EFECTOS SECUNDARIOS: 1 Edema pulmonar por reexpansión.

The European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, injected $13 billion into Western Europe to stimulate and modernise its economic infrastructure. Taking its cue from the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the US sought to alleviate high unemployment and low production levels in the war-ravaged European economies through ambitious economic policies and expertise. Among the many measures initiated by the Marshall Plan, the Technical Assistance Program began to transfer management knowledge from the US to Western Europe. The Program was designed to ‘identify problems of inefficiency’ in European companies and to ‘instruct Europeans in the most modern American industrial practices’.290 In Europe, as in

289 _{Wren, History of Management Thought, 349–51.}

290 _{S. Wasser and M. Dolfman, ‘BLS and the Marshall Plan: The Forgotten Story’, Monthly Labour Review, June}

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Tennessee, the US government replicated certain managerial practices. ‘Factory Performance Reports’ were rolled out across German industry and by 1948, 700 French industrialists and managers had visited US factories to witness the application of new management methods.291 Of the billions of dollars set aside for European recovery after the war, a sizeable amount was spent on ‘management training, executive seminars and American technical consultants’.292

Yet the transfer of management knowledge did not only improve productivity levels and know-how. It also imported a distinct way of seeing the political and economic conditions of postwar Europe. Political and economic instability were framed as technical problems of outmoded organisational methods which American managerial experts could update. They would seek to rebuild the postwar economies of Europe in the American image through managerial tools.293 One British treasury official begrudgingly captured this mimetic tendency of management, lamenting that ‘the Americans want an integrated Europe looking like the United States – “God’s own country”’.294

That official sentiment, however, captures not only the moulding effect of management, but the wider geopolitical struggle of which it was part. The defeat of Nazi Germany had left a power vacuum in Europe which it was feared the USSR would soon seek to fill. Thus, from the Allied position, the Marshall Plan not only functioned to reconstruct war-torn Europe but to secure American hegemony at an important site of potential American-Soviet confrontation. Managerial practices were put to that political task by training European companies and governments in the image of American business and shaping them into suitable trading partners. Factory performance reports, for example, provided the US government with productivity data which would allow it to assist, alter, and control European economic growth to its advantage.295 Management’s deployment within the Marshall Plan left little doubt as to the discipline’s American pedigree and makes explicit management’s importance to the geopolitical struggles of the early Cold War.

Little wonder, then, that American management methods became so popular in Europe during the 1950s and 60s. By then, the management consulting business had launched in Europe with firms such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group taking on European companies as clients. By the end of the 1950s, smaller American firms had established offices

291 _{Wasser and Dolfman, ‘BLS and the Marshall Plan’, 49.} 292 _{McKenna, World’s Newest Profession, 168.}

293 _{M. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952 (CUP}

1987) 429.

294 _{Robert Hall, quoted in L. Kaplan, The United States and NATO: The Formative Years (University Press of}

Kentucky 1984) 131.

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in capitals like London and Paris, and were soon followed by some of the market leaders including McKinsey.296 _{Management consultants offered their broad insight into American}

organisational planning and efficiency to European companies such as Nestlé, Deutsche Bank, and United Fruit Company.297 Moreover, even at this early stage, European governments were seeking assistance on how to make the state apparatus and public services more efficient. By the early 1970s, McKinsey had already taken on assignments from British Rail, the BBC, NHS, and the Dutch Ministry of Education.298 Such general uptake of McKinsey’s services confirmed the ‘widespread perception that the “elite” management consulting firm embodied the cutting edge of superior American organizational knowhow’.299

However, even if consultancy firms were the most common producer of management knowledge by the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not only they who implanted such knowhow. This is apparent from the experience of one international body, the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). Created in 1966 at the behest of the new Non-Aligned Movement, UNIDO’s objective, as contained in article 1 of its constitution, was the ‘promotion and acceleration of industrial development in the developing countries with a view to assist in the establishment of a New International Economic Order’.300 Within two years of its creation, UNIDO officials began investigating ways to improve the special organ’s performance, especially in the transfer of technical knowledge to developing countries. One official, Walter Kotschnig, who had worked for the US State Department on the creation of UNIDO, was involved in these discussions. Kotschnig observed that to discharge its mandate, ‘UNIDO must secure personnel of a different type from those generally found in international organisations’.301 _{Specifically, it would ‘have to draw heavily in its recruiting on practitioners} of industry, on proven organisers, practical technologists, and managerial talent’.302 _{For this to} work, Kotschnig was attuned to the fact that ‘such personnel will obviously have to be found primarily in the plants and establishments of industrialised countries’.303

Despite the internal appetite for managerial ideas within international bodies such as UNIDO, management consultancy firms were the ‘primary institutional conduit for the transfer

296 _{McKenna, World’s Newest Profession, 172.} 297 _{McKenna, World’s Newest Profession, 175.} 298 _{McKenna, World’s Newest Profession, 175.} 299 _{McKenna, World’s Newest Profession, 185.}

300 _{On management’s effect on the NIEO, see below section 3.}

301 _{Walter Kotschnig, ‘The United Nations as an Instrument of Economic and Social Development’ (1968) 22}

International Organization 16, 36.

302 _{Kotschnig, ‘The United Nations as an Instrument of Economic and Social Development’, 36.} 303 _{Kotschnig, ‘The United Nations as an Instrument of Economic and Social Development’, 36–7.}

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of American organizational models to Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s’.304 _{From the days}

of Taylorism and the stopwatch, management had transformed into a systematic framework for analysing and solving the problems of organisations old and new through strategic management techniques. Consultants contemplated new budget control systems, large-scale restructuring, and high-level strategic reform. For example, in 1957 McKinsey was recruited to reorganise the joint headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell in London and The Hague. McKinsey imposed a new ‘“decentralized” or “multidivisional” model’ of authority to be delegated between functional and regional divisions while still retaining Shell’s single executive board.305 Elsewhere, consultants hired to restructure company divisions ended up addressing questions that went ‘to the core of the company’s strategic position’.306 In 1968, McKinsey was recruited by Rhône-Poulenc, the largest French company at the time. Surveying its performance, managers observed that Rhône’s problem was one of core identity: ‘[a]re we a chemical company, are we a pharmaceutical company, a fine chemical company…?’.307 As managers posed bigger strategic questions, they carved out an indispensable role for their own expert tools to resolve them.