Grainy black-and-white film and a wavering camera show a stately building suddenly obscured by a billow of smoke, accompanied by the sound of an enormous crash. It is the Moneda Palace, bombed by the Chilean air force on the 11th of September 1973. In the first of an extraordinary triptych, Patricio Guzmán's La battaglia de Chile (The battle of Chile) followed this image with interviews of a cross section of Chileans on the eve of an election held six months earlier (the last democratic election in the country until military rule ended in 1990). A plainly dressed woman explains that her family once lived in a shack, now they at least have a home, some bread. Another woman, in a tailored suit and impenetrable sunglasses, grimly demands the president's impeachment. Those critical of the government declare foreigners have infested the country (true Chileans are, naturally, not communist). But the election results actually endorsed Allende's policies, increasing his parliament majority. No matter, forces opposed to his government, with significant support from the US government and corporations like AT&T and Pepsi, chose military force. Democracy was convenient enough when things were going their way and easy to abandon when things were not.

Chile's coup can appear unconnected to international development, civil society, and management. But free-market economic thinking shaped resistance to Allende's statist policies and contributed to his toppling. After the 1972 oil shock, such thinking also encouraged a new approach in management studies that shone a particular light on civil society. High management was decisively abandoned and a curious transformation occurred. As one conception declined, where technocrats sought to design society for stated ends, another emerged, where competition and market information sought development achievements without intervention. Development policy makers now turned to MOS for ways to be competitive, performance-oriented, and capable of change. Management became a wand to release entrepreneurial energies in development and forestall the failing hand of the state.

The past three chapters tracked doctrines of development and attendant views of management and civil society, from the interwar years until the mid-1970s. This chapter considers the period after that, spanning two dramatic successive oil shocks and recessionary contractions in the North, enormous public debt in the South, and in the case of some African and Latin American economies, unsustainable levels of foreign debt and hyperinflation.