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.