(Invisible) Disciplines: Sociology and Management

As an academic discipline, sociology has been a part of management education for long. Its intellectual and institutional legacies have been an inalienable part of American management schools after which business schools in India and IIMs, in particular, have been modelled. This chapter discusses the place of sociology in management education in India. It highlights some of the peculiarities of the location of sociology within the IIM system delineating the distinctive Indian twist to the American model in the early years after independence when the Indian state vociferously talked a language of development, modernization and democracy. The chapter evaluates the practices of the discipline in its varied manifestations—teaching, research, training and consultancy—on the basis of professional experience of fellow sociologists, irrespective of their location in a separate centre for sociology or in any other interdisciplinary group in an IIM.