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MLQ0010.1177/1350507617710321Management LearningAlcadipani

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Management Learning
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Reclaiming sociological reduction: © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1350507617710321
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507617710321
management education in the journals.sagepub.com/home/mlq

periphery

Rafael Alcadipani
FGV-EAESP, Brazil

Abstract
Management knowledge and practices have been circulating worldwide for a long time, and business and
management schools are central locations where management knowledge and practices have been produced.
Few studies discuss how this circulation occurs in the periphery in general and how management education
from the United States has circulated in the periphery in particular. Using historical research, this article aims
to reclaim the notion of sociological reduction, a notion developed by Brazilian scholar in the 1950s, to make
sense of how US management education was implemented in a Brazilian management school. By doing so,
this article contributes to the analysis of the spread of US management education grounded in a postcolonial
approach and addresses calls for analysing epistemologies from the periphery.

Keywords
Management education, non-western epistemology, postcolonialism

Introduction
Management knowledge and practices (MKPs) have been circulating worldwide since at least the
1950s (Farquharson et al., 2014; Kipping et al., 2009; Leavitt, 1957; Üsdiken, 2004; Yousifi, 2014).
Research has analysed the circulation of MKPs. ‘Rational accounts’ focus on the presumed eco-
nomic benefits of adopting a particular MKP (Ansari et al., 2010) and consider that ‘reinvention’
occurs when MKPs circulate (e.g. Chandler, 1962). Neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio and
Powell, 1983) challenges such ‘rational accounts’, advocating that MKP circulation is linked to
organizations dealing with social conformity pressures (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Tolbert and
Zucker, 1996), and during such a process, MKPs can be adopted as ‘myth and ceremony’ (Meyer
and Rowan, 1977) leading to decoupling, that is, a gap between what MKPs espouse and actual
organizational practices (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Moreover, the notion of bricolage (Campbell,

Corresponding author:
Rafael Alcadipani, ADM, FGV-EAESP, Av. Nove de Julho, 2029, São Paulo 01313-902, Brazil.
Email: rafael.alcadipani@fgv.br
2 Management Learning 00(0)

2004, 2009) focuses on how institutions change by ‘the rearrangement or recombination of institu-
tional principles and practices in new and creative ways’ (Campbell, 2009: 12). Thus, bricolage
relates to how old institutions are infused with new meanings to create new intuitions that simulta-
neously differ and resemble old ones (Campbell, 2004).
Drawing on neo-institutional theory and actor–network theory, translation studies (also known
as Scandinavian institutionalism) posit that while MKPs circulate from one place to the other,
MKPs are actively edited to fit local needs and circumstances (Czarniawska and Sevon, 2005;
Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevon, 1996). As such, carriers of MKPs are far from passive actors;
they actively shape MKP implementation. Even if they do not follow the ‘simplifying assumptions
about the homogeneity of diffusing [MKPs] across time and space’ (Ansari et al., 2010: 67), analy-
ses of MKP circulation tend to focus on North America, Western Europe and Japan (e.g.
Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevon, 1996; Djelic, 1998; O’Mahoney and Sturdy, 2016; Rovick, 2016;
Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002), implying that ‘research on the transference of management
knowledge to the periphery is still in its infancy’ (Kipping et al., 2009: 12).
One of the consequences of the lack of research on MKP circulation to the periphery is that most
research in the topic tends to disregard the ‘historical experiences of marginalization’ (Mignolo,
2002: 66) that are typical of peripheral regions of the world (Westwood et al., 2014). While some
research on the circulation of MKPs from the centre to the periphery has neglected the neo/postco-
lonial condition (Prasad, 2003; Young, 2001) of the latter regions, others, grounded in the postco-
lonial approach, bring this condition to the fore (e.g. Frenkel, 2008; Srinivas, 2009).
The postcolonial approach refers to the examination of a range of social, cultural, political,
ethical and philosophical questions that consider the importance of the colonial experience and
its persisting aftermath (Jack et al., 2011). Such a perspective, complex and varied as it is
(Ashcroft et al., 2006), tends to denounce epistemologies and practices as systems for the exclu-
sion of other realities and forms of knowledge (Mir and Mir, 2013; Prasad, 2003). Whereas
management learning, knowledge and education are immersed in the neo-postcolonial condition,
business textbooks propagate versions of colonialism (Fougère and Moulettes, 2012), and teach-
ing management practices tend to neglect postcolonial issues (Harney and Linstead, 2009; Joy
and Poonamallee, 2013).
Drawing on postcolonialism, research has analysed the circulation of MKPs from centres to
peripheries mainly using the notions of hybridity (Frenkel, 2008, 2006; Yousifi, 2014) and
anthropophagy (Islam, 2012; Wood and Caldas, 1997). Hybridity (Bhabha, 1994) is a construction
resulting from the conflictual colonizer and colonized interaction, marked by later resistance
(Frenkel, 2008). Hybridity refers to ‘a symbolic and structural reality in which dialectical and
complex linkages between identity construction, local power dynamics and the specific cultural
framework of meaning shape the implementation of the imported practices’ (Yousifi, 2014: 24).
Islam (2012) discusses hybridism as an outcome of the centre and periphery encounter of MKPs
via anthropophagy. Anthropophagy is the ‘cannibalistic’ appropriation of cultural forms and is
translated into the symbolic act of ‘eating’ foreign references and adapting them into the Brazilian
reality (Islam, 2012). Wood and Caldas (1997) use anthropophagy to describe a process of creative
adaptation in which Brazilian managers selectively adopt elements from Northern practices.
Long before the concerns of our field with the circulation of MKPs in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g.
Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevon 1996; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Rogers, 1985) and Bhabha’s
(1994) analysis of mimicry and hybridism that has inspired critical thought, in the 1950s and
1960s, a black Brazilian organizational theorist who is well known in Brazil but almost unheard of
in the Anglo-Saxon world, Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, developed the notion of sociological reduc-
tion (SR) as a ‘critical [attitude] to assimilate foreign thought and practices’ (Ramos, 1958: 16)
generated in the centre. African anti-colonial writers such as Cheik Anta Diop, Aime Cesaire and
Alcadipani 3

Abdoulaye Ly influenced Ramos’ ruminations on SR. Analysing business and management schools
is crucial to discussions about the circulation of MKPs because these schools are central locations
where MKPs are produced and taught (Hedmo et al., 2005; Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002).
Thus, how can SR make sense of the circulation of management education MKPs from the centre
to the periphery?
In this article, I will the SR notion to analyse the establishment of a Brazilian management
school (BMS), a pseudonym created by collaboration between the Brazilian and US govern-
ments in the 1950s. The development of the BMS occurred at the outset of the ‘Americanization
of management education’ (Leavitt, 1957), a process that has been mainly analysed by neo-
institutional (Engwall, 2004; Kieser, 2004; Üsdiken, 2004) and translation (Hedmo et al., 2005)
inspired lenses in Europe; there are few studies inspired by postcolonialism that discuss how
management schools and education were ‘Americanized’ in the periphery (Gantman and Parker,
2006; Srinivas, 2009).
Thus, an examination of Ramos’ work is first presented, and the SR notion is then discussed.
Following this discussion, the methodology of the study is introduced, and analyses of the SR of
US management education in the BMS are presented. The conclusion of the article is then offered.
This article contributes to reclaiming and describing SR as a critical attitude for engaging with
management education from the centre. Moreover, I will explore what the SR notion can offer to
studies of the circulation of MKPs grounded in a postcolonial approach in general and to an analy-
sis of management education circulation in particular. As such, I address calls to understand man-
agement knowledge in the periphery (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Faria, 2013; Seremani and Clegg,
2016; Westwood et al., 2014)
This article is part of a larger research project that analyses the importation of management
education into Brazil. Alcadipani and Cooke (2011) have developed a micro-history of US text-
books in Brazil, and Cooke and Alcadipani (2015) have discussed the interactions between a US
foundation and Brazilian actors to highlight the need for historical reflexivity among management
educators. Alcadipani and Bertero (2012) have discussed the impact of the Cold War in the import
of management education to Brazil. Barros et al. (in press) discuss the impact of the Americans in
the development of a management course in the South of Brazil.

Alberto Guerreiro Ramos and the postcolonial imagination in

Brazil
Alberto Guerreiro Ramos (1915–1982), a self-described ‘in-betweener’ (Candler and Ventriss,
2006), was a poor Brazilian organizational scholar and politician who was a member of the
Brazilian parliament and of the Brazilian mission to the United Nations. In his youth, Ramos suf-
fered from racism, and as an adult he was exiled from Brazil to the United States after the military
coup in 1964, where he worked at the University of Southern California (see Candler and Ventriss,
2006).
Ramos’ academic work focuses on creating social thought that is practice-oriented and attached
to the Brazilian context and aims to foster ‘Brazilian development’ (Ramos, 1957, 1963, 1965).
Ramos also produced organization and management theory that fits the Brazilian context (Ramos,
1957, 1963; 1989). For Ramos (1953), the idea of a ‘universal sociology’ is ethnocentric; at the
same time, he makes a critique of the positivist social thought’s intention to produce deterministic
universal scientific knowledge in favour of recognizing that social phenomena are historically and
culturally bounded (Lynch, 2015). Long before the Latin America Subaltern Studies Group was
founded (Rodriguez and Lopez, 2001), Ramos’ work was of paramount importance to the creation
of a postcolonial imagination in Brazilian social thought (Filgueiras, 2012; Lynch, 2015).
4 Management Learning 00(0)

Ramos (1965) argues that Brazilian social, economic and political formation and development
occurred under the subordination to a ‘colonialist culture’, first originated and developed in Europe
and later in the United States, which disseminates among Brazilians an alienated conception of
their own reality and themselves (Ramos, 1953). Brazilian people are subjected to a ‘cultural impe-
rialism’ due to the fascination that colonizer institutions arouse in the colonialized people, making
Brazilian elites imitate the colonizers (Ramos, 1953). In this perspective, Ramos had concerns
similar to that of Bhabha’s (1994) mimicry.
For Ramos (1953, 1957), Brazilian academics in social sciences imitate prestigious European
and US research methods, doctrines and theories in a ‘servile manner’ (Ramos, 1965: 100). The
consequence is the production of a dogmatic social thought that is both alienated and alienating
(Ramos, 1957). For example, Ramos (1957) questions Brazilian scholars’ debate around the role of
the black ethnicity in the country, arguing that such scholars tended to follow the ex-metropolitan
European view of considering Brazil as a white country, with the consequence of presenting
African-Brazilian people as an exotic, passive, problematic object disconnected from the Brazilian
dynamic. Ramos (1957) advocated the need for studying the Brazilian African-American popula-
tion on their own terms and as members of the Brazilian reality.
In this way, Brazilian social thought suffered from an ‘alienation syndrome’ composed of some
specific ‘defects’ (Ramos, 1957), that is, the tendency of Brazilian scholars to adopt what is gener-
ated in Europe and the United States without a critical attitude but rather with a dogmatic attitude
characterized by a submissive apologetic posture, repetition of the ideas of the ‘big names’ in social
thought, attribution of absolute truth to the ideas generated in Europe and the United States, aliena-
tion from Brazilian problems and inauthenticity in knowledge production because the knowledge
generated by the Brazilian sociological scholar is not rooted in his or her everyday experiences
(Azevedo, 2006; Ramos, 1957). Although not directly influenced by Ramos` work, Ibarra-Colado
(2006) raises similar concerns in relation to management and organizational thought and education
in Latin America in the 2000s, arguing that our field in the region is under ‘epistemic coloniality’.
Ramos’ SR notion emerged as an approach to overcome Brazilian social thought’s ‘alienation syn-
drome’, even though some of Ramos’ later work specially after he moved to the United States can
be considered as less critically engaged (Cavalcanti and Alcadipani, 2016).

Understanding SR
In developing SR, Ramos (1965) was inspired by Husserl’s notion of phenomenological reduction
that searches for the essence of things. Heidegger also influenced the development of SR, espe-
cially with the notion that ‘objects in the world are part of a referential structure that gives objects
meaning’ (Ramos, 1958: 86). Ramos (1965) argues that ‘to reduce an idea or a mineral, for instance,
means to untangle from its secondary components in order to make explicit what is essential’ (p.
81). It is in this sense that Ramos uses the notion of reduction in SR. Ramos (1964) also draws on
the work of key African anti-colonial writers who developed a critical consciousness of the African
colonial condition in the 1950s to advocate the need for a similar movement in Brazil. Even though
Brazil had been independent from Europe since 1822, the ‘colonial mentality’ was still prevalent
in the country during the 1950s and 1960s. Ramos (1965) aimed at overcoming Brazilian social
and economic problems at the time by developing a Brazilian historical personality that would
govern the country, manage its own reality and thus self-determine its destiny by overcoming
Brazilians’ prevalent ‘colonial mentality’ at the time.
For Azevedo (2006), even though SR was hinted at in Ramos (1953), ruminations about the
need to produce an approach to evaluate ideas was founded outside Brazil, and it is only in
Ramos (1958) that an unfinished version of SR was presented as a ‘critical approach
Alcadipani 5

to assimilate foreign thought’ (Ramos, 1958: 16) and practices. The ‘final’ version of SR was
presented in Ramos (1965), where he argues that SR has three basic meanings, that is, (1) a
method to assimilate foreign social thought into Brazil; (2) an attitude that allows individuals to
overcome the limitations that constrain his or her freedom and autonomy; and (3) a way to over-
come the colonial status of Brazilian academic thought at the time (Ramos, 1963: 11). Ramos
(1965) also believed that SR should become a general attitude of Brazilians when dealing with
foreign influences to make systematic the critical analysis of foreign products (Ramos, 1965:
68). A crucial step to SR is the deployment of a critical consciousness that allows people to make
sense of the underlying factors and elements that determine their realities (Ramos, 1965: 61).
Thus, SR has critical political dimensions.
Ramos (1965) details seven elements of SR. (1) SR is a ‘methodical attitude’, meaning that it
does not naturally accept what is being imported; (2) social objects entail assumptions that need to
be analysed; (3) SR has a ‘world view’ that assumes that individual consciousness and objects are
interwoven; (4) SR is ‘perspectivist’, meaning that perspectives about objects partially constitute
objects. If perspectives about objects change, the objects themselves also change; (5) SR is a col-
lective act and not the work of a single ‘lucid individual’; (6) SR is a critical-assimilative process
of the foreign product. SR does not romanticize the local, the regional or the national. As such, SR
does not defend an isolationist attitude in favour of a ‘genuine’ local production; and (7) SR is an
elaborated attitude achieved by using diverse knowledge sources, especially historical-social-polit-
ical, about and from the local. (pp. 72–73)
As such, SR is grounded in a methodical attitude interested in finding the referential implica-
tions of the social-historical nature of intellectual productions and systematically referring such
production and practices to the context where they are being translated to create the meaning they
will assume in Brazil (Ramos, 1963: 96). According to Ramos (1965), social science debates,
notions and concepts must be attached to the social problems and historical moments of the par-
ticular country from which they emerge. SR is a commitment to and engagement with the local
context, a critical-assimilative attitude that

stimulates the search for the universal, subordinated to the particular – to the local. It does not oppose the
appropriation of conceptual contents, but demands it be carefully done and subordinated to a conscious
reflection involving especially and first the recognition of its assumptions. (Bergue, 2010: 164)

SR can be described as an attitude that aims to systematically question the nature and content of
what is adopted from the centre to Brazil.
Moreover, SR is commitment to practice and social change. Ramos (1965) proposes that the
reduction can be technological and uses the example of a truck that was imported from Europe to
Brazil and had its engine, frame, suspension, radiator and so on adapted to the local conditions. In
general, terms, ‘where there is practice, there is reduction’ (Ramos, 1965: 50). As such, SR is a way
of learning what is adequate for a particular condition through practice. Moreover, Ramos (1965)
argues that it is easier to adapt practices and techniques to Brazilian local conditions than it is to
adapt notions and concepts.
In this way, rather than foreign knowledge acting as a role model or a paradigm, to SR, foreign
references need only to assume a subsidiary role, and foreign social thought should never be treated
as the key explanation of the Brazilian reality (Ramos, 1965). In summary, SR reduction involves
a movement in three moments. First, a foreign product of interest is located. Then, this product’s
assumptions and characteristics are critically reflected upon in relation to Brazilian historical,
social, political and any other relevant characteristics. Finally, the reduced foreign product circu-
lates into the Brazilian context.
6 Management Learning 00(0)

Methodology
The focus of this article is the establishment of the BMS, a pseudonym to preserve the school’s
identity, in Brazil in the early 1950s because the BMS was expressly designed by the US govern-
ment as a school from which (US) management education would be spread to other regions of
Brazil as well as other South American locations. At that time, management education had a scant
presence in Brazil, and managerial positions were mainly restricted to the family members of com-
pany owners, most of whom had no university education.
The setup of the school involved the presence of US management professors who went to Brazil
to introduce the programme. The professors travelled to Brazil in groups of four and remained for
2 years before returning to the United States. The US mission, as it was called, remained in Brazil
from 1954 until 1962.
To understand this ‘colonial encounter’, data from both the United States and Brazil were
required. From the United States, the data included monthly reports produced and sent to the
United States that detailed the activities conducted by the US professors. Although copies of these
reports were in the BMS dead file and were not available for public viewing, I was allowed by the
BMS to access copies of all the monthly reports submitted by the US professors who were there
from 1954 to 1961.
Financed initially by The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
and later by the Ford Foundation, Brazilian academics were sent to the United States to obtain
master and PhD levels of education in management sciences. Following the advice of
Alcadipani and Cooke (2011), to counterbalance the US-centric reports and provide a Brazilian
voice for this research, interviews were conducted with 10 academics who graduated in the
United States and performed important academic duties in the school after 1958. Among those
interviewed were deans and academic directors. I also obtained access to two interviews con-
ducted in the 1990s with the first school dean, now deceased. These interviews were in the
possession of a BMS professor who granted access to the tapes upon learning that I was
researching the history of the school. Such a form of oral history (Thompson, 1978) is impor-
tant to develop ‘histories from below’ (Walton, 2010: 5). Here, I follow the stance of Cooke
(1999), who posits that historical accounts are never realist/positivist in the sense that con-
structing history is always shaped by the choices and the present of the person who constructs
it. Although recognizing the different natures of archive and oral history, for the practicality
of coding and analysing data, both interview transcripts and reports were open-coded (Miles
and Huberman, 1994) to seek emergent themes that would ground the narrative presented. It
was during this process that the notion of SR emerged as relevant for understanding the ‘colo-
nial encounter’ between United States and Brazilian academics. I am an academic born and
working in the periphery, with my PhD earned in the centre, which may explain some of my
unavoidable personal bias. I believe that this type of debate is at the heart of my intellectual
history. Having known of Ramos’ work for a long time, I believe it is important to bring it to
international attention because of its relevance to the crucial centre-periphery debate in man-
agement and organization studies. I do not follow an ‘isolationist’ view that periphery contexts
should only be evaluated through home-grown bodies of knowledge. But, I follow Ramos SR
view that theories nested in the centre need to be critically examined when analysing issues in
the periphery. I also consider that theories from the periphery are well equipped to understand
the many peripheries that are present in the North. For example, cities like London and Boston
have huge communities of Brazilians. Also, poverty is a feature well present in the North in
which many centres and peripheries co-exist.
Alcadipani 7

SR in action
US ideas, personnel and monetary resources were fundamental in the creation and development of
the BMS. This is made explicit in the following excerpt from the US professors’ monthly reports:

During the initial years of the life of the school, the American professors played a dominant role in both
the academic and administrative affairs of the school. They designed programs, courses and teaching
materials; they taught classes; they administered programs; and they served as department heads,
supervising the activities of their ‘subordinate’ Brazilian professors. (May, 1959)

The term ‘subordinate’, used by the US professors when referring to their Brazilian counterparts,
implies a hierarchy between the two groups and a superiority of the US academics, possibly due to
the US academics’ knowledge about US management education.
Moreover, the Americanization of management education has been associated with the struggle
against communism during the Cold War (Westwood and Jack, 2008). The Point Four Program was
one of the ‘weapons’ implemented by the United States during the Cold War to fight communism
(Westwood and Jack, 2008). In this context, left-wing thought was not prevalent in (Anglo-Saxon)
management thought (Cooke, 1999). During a BMS visit in 1960, the chief of the US diplomatic
delegation in Brazil, Minister Howad Cottan, remarked that the BMS project was one of the most
important US Point IV enterprises in Latin America. The influence of the Point Four Program and
the US presence in the school could mean that the BMS would not only act as a ‘carrier’ (Sahlin-
Andersson and Engwall, 2002) of US management education but also propagate US ideology in
Brazil. In 1964, after a coup d’état, Joao Goulart, a left-wing Brazilian president, was expelled
from office, and a military government was established. The coup had the support of the US gov-
ernment as it fought communist influences in Brazil.
At face value, the BMS can be perceived as the practice of wholesale US management education
in Brazil and a sponsor of a pro-US and anti-communist ideology in the country. However, during the
interviews, an important academic of the school, who received his graduate education in the United
States under the programme that created BMS, was asked about the fear of dealing with pro-US ide-
ology during his PhD in the United States and in the school. He replied, ‘At the time, I was aware that
US imperialism was a danger. Therefore, I went to the U.S. armed … to defend myself from the US
ideology. I was especially armed with a fantastic book called “Sociological Reduction”’. The
Brazilian academic stated that before moving to the United States, he read Ramos’ work on SR to
preserve a critical attitude towards the US content and ideology. This suggests that at the time the
BMS was created, SR was well known at least by some Brazilian academics and helped them to
address the importation of US management into Brazil. In the remainder of this section, I will discuss
how US management education was ‘reduced’ at the outset of the creation of the BMS in the late
1950s and early 1960s, highlighting central local elements that mediated this ‘reduction’.

Local language
One of the first elements that impacted the ‘reduction’ of US management education in the BMS
was the language difference between the US professors and the Brazilian academics and students.
The US professors commented in a report, ‘We have discovered that translating activities that
seemed rather simple at first are really quite complex’ (March, 1955). Translating, as used here,
refers to the conversion of the content of lectures and teaching materials from English into
Portuguese. The ‘translation issue’ was one that persisted for a considerable period of time. A mis-
sion report stated,
8 Management Learning 00(0)

The language, however, is still a deterrent. It complicates and forces us to change long established teaching
habits. When a teacher has his finger on the pulse of his class, he can allow the discussion to determine the
course of events and vice versa. When the connection link between the teacher and the class is weak
because of a language barrier, the instructor must work hard to maintain harmony. This is the challenge of
teaching here. (August, 1958)

Thus, the practical need to translate lectures into Portuguese forced the US professors to change
their teaching habits to fit the new situation.
Local academics played an important role in the translation process. ‘Translating materials
into Portuguese, serving as interpreters in the classroom, and attending special seminars designed
to prepare them to advance study in the US taught by the American Professors’ were among the
responsibilities of the ‘Brazilian assistants’ (June, 1959). The word ‘assistant’ positions Brazilians
in a subsidiary role in relation to the US personnel. The live translations done by Brazilian aca-
demics while US academics were teaching were problematic. According to a mission report,
‘Not all of our assistants have the necessary skills in Portuguese and English. Those who have
such language facility need some experience and guidance to make their Portuguese translations
more professional’ (July, 1959). By criticizing the Brazilian academics’ lack of professional
translation skills, the US professors assumed that their language was prevalent and that the US
nationals had no need to learn and know the local language, reinforcing the role of English lan-
guage as dominant.
One of the Brazilian academics interviewed for this article acted as an assistant to the US pro-
fessors in the late 1950s. He stated that when students asked the US professors questions, problems
frequently arose:

The student would ask in Portuguese, and the Brazilian assistant would translate into English. What
occurred was that the assistant did not understand what the student had asked, and he would formulate a
nonsense question. Then, the American professor would reply with a totally nonsense answer, and some
students would start to laugh like crazy because a few of them had command of English, and they had just
made jokes about the assistant in the classroom. It was very funny, and it was a big mess.

Thus, the local language affected the teaching of the US management education in the Brazilian
classrooms, causing a different style of teaching to emerge in the encounter between US and
Brazilian academics and students. As previously stated by Ramos (1965: 50), practice always
involves reduction.
Another relevant problem was the translation of US management terminology into Portuguese.
US management knowledge was a novel concept in Brazil, and as such it created new terminolo-
gies with respect to finance and accounting. According to a US professor’s report,

Brazilian methods have grown primarily from Italian practices in finance and accounting. […] without
attempting to say that American techniques are superior, it was discovered that Brazilians are eager to
learn the elementary concepts of accounting found in the Estados Unidos. (May, 1956)

The superiority of US management knowledge is subtly expressed here in relation to what was
prevalent in Brazil at the time.
Accordingly, the circulation of US management education to Brazil faced a practical and impor-
tant element, the language difference. The local language impacted how US management educa-
tion was ‘reduced’ into the local reality in various aspects, from teaching practice to technical
terminologies. Moreover, the US professors’ report portrayed US academics as superior to the local
ones and the US knowledge as superior to what was being practised in Brazil at the time.
Alcadipani 9

Local pedagogic practices

The US professors noted that the pedagogic practices they had experienced in the United States and
that they were facing in the BMS were significantly different. ‘The Brazilian philosophy of educa-
tion is substantially different from the American concept. The basic Brazilian philosophy was
inherited from the French […] pursuit of a college degree is a highly informal affair, demanding
little of the students’ (June, 1961). There is a subtle suggestion that the US teaching philosophy is
more serious than Brazil’s philosophy, which was inherited from France. US academics also noted
behavioural differences between Brazilian students and US students, positioning the Brazilian ones
as inferior.
One of the main resources for understanding the US management pedagogy is the case method.
In various documents, US professors regarded the original (US) case materials as crucial to the
success of the programme. Case method places a greater focus on students’ actions, as he or she has
to prepare and discuss the case in the presence of the academic instructor in the classroom.
However, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, students in Brazil were accustomed to having profes-
sors lecture for the entire class period with little or no interruption. As such, the role of the Brazilian
students was to listen and take notes based on the professors’ lectures. Even asking the professor
questions was an uncommon experience in the Brazilian classroom. As a consequence, the Brazilian
students had significant difficulties engaging in the US case method.
The length and complexity of US case studies also created difficulties for local students. Thus,
eventually, cases created for BMS students differed significantly from those created for US stu-
dents. According to a Brazilian professor who worked with the US mission at the BMS,

The reality of teaching was very different in Brazil. US case studies are that of cases with 35 pages, 20
tables, 150 footnotes … such cases were difficult to assimilate into the Brazilian educational philosophy.
After some time, we concluded that case studies in Brazil should be limited to three or four pages
maximum, with few tables and no footnotes.

Not only were the pedagogic practices in Brazil different, but there were also differences in social
class structure, economic indicators, tax systems, production scales, business models and sizes,
market structures and so on These differences needed to be considered when adapting Brazilian
case studies to better reflect the Brazilian reality. This clearly exemplifies the practice of ‘reducing’
the US educational method. Although the core idea of the centre imported tool, that is, the case
study, was maintained, it was ‘reduced’ to fit the specific conditions of the local pedagogic prac-
tices. As such, the pedagogic practices of Brazilian students played a decisive role ‘reducing’ US
educational materials, such as the case study, for application in the BMS.

Local ideology: anti-Americanism

As the BMS was created under the auspices of the US government, was the school a ‘carrier’ of US
ideology into Brazil? For Alcadipani and Caldas (2012), the ideology of ‘modernizing’ Brazil
through the centre’s social and economic models has been present since the origins of the country
(Faoro, 1976; Holanda, 1973). After Brazilian independence from Portugal, England and France
occupied the role-model position of the ‘superior’ foreign nation in the Brazilian imagination
(Wood and Caldas, 1997). Following the end of World War II, the United States became a neo-
colonial power (Nkrumah, 1965), with its influence been felt all over the world. Even though
Brazil has a long-lasting anti-Americanism (Katzenstein and Keohane, 2007) that dates back to the
late 1800s (Prado, 2003/1893), throughout the years, Brazil has developed an ambiguous attitude
towards the United States. Some groups perceived the United States as the role model for Brazilian
10 Management Learning 00(0)

development, whereas others criticized US imperial-like ambitions in the country and in the Latin
American region (Bandeira, 1997; Ferreira, 2012).
Even though European countries’ influences in Brazil have been mostly uncritically accepted,
especially in the academic world as Ramos (1957) criticized, US influences have been perceived
with some suspicion. In this way, the establishment of an academic institution under US sponsor-
ship concerned important figures in the country. According to one of the ex-deans of the school and
a prominent figure throughout the school’s history,

Outside the school, my friends used to say, ‘[…] listen, are you crazy? Are you dealing with those
imperialists? […]`. For a long time, others rejected our school because it was an American school. […]
They questioned if the school would not have an internal resistance that would counterweight the American
imperialists.

According to the professor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a prominent social science scholar who
served as Brazil’s president from 1995 to 2003, was among those who questioned the US presence
at the school.
The underpinning of such critical attitudes regarding the US presence at the BMS was the strong
Marxist presence in Brazilian social thought that was inherited from France. According to a profes-
sor from the school who moved to the US during the late 1950s to pursue his doctorate, ‘The school
had a group of social science scholars who arrived in the school together with the management
academics. As a result, there was a subtle conflict between social sciences and management’. All
social science courses at the BMS were taught by academics who were critical of US capitalism,
US management and the growing presence of the United States throughout the world. Another
interviewee, one of the school deans, claimed that all the academics hired to be part of the school
had excellent critical educations and had read extensive literature about Brazil and current world
issues. For him,

Any management professor who worked at the school read the social science classics (e.g., Weber, Marx)
and the classics of Brazilian critical social thought (e.g., Ramos). Someone who has read such books
would never merely reproduce blindly US management handbooks.

One of the expressions of this anti-US attitude at the BMS was the introduction of the work of local
left-wing scholars into the course content. A preeminent professor from the school stated,

In the course Introduction to Business, I did not include only references and content from the US, but I
would usually add references and specific lectures about the social and economic situations in Brazil. I
would give wisdom on Brazilian society using the classics of Brazilian thought, and I would mediate the
US content with ideas and content from the Brazilian social sciences.

In this way, anti-US attitudes were translated into the course content by inserting readings and
other course materials that were of Brazilian origin and would thus make sense in the Brazilian
context. When doing so, some Brazilian instructors selected that which they thought was funda-
mental to the core of US management and mixed it with Brazilian social critical thought, thereby
‘reducing’ US management course content into the BMS.
One of the interviewed academics stated,

We had some professors who were left wing radicals, didn’t we? Once, I watched a seminar in which, to
my greatest disappointment, an extreme left wing professor said in front of the US professors that we
should not have accepted the contribution from the Americans. ‘Yankees, go home!`
Alcadipani 11

The presence of left-wing individuals at the BMS meant that there was internal resistance against
US ideas and academics.
Despite the US support of the military dictatorship at the time, the school protected academics
who were well-known communists. One of the interviewees stated,

The school always maintained academic freedom. During the dictatorship, the police or the military never
invaded the school, something that occurred in other universities. For a long time, our school was
considered a den that propagated left wing, communist ideas.

Some of the interviewees referenced cases when the dean who did his PhD in the United States
sponsored the hiring of left-wing professors despite pressure from right-wing professors who used
the US origins of the school as an argument to strengthen their position.
As evidenced, the critical attitude necessary for SR was embedded in the everyday life of the
BMS academics and students, thereby influencing their encounters with US ideology and US pro-
fessors. This is not to say that the BMS was mainly formed by left-wing academics. The school
academics came from all different ideological spectres, from far right to far left. The point here is
to argue that the presence of left-wing thought helped to ‘reduce’ US management education into
the school.
Moreover, some of the Brazilian academics who moved to the United States to attend graduate
education encountered a country full of ambiguities. Some BMS academics reported that in the
United States they experienced demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the early 1960s and
other Civil Rights movements. Moreover, some also reported, ‘We had some economic courses
with left wing professors who later suffered from McCarthyism’. Thus, even in the United States,
the BMS academics were influenced by anti-US mainstream ideologies at the time.
According to an important figure from the school, the presence of communist ideas in the school
never prevented students from attaining positions at multinational corporations:

At the time, it was common to find students wearing sandals, beards, and looking like Che Guevara, and
the next day, you would meet the same guy wearing a suit. I would ask, ‘Wow! What happened?’ They
would reply, ‘I have a job interview with General Motors’. The student was a revolutionary at school one
day, but the next day, he was a capitalist working for GM!

Another BMS ex-dean argued,

The student leaders of the late 1950s and the 1960s were all left wing. They left the school and went to
work at top US multinationals. They all became very good business people. During their academic life,
they were always better fitted to the challenges of business problems in Brazil than their friends who were
right wing. They (the left-wing individuals) became very capable business people.

As such, being left-wing was not at odds with becoming a business leader within the context of
Brazilian conditions; it was actually perceived as an asset.
Therefore, the presence of an ambiguous attitude towards the United States in the BMS, with a
special focus on the role played by anti-American ideology, played an important role in ‘reducing’
US management education into the BMS.

Discussion and conclusion

I discuss in this article the SR notion to analyse the establishment of the BMS in the 1950s, the
early days of the ‘Americanization of management education’, to reclaim the notion of SR. In
12 Management Learning 00(0)

doing so, I try to make sense of the periphery by using local epistemologies and bringing back
‘southern voices in management and organizational knowledge’ (Alcadipani et al., 2012: 131). The
notion of SR highlights the local critical agency of local people and the importance of local condi-
tions when importing theories and technologies from the centre to the periphery. Rather than pro-
posing an isolationist posture, a romantic over-evaluation of authentic ‘localness’ or a step-by-step
methodology, SR is the result of practical reasoning and critical judgement; it is an intellectual and
practical attitude that entails politically engaged learning from centre references in the periphery.
Focusing on the transmission of US management education into the BMS, the discussion herein
explained how this education was ‘reduced’ at the school. This reduction was strongly influenced
by the interweaving of the local language, which mediated the importation of US teaching materi-
als and teaching language; by local pedagogic practices manifested through Brazilian students’
attitudes and behaviours towards education in the classroom and through their engagement with
US pedagogical and didactical tools; and by local ideology, as I argue that the presence of left-wing
ideas and anti-American ideology impacted the ‘reduction’ of US management education into the
school, while the school’s ties with the United States helped maintain the school’s left-wing aca-
demics in a historical moment of right-wing dictatorship in Brazil. Thus, there is a paradox in
which the critical attitude towards the US management education was sustained by the school’s ties
with the United States. Such left-wing ideas were perceived as not preventing students from attain-
ing positions, even in US local companies. As such, it is necessary to provincialize Cooke’s (1999)
findings about left-wing thought in management as a peculiarity of some Anglo-Saxon regions that
cannot be made universal.
Thus, a first contribution of this article is to deploy SR to make sense of the spread of US man-
agement education and discuss how such a process relies on the interconnection and interweaving
of local language, local pedagogic practices and local ideology on transforming US teaching prac-
tices, course contents, didactical materials and other elements involved in US management educa-
tion. Accordingly, it is suggested that even well-established teaching resources, such as the case
method, must be reduced to the periphery context. Broadly speaking, SR helps us make sense of
how management education practices generated in the centre are transformed in the periphery. By
showing this, I extend the notion of SR to make sense of the importation of management education
to the periphery. In addition, the discussion of the Brazilian case has indicated that SR reflects an
attitude of learning in action.
Different from the discussion on the global spread of management that tends to ignore issues
related to power and politics altogether (e.g. Kipping et al., 2004, 2009), this study discusses the
ideological and political resistance faced by the global spread of management education, as well as
the attempt of US academics to state a superiority in relation to the local academics and local aca-
demic practices. Specifically, in contrast to most of the literature on the Americanization of man-
agement education that has neglected the role of ideology and politics of implementing US
management education in foreign countries (e.g. Engwall, 2004; Hedmo et al., 2005; Kieser, 2004;
Üsdiken, 2004), SR places politics and ideology at the fore. The notion of the Americanization of
management education places strong agency in the United States, whereas SR is a politically
engaged attitude that does not position US management education as a role model to be followed.
Instead, SR decentralizes the importance of such education, making it subsidiary to the local inter-
ests of people in the periphery. As such, this article, with a particular focus on management educa-
tion, contributes to the growing literature that attempts to decentralize the centre as the sole place
of management knowledge production (Alcadipani and Cooke, 2011; Alcadipani et al., 2012;
Cooke and Alcadipani, 2015; Khan and Koshul, 2011; Mir and Mir, 2013). In doing so, the article
contributes the global study of management by showing the production of management knowledge
in the periphery. Moreover, the centre should not be taken as a monolithic entity. The centre has its
Alcadipani 13

own peripheries notions such as SR can be helpful to analyse how management ideas nested in elite
circles circulate in the many peripheries that exit in the centre. In addition, the literature on the
Americanization of management education rarely analyses in detail how such a process occurs in
a particular institution, as I did in this article. Moreover, I use SR to discuss the unique character-
istics of management education, as well as the political mechanisms that allow such uniqueness to
emerge when importing knowledge from the centre.
Furthermore, Alcadipani and Cooke (2011) stress the need for symmetrical approaches when
conducting archival research regarding the transmission of actions from the centre to the periphery.
Herein, by conducting interviews with people from the periphery, it is found that the ability of local
actors to account for their own realities can be strengthened through SR. As such, the subalterns
speak for themselves.
The discussion of BMS also suggests contributions to SR on showing how people in the periph-
ery can have very stereotypic views about American imperialism that people in the periphery can
have open resistance against knowledge and practices from the centre, these two points have not
been addressed by Ramos on this analysis of SR. The question, then, becomes what are SR’s simi-
larities and differences from other postcolonial inspired perspectives in our field that address the
circulation of MKPs from the centre to the periphery? Highlighting these similarities and differ-
ences is the second contribution of this article. Frenkel and Shenhav (2006) claim that two perspec-
tives dominate postcolonialism in management and organization studies: Orientalism (Said, 1978)
and hybridity as a third space (Bhabha, 1994). Orientalism is based on a binary epistemology that
enacts purification, that is, a sharp distinction between colonizers and the colonized with the con-
sequence of constructing the colonizers and the colonized as distinct and incommensurable onto-
logical zones, while Bhabha’s work represents a hybrid epistemology, taking into consideration the
fusion, mixing and mutual effects of colonizers and the colonized (Frenkel and Shenhav, 2006:
855).
In trying to make sense of how products established in the centre are ‘imported’ into the periph-
ery, SR’s concerns are complementary to those of hybridity as third-space outcomes (Bhabha,
1994). SR emerged approximately 40 years before Homi Bhaba’s notion. Although it emerged
much earlier and had clear similarities, Ramos’ ruminations did not inform Bhaba’s work, probably
because Ramos’ work was only available in Portuguese. Homi Bhabha developed his entire aca-
demic career in the Anglo-Saxon world, whereas Ramos moved to the United States only after he
had developed the SR notion, and most of his intellectual work has been published in Brazil and in
Portuguese. The SR notion emerged within the context of Ramos’ struggles with his local academic
colleagues who were blindly importing centre concepts and practices and with Ramos’ attempts to
produce knowledge that would help foster Brazilian development. Bhabha’s ruminations on
hybridity as a third space are more associated with debates within the postcolonial studies located
in the Anglo-Saxon world. This indicates that epistemologies, such as SR, that emerge in the
periphery, are not written in the lingua franca of Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000) and do not benefit
from the centre networks of knowledge dissemination (Ibarra-Colado, 2006) tend to reach a smaller
audience and are confined in specific places within the periphery. This is not to say that SR is infe-
rior to Bhabha’s work. My point here is that SR, available only in Portuguese, was restricted to a
local and had difficulties a ‘global’ audience.
Bhabha’s (1994) work focuses on culture formation, identity construction, social agency and
national affiliation, and within these debates hybridity, mimicry and third space notions emerge.
This means that Bhabha’s notion has a greater scope and range than SR, which is particularly
concerned with importing centre-created practices and thoughts into the periphery. SR and
Bhaba’s notions highlight issues of power, resistance and politics in the encounter between the
centre and the periphery. Moreover, Frenkel (2008) has shown that almost no analyses use Bhabha’
14 Management Learning 00(0)

notions to analyse the import of management education to the periphery (for an exception, see
Srinivas, 2009).
For Bhabha (1994), colonial mimicry represents a colonial practice that intends to change the
colonized conduct and at the same time reconstitute the colonized identity. The idea is to make the
colonized emulate the colonizers’ practices and culture as role models. Colonial mimicry ‘is the
desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but
not quite’ (Bhabha, 1994: 103). Within the mimicry strategy is the possibility of resistance because
the colonized can disrupt the imposed knowledge and practice; thus, a hybrid culture that is not that
of either the colonized or the colonizer can arise (Bhabha, 1994; Frenkel, 2008; Prasad, 2003). SR
is a ‘local’ attitude that decentralizes the agency of the colonizer. As such, it can be perceived as an
attitude that simultaneously emerges within and enacts a third space (Bhabha, 1994), that is, a
space of contradiction, ambiguity and refutation of the colonial authority that does not allow the
existence of essentialist and oppositional polarities (Frenkel, 2008). Thus, SR can be seen as a
‘local’ strategy that opposes and challenges colonial mimicry.
Moreover, Bhabha’s (1994) hybridity analysis takes issue with the naturalized non-problematic
discussions of nationhood and national culture. He questions the adequacy of talking about nation
and national culture, which are modernist ideas, in the periphery and how such notions erode dif-
ferences among populations within one geographic label (Özkazanç-Pan, 2008). Bhabha’s ques-
tioning of nationhood and national culture can help us to question SR’s tendency to assume nation
and national development in a non-problematic form.
Bhabha’s (1994) reflections on the nation and nationhood make us think that when applying SR,
we need to be careful not to assume a homogeneous periphery and to question which interest will
be fulfilled by the content being ‘reduced’. Here, further research is necessary. For example, Brazil
is a country with continental dimensions and huge social and economic inequality. The ‘reduction’
of US management education in a school that received mainly white people from high social
classes who would work in business corporations would attend to whose interests? What is the
impact of ‘better managed’ corporations for Brazil’s poor and excluded population? Ramos talked
about SR as a tool to create development in Brazil, but ‘development’ for whom and on whose
terms? These are questions about SR that Bhabha’s work can help us to answer and further inves-
tigation is necessary. However, SR can help us on making studies of the widespread of global MKP
more related to the periphery concerns and agendas.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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