Learning productivity: the European productivity agency - an educational enterprise

This chapter focuses on the institutionalization of the European productivity agency (EPA) and its initial program, arguing that its establishment as an operational arm of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1953 was primarily a US endeavor aimed at maintaining Europe within the ideology and epistemology of the capitalist West. Education thus constituted a key means of enculturation. This chapter examines the United States as a key driver of the agency’s institutionalization and reveals the resistance to its establishment. This chapter analyzes the concept of productivity as a form of ‘epistemological conveyer’ and shows that the EPA’s educational aspirations amount to a process of enculturation. This chapter concludes by exploring how the EPA, with its productivity drive involving and creating a web of change agents, can be seen as a precursor of the OECD’s educational programs. It hints at education as a subtle yet neglected dissemination mechanism and thereby highlights the largely ignored roots of the OECD’s operations, ideas, and educational agenda.