corporate training for managers before July 1962 and that the work to reach top management had started too late; thus, given the short time until the close of the project, its focus should be on existing activities.¹¹⁶

We also know that the mission had developed a course for senior personnel managers with the business school IDEA, organized seminars, negotiated with several corporations on in-house training, and arranged other relevant activities.¹¹⁷ However, given the growing need for management training linked to “the emergence of a cadre of professional managers who will take over,” the project leader of the mission, Moushine, said that these achievements fell “far too short.”¹¹⁸ Moushine’s successor confirmed this impression. As the new project leader, Enrico de Gennaro recommended that the problem of “under-management” in Argentina should be solved using a more concentrated focus on applying productivity methods; improving the skills of middle managers, technicians, and the labor force; and increasing the activity within vocational education.¹¹⁹

At the time, evolving knowledge transfer ideologies occurred in a process of learning-by-doing from parallel projects in other countries. For example, the director general of the ILO underlined the American executive education model, the AMP, as a role model for developing management development programs in Argentina. Indeed, the ILO had a good experience with such programs in India, “which by common concern was considered to compare favourably with programmes presented by, for example, the Ford Foundation, with a MIT faculty.”¹²⁰ However, no AMP was offered in Argentina. The aforementioned ILO experts indicated that the activities were staffed by persons who were anchored in European business environments associated with the European productivity movement, and they were not close to or connected with the new wave of US executive education that had been mentioned as a role model at the ILO’s 1958 launch of the management development project.

The Tripartite Logic in a Broader Cooperative Landscape

The ILO’s activities are based on the tripartite principle of cooperation between the government and the employers’ and workers’ associations. The ILO’s project to promote management development in Argentina depended not only on the cooperative climate between the ILO’s mission and the CPA, as previously discussed, but also on support from the government and the employers’ and workers’ associations. According to various reports from ILO experts, the cooperative efforts should also contribute to developing good contacts with local experts and good routines for working together as a team. However, stakeholders had different visions, and these institutional and economic contexts influenced and readjusted the relationships.

From 1962, the ILO mission learned to operate in an increasingly turbulent landscape, and the development of the mission occurred in parallel with a peak in conflictive labor relations. From 1959 on, the unions launched several strikes in sectors such as metallurgy, construction, footwear, graphics, textiles, refrigeration, and shipbuilding, where strikes were also declared illegal, and strikers were persecuted. Meanwhile, from 1961, top union leaders displayed pragmatic negotiation.¹²¹ Overall, the CGT or any other workers’ organization was never included in the executive committee of the CPA during its entire existence. The ILO expert reports found the relationship with the workers’ unions challenging. From the beginning, there had been several attempts at relationship building. Eight training courses on various topics were organized for trade union leaders. Altogether, 76 people attended. No specific courses for trade unionists have been identified since 1964. This would confirm that there has been a potential impasse since then. Contacts continued, but they were made on an individual level and not through the central CGT, which—according to ILO reports—“has remained indifferent to the CPA.”¹²²

Another challenge for the ILO mission and the CPA—a subject for future research—was the need for the private sector to join these initiatives and overcome the conflicts within the corporate business world. In any case, this, and other initiatives on productivity at the time, were characterized by reluctance, internal tensions, and divergent visions among government officials beyond the discourse emanating from local technicians and ILO experts who tried to depoliticize the debates on productivity.

When the mission was fully operational in March 1962, President Frondizi was overthrown by a coup d’état. In this context, the ILO’s project leader, Moushine, sent a confidential report to the ILO’s headquarters. He expressed some concern, but also considered that “the C.P.A. is not identified as a government office, which is contributed to by the fact that it is now outside the Ministry.” He stressed that all contacts and discussions were purely technical and not political. He also discussed the experiences with the three partners and explained that the relationship with the government through the INP and the Ministry of Industry was “good, but not close,” with few visits and meetings, but the main problem was the instability. For that reason, “it was considered advisable not to develop close working relations with their departments, and also not to establish contacts with the Ministry of Economy, it being a highly political post.”¹²³

The relationship with private industry leaders was good but not broad.¹²⁴ As previously stated, the trade unions did not identify openly with the CPA.¹²⁵ In this situation, the CPA had consolidated itself as a relatively independent organization, but this strategy did not protect it against uncertainty. These observations indicate that the project’s anchoring in the tripartite principle was fragile, and the ILO mission reported that “we are uncertain as to the support from the authorities, both now and in the near future.”¹²⁶ However, the new government continued to support the CPA. For example, when the INP was dissolved, its activities—namely, promotion, training, consultancy, and investigation—were transferred to the CPA. As a result, in 1963, the executive committee of the CPA decided to replace the two representatives of INP in the CPA with two from the Banco Industrial de la República Argentina (BIRA). From then on, together with the INTI and the AAPRO, the BIRA became the main local financial support and the most reliable governmental partner of the CPA. The BIRA’s supporting role should be highlighted not only as a financing agent of the CPA but also as a promoter of some studies and reports; it even granted the first special loans to companies that carried out organizational reforms for productive purposes.

The support from the BIRA did not prevent the ILO mission from complaining about the extant political instability. The 1963 mid-year report stated that the main reason for the project’s lack of progress was “largely political and economic” and that “frequent changes in the Government create a climate of uncertainty.”¹²⁷ The challenge with the government was not only its instability but also that it sometimes tried to influence the project’s activities. In the autumn of 1963, Enrico de Gennaro reported that the secretary of Industry, Mr. Gottheil, had expressed that he would like to see a change in the project from focusing on management development and training to economic research, and that the CPA should become part of the Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo Económico, which was creating an economic plan for the country. According to de Gennaro, the ILO should partly adjust its activities to meet this requirement: “We should include experts on business analysis (a microeconomist), stock control in industry, transportation, and international statistical comparisons, in addition to the expert in productivity measurement that is requested.”¹²⁸

From the perspective of the ILO, the project would have benefited from stronger support from employers’ and workers’ associations. The private sector’s support for the CPA came from several individual companies, specific business organizations, and organizations such as AAPRO. However, from the perspective of ILO experts, the owners and managers of industry were, to some extent, excused from this support. They had to operate in a situation of political crises and a stagnating economy, which “caused senior management to be anxious and preoccupied with short time economic measurement.”¹²⁹ Therefore, “the image of the CPA is not yet that of a high-standard organisation in the business community.”¹³⁰

By 1965, there was no change in the central workers’ union lack of open and public support, which was criticized in a mission report: “Another persistent problem is the reluctance of the central worker union (CGT) to identify themselves openly with the CPA.”¹³¹ The analysis of historical documentation from 1963 to 1965 confirmed the CGT’s indifference to CPA activities.¹³²

When the project ended in 1966, a new coup d’état took place with the overthrow of President Arturo Illia and the rise of the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía; it was thus clear that among the three partners in the tripartite system, the national government had been most supportive of the CPA. However, this was not primarily because of changes in the ILO’s mission of development programs (although the minister of Industry sought to shift focus from management development to economic research and planning). Rather, lessening support was related to Argentina’s increasing instability and unpredictability.¹³³

After the ILO mission left the country as planned, the Argentinian government closed the CPA, which was absorbed into the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. This official decision came when the institution was, according to the CPA, in a relatively good condition:

Unfortunately, such reorganization seems to limit the operations of the CPA to the point of practically incapacitating it as an effective institution for the promotion of modern business management and working methods, training and improvement of human resources, advice to industry and commerce, and research.¹³⁴

Conclusion

This article explored the ILO’s role in promoting management development programs in developing countries in the 1950s and 1960s by studying the ILO’s mission on management development in Argentina from 1960 to 1966. The ILO chose Argentina and Poland as the two pioneering countries for the organization’s ambitious project to launch management development initiatives in developing countries, as decided by the ILO’s congress in 1958.

Inspired by the new executive education movement in the US, the ILO’s efforts were nevertheless unique in several ways. The organization intended to advance top executives’ professionalization, but more than being a copy of US executive education, the program was closely linked to the productivity movement and strongly anchored to European expertise and to the ILO principle of tripartite support from national governments, unions, and the business community. It was also a principle that the management development programs should be offered by national productivity centers supported by the three partners and the ILO, and that the ILO should withdraw after six years.

Our study of the ILO’s activities in this field in Argentina indicates that these principles led to a high degree of local adjustment and flexibility. The concept of management development was broadly interpreted to include courses not only in general management for people in high-level corporate positions but also courses in functional areas, supervisory training, and vocational training. The activities were also strongly connected to the productivity work that had begun in Argentina just after World War II. As observed, the activities in productivity work ranged from technical productivity issues to those involving approaches related to highlighting human resources and human relations. This blurs the boundaries between the promotion of management development initiatives and productivity work. This observation calls for further research into the relationship between productivity work, human relations, and management development in the 1960s.

There are multiple reasons for these adjustments to the ILO’s mission. One reason was that the project was organized as a cooperative project of the ILO mission and the Productivity Center of Argentina, which—as the name indicates—should promote the increase of productivity, meaning that productivity and management training projects operated within the same organizational environment supported by cross-fertilization. Another reason is that the subsequent government led by President Illia had shown interest in pushing the project more toward vocational education and technical questions. Both the ILO’s ideology and mission were receptive to these adjustments, which arose from specific requests from the various stakeholders involved. Indeed, some of these were, to some extent, orchestrated adjustments. Management and staff of the ILO mission came from different European countries, each with their own management traditions, including clear links to British management practices and ideas.

The ILO considered its Argentina project to be successful and that it had achieved most of its aims, including developing a multiplier effect. Meanwhile, the CPA considered that it had introduced “within a considerable group of industrialists, traders, business leaders, professionals, and university students modern concepts, methods, and techniques for a more efficient and remunerative business conduct in Argentina.”¹³⁵ However, taking a more long-term perspective, the overall results were more mixed because the CPA was closed down, most of the CPA-promoted management development initiatives ceased, and its advisory and coordinating role disappeared. Thus, the long-term impact of the ILO project on management development seems to have been weak.

The tripartite system, which initially drove the project toward local adaptation and integration, was never fully realized due to the lack of trade union involvement in the CPA and was further weakened by conflicting local political and economic contexts. Thus, while the tripartite principle of the ILO project initially appeared to be a strength, it became one of its main weaknesses due to local conditions. When the support of the main partner, the state, was withdrawn, the project collapsed.