Bill Cooke

Research information

Bill Cooke is an Emeritus Professor at the School for Business and Society. His research interests are in the temporal and spatial spread of management ideas, institutions and practices. In an international development context, he is particularly interested in the role of multi-national institutions like the World Bank in this process. His first major work in International Development was the best selling edited collection ‘Participation: The New Tyranny’, with Professor Uma Kothari (2001); he also went on to co-edit Dr Sadhvi Dar and Bill Cooke (2008) The New Development Management, both published by Zed Books. More recently he has been working with Dr Arun Kumar on the long term role of US Philanthropic Foundations in the global spread of business education as a development intervention, and has also published on the use of management techniques by the World Bank in Brazil to bypass local democratic governance. He published ‘Administração E Gestão De Desenvolvimento Do Atlântico Norte No Governo Do Brasil: Uma Análise Histórica Do Banco Mundial’ (North Atlantic Development Administration and Management in the Government of Brazil: A Historical Analysis of the World Bank) in Revista Brasileira de Estudos Organizacionais (2015) and co-edited a Special Issue of Cadernos EBAPE.BR with Professor Alex Faria on the relationship between ‘development’ and ‘management’. Alongside this he has published in a number of English-language peer reviewed journals, and his work appears in a number of anthologies.

Bill’s current work seeks to draw together histories of development, managerialism, and post-WWII international political economy and international relations. He is particularly interested in researching micro-level processes – the commissioning and writing of business textbooks, or the promotion of particular forms of management knowledge – in relation to claims for development and modernization.