INDIAN MANAGEMENT: Thought and Practice

Indian management is deeply influenced by the paradigm of western management thought and practice. The reasons for this lie in the nature of current business activity and organization. The modern business organization is the child of Industrial Revolution which transformed not only human society and its culture but also the nature of its economic institutions. In the wake of the industrial revolution different forms of business organization sprung up, chief among them being the modern joint stock company. The division between ownership and management effected by this kind of business organization influenced the growth of different schools of management beginning with Taylor’s scientific management. The later years saw the accretion of new theories to this cardinal management thought, most of them cast in the mould of systems’ thought and practice. The pre-occupation with systems’ thought was a fall out of the technological proclivity of the western mind. The Human Resource Approach, though voiced early by Henry Fayol and the Hawthorne experiments remain at best a lesser and subordinate wheel of thought.

The Indian development story owes as much to its colonization as to its native growth. Colonized for over a century by the British, India received inputs of the Western development story which coloured its psyche and philosophy of growth accordingly. So, no matter how much the word ‘development’ may have come in for criticism from dissenting thinkers like Noam Chomsky, it embarked on the path of modernization based on the paradigms of the Western Enlightenment thought. The byproduct of such a systemic makeover in Indian psyche was the modern Indian business organization which took after its Western apotheosis, the joint stock company. As this form of business organization was characteristically different from the native Hindu undivided family business, it called for different system of governance, the seeds of which lay in the Western schools of management. Coincidentally, many of the captains of business and industry in post-independent India had their grooming in the Western paradigm of general and management education, so the transition was not very difficult.