The previous chapter showed how by the interwar years a perception emerged of an affinity between resource development, the dual mandate, Taylorism, and civil society. This chapter covers a longer period of time, through the 1960s, a period when modernization became the key doctrine of development. Development was not seen anymore in terms of increased resource production by colonies, but as an opportunity for these colonies to gain some autonomy if not outright independence. They would do so by importing technology and acquiring technical skills to transform their societies. But committing to this changed doctrine of development also required a change in the ways in which management and civil society were understood. Management was now considered as not solely techniques to increase production but as a means to acquire modernity—in a sense, to enhance technical capacities in human beings. Civil society organizations, as agents of development, now became sites for practicing and refining these management ideas. (Though the UN had defined the term “NGO” in Article 71 of its charter in 1945, it would be much later that these organizations would acquire that label, as explained in Chapter 6.)

Both this chapter and the one that follows study the regime of state capitalism. Thanks to aid commitments from Northern countries, and through their Southern alliances, the rivalry and uncertainty of the regime of colonial resource development was replaced by an uneasy stalemate between the US and the Soviet Union. Northern industrial expansion met growing consumer demand from the North and the South, while the emphasis on technical education fed directly into the growth of factories, corporate offices, and allied specializations in marketing, public relations, and advertising. Underpinning the stability that enabled corporate expansion were states willing to intervene.

The doctrine of modernization spanned a period that stretches from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s. This chapter classifies this period into three stages—proto-modernization from 1948 to 1960, apogee from 1961 to 1968, and decline from 1969 to 1974. It is hard to pin dates to what is evidently a broad characterization of a historical period. But some key climacterics are: US President Truman's inaugural address in 1948, the “decade of development” declared at US President Kennedy's inauguration in 1960, the Tet offensive launched by the Viet Cong in 1968 and the 1974 oil shock.