The Making of the First IIMs: the Management School as a Boundary Object?

The first IIMs were established by a coalition of partners with diverging ideas and perspectives on the role of management education in developing India. For some, the management schools materialized the ambition to create a Nehruvian India, based upon socialist principles, while for others they formed a project to foster liberal values and norms in the ‘non-western’ world. This chapter uses the concept of ‘boundary object’, developed by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star in the context of science and technology studies, to explore these diverging interpretations of the management school and to describe how these were reconciled in difficult negotiations and coalition building process that preceded the establishment of the first IIMs from 1955 to 1961.