The Chandler–Furtado case: A de-colonial re-framing of a North/South (dis)encounter

Abstract

This paper shows that, although an encounter between the ideas of Alfred Chandler (from the USA) and Celso Furtado (from Brazil) within the Cold War period could have avoided the crisis of legitimacy faced by strategic management, it was only Chandler who became a universal authority in this field. Chandler and Furtado approached corporations and governments from different perspectives for more than 50 years, and this partially explains the disencounter between them. Although the contemporaneous crises of both US hegemony and strategic management suggest that a multipolar and pluriversal field of strategy is needed, influential authors from the USA have overlooked history and stood for the reinforcement of North/South coloniality to tackle global problems, which they enunciate from a universal and unilateral standpoint. A de-colonial historical analysis of the (dis)encounter between these two authors is undertaken by two Brazilian authors, in this paper, to show that their works are inseparable parts of the same phenomenon, in the same way as modernity and coloniality are. We develop a framework with three levels of analysis to re-frame such a North/South (dis)encounter: at the macro level, the grand narrative of the Cold War; at the meso level, the subaltern knowledges produced by the Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean (ECLAC) and by Celso Furtado; and at the micro level the national identity espoused by each author. We argue that the Chandler–Furtado encounter we produce in this paper helps create conditions for the development of a multipolar and pluriversal field of strategy in the post-Cold War period, which moves beyond the North/South divide.

Ensino superior em administração entre os anos 1940 e 1950: uma discussão a partir dos acordos de cooperação Brasil-Estados Unidos

“…At a time when discussions are focusing on the need to develop perspectives from the south (WANDERLEY and FARIA, 2012;ALCADIPANI, KHAN, GANTMAN et al, 2012), it is important to put our own knowledge under analysis from a historical point of view to understand how it appeared and developed. In this way, we believe that it is possible to establish a more adequate look at the local development, revealing processes that are often hidden in that they only replicate knowledge developed outside, ignoring local processes such as those discussed by Curado (2001), Zanetti and Vargas (2007) and Frenkel (2009).…”

Developing critical organizational history: Context, practice and implications

“…An example is Mills’ (1995) work on gender at British Airways. Critical histories of management thought can be written to introduce voices from the South into the dominant narrative on the past of management and organization studies (MOS), an example being Wanderley and Faria’s (2012) account of Furtado’s role in the trajectory of the academic field of strategy. The latter provides an excellent example of a history that can assist in ideological emancipation.…”

Local development versus neoliberal globalization project: reflecting on market-oriented cities

“…It is important to emphasize the relevance of Polanyi's work for the social sciences as a whole, but it is also necessary to contribute improvements to this line of thought, in order to adapt and to respect geographic bias of this knowledge based on the studied phenomenon. Under this logic, we embrace the decolonial option (Abdalla & Faria, 2017;Escobar, 2004;Grosfoguel, 2008Grosfoguel, , 2012Lander, 2000;Mignolo, 2009Mignolo, , 2010Mignolo, , 2011Mignolo, , 2014Wanderley & Faria, 2012) and transmodern perspective (Bragato & Castilho, 2012;Dussel, 2005Dussel, , 2013 as a way to deal with the multipolar character, especially the various sites subject to unthinking development and the consequent emergence of market oriented cities. This perspective prevents reproducing mistaken understandings of the coloniality of knowledge, since phenomena of the South are analyzed from the South itself, but in theoretical logic that is cross-bordered and cosmopolitan, which does not segregate or belittle knowledge from the North, but embraces it from a pluriversal perspective.…”