I don’t disagree with anything MacKenzie et al. say in their paper. However, I have parallel set of observations that are about the use of historical analogy in the marketing of OpenAI’s flagship product, ChatGPT. (When I say marketing, I’m talking more about the attempts by the company to secure the support of investors and policymakers than the end consumers). The very term ChatGPT, is an allusion to a term that emerged from the field of economic history in, if memory serves me correctly, the early 1990s. At that time, Joel Mokyr, Nathan Rosenberg, and other who study industrial revolutions past and present, popularized the term General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) to describe any technology that have the potential to significantly impact multiple sectors of the economy, leading to widespread and transformative changes in various industries. [It may be that Robert Solow first introduced the term but in any event it was in common currency in econ history circles by the team I reached university in 1995]. Steam engines and electricity are cannonical examples of GPT. Since the 1990s, generations of students in intro economic history have been taught that the key characteristics of General Purpose Technologies are:
Breadth of Application: GPTs have the capacity to be applied across a wide range of industries and sectors.
Economic Impact: They have the potential to bring about substantial economic growth and TFP improvements. They allow lots of people to produce more GPT per hour worked.
GPTs tend to facilitate and support the development of complementary technologies, further amplifying their impact on the economy.
Long Gestation Periods. The development and diffusion of GPTs often take a considerable amount of time due to their complexity and the need for widespread adoption. It is took a long time for the steam engines invented down in Cornwall to really change the world, but once they did, the social returns on the initial investments on steam engines were just massive.
The long gestation period teaching from economic history stresses the need for patient capital. Telling your investors that your venture is working on a GPT is basically a way of explaining in advance why it is going to take a long time for venture to generate real profits for the investors or society as a whole. I would be fascinated to hear from readers what actual Venture Capitalists think when this historical analogy argument is used on them. (Information in the comments section welcome!).
Now since the 1990s, millions of people throughout the English-speaking world, and probably beyond. have probably been exposed to the concept of the GPT through introductory economic history class or maybe a geography class. (I first encountered the term in a geography course). For years, I delivered a few lectures each semester to business undergraduates that were designed to give them the overview of economic history they needed. So they got some Great Divergence, some new institutionalism, and, yes, some exposure to the concept of the GPT. So have millions of learners around the world– at least judging from the textbooks that are widely used. So by 2022, lots of people were vaguely familiar with the concept of the GPT. They were a small proportion of the human race, sure, but they were disproportionately in positions of power and authority. I bet everyone who did a PPE degree at Oxford or spent a couple of years at Stanford, which is what Sam Altman did, hear about General Purpose Technologies. That gives elites a common vocabulary for thinking about the world.
AI Enterpreneurs Meeting With a Key Stakeholder. Historical analogies can give people a common vocabularly for thinking about the world.
24/05/2023. London, United Kingdom. The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak meets with Demis Hassabis, CEO DeepMind, Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic, and Sam Altman, CEO OpenAI, in 10 Downing Street. Picture by Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street
What all of that means is that it was a brilliant use of rhetorical history by Sam Altman’s team at OpenAI to label their product ChatGPT. Rhetorical history is when a company, manager, or some other actor in the academy uses a historical argument or allusion to persuade others. As someone who studies how companies use historical ideas to appeal to consumers, investors, and other groups, I am impressed by what a clever move it was to dub OpenAI’s product ChatGPT. I say that as someone who is agnostic about whether generative AI, as opposed to say AGI, truly is a GPT. (The late Nick Crafts had some interesting observations about that).
The Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division and Yeshiva University have announced the winner of the Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award for the year 2023. The winner is Derek Lidow of Princeton University’s Keller Center for their course entitled: The Histories of Entrepreneurship. Congratulation Derek! I’m happy that historical approaches are getting increased validation in both entrepreneurship teaching and research. Academic historians in business schools will be able to build on this momentum.
From the press release:
“The History of Entrepreneurship class developed at Princeton University over the past five years fills important gaps in entrepreneurship education (EE). The pedagogical framework of the class rests upon 70+ deeply researched historical examples of entrepreneurs and the impact of their behaviors on society and culture over the past nine-thousand years. The framework enables students to realize and simply understand the underlying reasons why and how entrepreneurs have such oversized impacts, which in turn contextualizes the importance of entrepreneurial ethics. Students love the class for being interesting, engaging, unexpected, accessible, and relevant. A detailed syllabus and abundant documentation make the class easily transferable and configurable for varied undergraduate and graduate school formats.
This class and its supporting materials and pedagogies were developed to deliver the following learning objectives:
Provide context for students to realize the magnitude of the impact of entrepreneurs on surrounding cultures and societies (i.e., its importance), Understand the nature (i.e., the why and how) of those impacts, Contemplate the ethical ramifications of entrepreneurial behaviors and the societal expectations they could or should engender.
The class enables students to realize and simply understand the underlying reasons why and how entrepreneurs have such oversized impacts, which in turn contextualizes the importance of entrepreneurial ethics.
The class is structured around more than 70 deeply researched historical examples of entrepreneurs and the impact of their behaviors on society and culture over the past nine-thousand years.” – Derek Lidow
To make The Histories of Entrepreneurship course easy for others to teach, there is an accompanying book, The Entrepreneurs, a detailed syllabus, and abundant documentation, including over 100 slides that are available to anyone interested in the class or subject matter.
This paper aims to provide an historical perspective that offers insights from existing business historical research for the enrichment of current international business (IB) nonmarket strategy literature. Identifying seven questions that are of interest to IB nonmarket strategy scholars, we highlight exemplary historical studies to illuminate insights into each of these questions. We maintain that historians’ ability to provide such insights is rooted in their methodology consisting of archival research and an analysis of firms’ decisions within the context of long-term political and economic processes. The questions discussed in this paper cover various areas: the adoption of rhetoric that embraces host-country nationalism, the use of an MNE’s third-country status to gain advantages over other MNEs, the development of secret nonmarket strategies, the building of coalitions to obtain support from home-country stakeholders, the elements that turn the political ties between the MNE and the host-country elite from an advantage into a liability, the direct intervention of MNEs in international diplomacy, and the strategies developed by MNEs to confront global anti-corporate activism.
I recently returned from the Academy of Management conference in Boston. I left Boston in a really good mood—the conference went well for me (I got to meet co-authors, get feedback from journal editors, and hear really interesting research being presented. I also participated in a fantastic all-day PDW workshop that took place the day before the main conference started. So you can see why I left down in an upbeat mood. Another reason I was very encouraged by my experience at the AoM was that I witnessed some very position changes in the Management History division, which has expanded in terms of the number of participants and which has also experienced a qualitative change as well. This year, the MH division includes some panels that featured some top-notch presentations by great scholars. (My personal favourite was probably Lamar Pierce’s presentation of his research on the long-term effects on African countries of the slave trade).
The MH division sessions are also now attracting scholars who don’t primarily identify as historical researchers but who have concluded that it would be prudent to learn more about historical research methods and data since such approaches to theory development are increasingly regarded as legitimate by journal editors, reviewers, and hiring committees in North America. When I first started going to the AoM a decade ago, the MH division was tiny. It is now expanding and thriving. I was struck by the change from just 2019, the last time AoM was held in Boston. In that year, as in 2023, the MH sessions were mostly put in the Marriott Copley Place Hotel. In 2019, the division used the smallest meeting rooms, up on the fifth floor. This year, many of the meetings with in the more capacious ballrooms. That’s a small but telling indicator of a division on the move.
One of the two hit films of this summer is Barbie. The release of the film generated lots of discussion online, particularly after the conservative hivemind in the US decided, sight unseen and over a 48 hour period, that the film that the film was somehow leftist and therefore evil. A month ago, I would have predicted that the film would be attacked by the left in the US culture wars. Anyway, through sheer coincidence the journal Business History has published an excellent paper by Valeria Giacomin (Bocconi) and Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School) on Ruth Handler the historical entrepreneur who was behind the Barbie phenomenon. The main empirical basis of the paper was archival materials now stored at Harvard University.
We take a historical approach to the concept of ‘entrepreneurship as emancipation’ by exploring the entrepreneurial process of Ruth Handler, co-founder of the toy company Mattel and inventor of the iconic Barbie doll. Focussing on the link between Ruth Handler’s evolving self-narratives and her entrepreneurial process between the 1930s and the 1980s, we show how her entrepreneurial emancipatory agency was contextualised and socially embedded ‘in time’ as well as an evolutionary and cumulative process ‘over time.’ We explore how the entrepreneur engaged with the industry context of the toy industry, and how she linked her social identity to interpretations of past, present, and future. We base our analysis on autobiographical accounts from Handler’s personal archival collection at the Schlesinger Library and secondary sources.
Andrew Smith: There are lots of business historians who work in UK management schools, but relatively few of them have “busineses history” in their actual job titles. The School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London, is trying to fill a new Lecturer (Assistant Professor) post in Business History and Heritage. QMUL is part of the Russell Group of elite, research intensive R1-equivalent universities. Their campus is located very close to both Canary Wharf and the City, the traditional financial district of London, which would give the postholder fantastic opportunities to work with companies.
Lecturer in Business History and Heritage (Teaching and Research)
RefQMUL32395RegionLondonMain SiteMile EndQMUL FacultyHumanities & Social SciencesOrg 1Humanities & Social SciencesOrg 2School of Business & ManagementOrg 3School Of Business And ManagementFull Time / Part TimeFull Time
Please click on the link below for the full Job Description and Person Specification:
Lecturer in Business History and Heritage (Teaching and Research)
Ref: QMUL32395
About the Role
The School of Business and Management (SBM) seeks to recruit an inspirational researcher, teacher, and educational leader to a lectureship in Business History and Heritage. This post offers an exciting opportunity to make a major contribution to SBM’s research expertise in fields such as business history/the history of business in any location or period (especially those with critical approaches and/or whose interests explore global dimensions of history). We value candidates with the particular research and teaching interests of the Department of Business and Society, applications are particularly welcome from those who explore histories of capitalism, environmental change/sustainability, social entrepreneurship/philanthropy, and technological innovation. You will also be actively engaged in (or show the potential to develop) research and teaching in public engagement with business history via heritage and its management, such as in the form of business archives, company museums, heritage crafts, labour heritage, and/or historic industrial/post-industrial environments. Depending on their particular research field, the postholder might contribute to research units in the School such as (but not limited to) the Centre on Labour, Sustainability, and Global Production (CLaSP) and the Centre for Globalisation Research (CGR).
The role of Lecturer in Business History and Heritage in the Department of Business and Society includes both teaching and research objectives: (i) to make important research contributions to the field; (ii) to advance the research subject through publications; (iii) to deliver quality teaching including making innovations in key aspects of teaching and learning; (iv) to contribute to the administration of the Department/School; (v) to maximise opportunities for public engagement in the subject.
About You
Candidates will have completed a PhD and will need to demonstrate potential to publish at national and international level. Applicants will be expected to show how their research interests complement those within the Department or School, and how they can contribute to the development of modules on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the areas of business history and heritage management. You may also contribute to teaching in areas such as business and society, sustainability, and creative and cultural industries. Whilst we welcome applications from all areas of the discipline, we are particularly interested in candidates who will be able to demonstrate commitment to cross-disciplinary learning and research-based teaching. We are looking for someone with a keen interest in new methods of pedagogical engagement suited to our diverse cohorts of students. We appreciate expertise in engaging large numbers of students and delivering successful pedagogy with large cohorts. We also value experience and expertise in leading initiatives in student entrepreneurship, enterprise, and external engagement activities. The School is strongly committed to the development of all its staff and we will ensure that the successful candidate has the opportunity to develop their teaching, research and administrative skills.
Job context
The School of Business and Management is one of the eight schools in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. The School has been undergoing a period of rapid growth, doubling our number of academic staff over the last five years. We presently have 121 academic staff and a large team of Teaching Fellows and TAs. We have over 2,000 undergraduate business studies students and, at the post-graduate level, approximately 1,000 MSc students and a well-established doctoral programme of around 80 students.
SBM’s core purpose is to promote social justice, sustainability and good governance in the management of private, public and voluntary organisations through our research and education. We are a distinctive School that takes a humanities and social science-led approach to our scholarship, including interdisciplinarity and are now the largest school within QMUL’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, with its traditional strengths as a site of critical thinking in the humanities, law, history, geography and politics.
The Department of Business and Society contributes to SBM through world leading teaching and research in the areas of business history, global value chains (and the relationship between the Global North and the Global South), business ethics, CSR, public management and institutions, social entrepreneurship and social innovation (in the local and global contexts), organization theory, critical management, and business law. Our focus on the relationship between businesses, society, sustainability, and social justice shapes the teaching and research environment of the Department of Business and Society. Department members are typically (but not exclusively) associated with the Research Centre on Labour, Sustainability, and Global Production, the Public Management and Regulation Group, and the Organisational Processes and Practices Research Group. As such, the Department examines business as a field of enquiry in its own right – an area to be subject to critical analysis in the broader context of the relationship between business and society.
Benefits
We offer competitive salaries, access to a generous pension scheme, 30 days’ leave per annum (pro-rata for part-time/fixed-term), a season ticket loan scheme, and access to a comprehensive range of personal and professional development opportunities. In addition, we offer a range of work life balance and family friendly, inclusive employment policies, flexible working arrangements, and campus facilities including an on-site nursery at the Mile End campus.
The post is based at the Mile End Campus in London. It is a full time, permanent appointment, with a start date as soon as feasible for the successful candidate. The starting salary will be Grade 5/6, in the range of £45,931 – £56,921 per annum, inclusive of London Allowance.
How to Apply
Your application should include:
· a statement as to why you are applying to the School of Business and Management (Department of Business and Society) at Queen Mary, University of London,
· a focused CV of no more than five pages, to include up to one page of evidence of teaching quality (for example recent evaluations and teaching awards or other recognition),
· a brief (1-2 page) outline of your research plans for the next three years.
As part of the selection process, you will be asked to present to members of the Department of Business and Society on your teaching and research.
Queen Mary’s commitment to our diverse and inclusive community is embedded in our appointments processes. Reasonable adjustments will be made at each stage of the recruitment process for any candidate with a disability. We are open to considering applications from candidates wishing to work flexibly.
We particularly welcome applications from women and LGBTQ+, Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic applicants who are currently under-represented in the School at this level.
Informal enquiries should be addressed to Giuliano Maielli, Head of Department of Business and Society and Reader in Organisation Studies, at g.maielli@qmul.ac.uk
That’s the title of a talk I’ll be giving at the University of York Management School on Tuesday 18 April 2023. Here is an abstract of the paper:
The vexed issue of modern slavery is again in the headlines. Policymakers in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and elsewhere are currently considering how to deal with international supply chains that involve modern slavery and similar forms of unfree labour. In the UK, growing awareness of the limits of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 is prompting consideration of new measures to tackle this issue. This paper discusses the values of historical approaches in thinking about the problem of modern slavery. It does so by exploring how British people in the twentieth century discussed the perennial problem of goods made with unfree labour in international supply chains. By learning how this policy issue was discussed in the past, we can illuminate present-day policy dilemmas.
Short bio: Andrew Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management at the University of Birmingham. He has published his business-historical research in a range of journals that include Business History, Business History Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and the Journal of Management Studies. He is currently co-editing a Special Issue of Journal of Management Studies that will provide historical perspectives on deglobalization.
Are you interested in publishing in the Journal of Management Studies special issue on Historical Perspectives on Deglobalization’s Antecedents, Outcomes, and Managerial Responses? If so, you should consider participating the webinar related to the special issue that is taking place at 2pm UK time on Monday 17 April 2023. To register for the seminar, please use this form. The deadline to register is Friday 14 April. Zoom details of the seminar will be sent all registered participants via email.
Since 2016, the use of the term deglobalization has increased markedly (Google Trends; Van Bergeijk, 2019). This relatively novel word is now employed by journalists (Financial Times, 2021; Economist, 2022), political risk consultants (Swarup, 2016), policymakers, economists (Irwin, 2020; Van Bergeijk, 2019), historians (James, 2018; Tooze, 2018) and management academics (Aguilera, Henisz, Oxley, and Shaver, 2019; Buckley, 2020; Munjal, Budhwar, and Pereira, 2018; Witt, 2019) as they attempt to make sense of such interrelated phenomena as rising protectionism, nativism, and the re-imposition of controls on flows of goods (Peng, Kathuria, Viana, and Lima, 2021), capital (Roubini, 2020), labour (Farndale, Thite, Budhwar, and Kwon, 2021) and ideas (De Chant, 2022). In effect, they use the term deglobalization to describe developments that make economic exchange across borders harder than was previously the case. For people who use the term in this fashion, deglobalization denotes the opposite of globalization, economic liberalization, and movement towards a borderless world economy. Users of the term deglobalization usually focus on decisions taken by policymakers as the causal drivers behind it, although other drivers, such as environmental and epidemiological, are also certainly possible. The rise of protectionism, nativism, and the intensification of geopolitical rivalries in the early 2020s has created new challenges that forced scholars studying firms and other organizations to bring politics and hostility to globalization back into the agenda (Witt, Li, Välikangas and Lewin, 2021; Doh, Darhan, Cassario, 2022). In the aftermath of the Cold War, many Western liberals mistakenly saw globalization as inevitable and irreversible (Friedman, 2005). Few subscribe to that viewpoint today.
The advent of deglobalization means that scholars in business schools are in (seemingly) uncharted territory. However, the world economy has experienced cycles of globalization and deglobalization over the last few centuries, as the business historian Geoffrey Jones (2005) noted in a paper that now seems prophetic. History can serve as one guide for thinking about deglobalization’s antecedents and outcomes, because historical and history-informed research can advance management theory (Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones, and Silverman, 2020; Buckley, 2021; Raff, 2020; Sasaki, Kotlar, Ravasi, and Vaara, 2020; Suddaby, Coraiola, Harvey, and Foster, 2020; Suddaby and Jaskiewicz, 2020; Wadhwani, Kirsch, Welter, Gartner, and Jones, 2020; Wadhwani, Suddaby, Mordhorst, and Popp, 2018). As Argyres et al. (2020) observe, the field of history-informed management research is very diverse, encompassing myriad theoretical perspectives and research methods, positivist, interpretivist, and phenomenological. Historical and history-informed research in management includes papers that examine historical phenomena in light of management theory. It also includes research about what managers and other actors in the present do with historical narratives as in the literature in management on ‘rhetorical history’ -how managers use historical narratives to persuade others- and ‘history-as-sensemaking’ -how managers draw on their historical knowledge to make sense of the present (Suddaby, Coraiola, Harvey, and Foster, 2020).
This Special Issue seeks to include diverse historical approaches to deglobalization that can advance management theory and provide actionable guidance to practitioners. At the same time, the Special Issue will enable historical scholars to engage with management, producing theoretical cross-fertilisation. We anticipate that this Special Issue will include representatives of the different branches of historical and history-informed research and of different research traditions, including International Business, Strategic Management, and Historical Organization Studies. We seek papers about deglobalization’s history (from the distant past and right up through the present) and equally about how any of a wide variety of essentially historical approaches to and perspectives on this once again current and salient phenomenon can advance management theory and provide actionable guidance to decision-makers.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
This Special Issue will showcase historical and history-informed research that contributes to contemporary debates about deglobalization’s antecedents, outcomes, and managerial responses. We therefore encourage submissions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes.
Theme 1. Antecedents of Deglobalization
Deglobalization has many antecedents that remain underexplored by researchers. We need to know about what causes deglobalization. We encourage contributors to be explicit about the macro-level theories they use to understand global political economy, whether hegemonic stability theory (Meyer and Li, 2022), Marxian theories of political economy (e.g. Van Lent, Islam, Chowdury, 2020), world-systems theory, or postcolonial theory (Boussebaa, Sinha, and Gabriel, 2014; Boussebaa and Brown, 2017; Said, 1978). Theories that causally link deglobalization and pandemics (Tworek, 2019) might also be usefully applied here. Historical and history-informed research can therefore help to address the following questions, among others:
· How is the concept of waves of globalization and deglobalization developed by economic historians (Findlay and O’Rourke, 2007) useful in management research?
· How do organizations of different types (firms, non-profit organizations etc.) contribute to and experience deglobalization?
· How can comparisons of different episodes of deglobalizations, such as the present one with the deglobalization of the early 1930s, illuminate the underlying causes of deglobalization, be they technological, ideational, or environmental?
· What is the role of nonmarket strategy (e.g. Lawton, Dorobantu and Sun, 2020) and/or corporate political activity (Lawton, McGuire, and Rajwani, 2013; Sutton, Devine, Lamont, and Holmes 2021) in driving deglobalization?
· What is the role of corporate political activity in generating the policies associated with deglobalization?
· What is the relationship between business and peace (Ganson, He, and Henisz, 2021)?
· How does deglobalization change the nature of institutional distance and actors’ perceptions of institutional distance?
· What causal connections, if any, exist between deglobalization and inequality?
Theme 2. Outcomes of Deglobalization
A second major theme of the special issue will be how deglobalization differentially impacts organizations with different characteristics, such as size, purpose (e.g., profit-seeking or non-profit), nationality, and organizational structure. Papers submitted to the special issue might also engage ongoing debates about de-internationalization (e.g. Kafouros, Cavusgil, Devinney, Ganotakis, and Fainshmidt, 2022), international entrepreneurship (Terjesen, Hessels, and Li, 2016), and political risk management (Forbes, Kurosawa, and Wubs, 2018; Hartwell and Devinney, 2021) through the use of historical case studies. Historical and history-informed research might shed light on the following questions, among others:
· Does deglobalization impose greater or lesser costs on large multinational enterprises (MNEs) than on smaller ones?
· How does the structure of ownership and control of overseas operations affect the costs of deglobalization?
· How does deglobalization impact the lived experiences of MNE managers, relations between workers and managers, and the international human resource management strategies of firms?
· How does deglobalization affect the entrepreneurial opportunities of overseas supply chain firms?
· What are the implications of deglobalization for different types of entrepreneurship?
· Does deglobalization have different impacts on family-owned firms versus other firms?
· How does deglobalization change the relationship between firms and the state?
Theme 3. Managerial Responses to Deglobalization
A third major theme is understanding how managers in different types of organizations (MNEs, domestic companies, non-profits) creatively respond to deglobalization. Managers appear to have considerable agency in how they respond to deglobalization. We know from the existing historical research that some multinational firms responded to the deglobalization episodes of the early twentieth century by using cloaking (Boon and Wubs, 2020; Casson and da Silva Lopes, 2013; Donzé and Kurosawa, 2013; Forbes, Kurosawa, and Wubs, 2018; Jones and Lubinski, 2012; Kobrak and Hansen, 2004). In a cloaking strategy, a firm attempts to hide its nationality to avoid being caught in the cross-fire between warring nation states. Other multinational firms of that era exploited the tensions between nations associated with deglobalization to engage in “geopolitical jockeying” (Lubinski and Wadhwani, 2020). Historically, some firms responded to deglobalization by embracing host country’s nationalism (Moreno, 2005) or by strategically incorporating members of a protectionist host country’s elite into the firm’s hierarchy (Bucheli and Salvaj, 2018; Garner, 2011). Firms have also used wartime sanctions regimes to attain competitive advantage (Mulder, 2022). We would therefore welcome historical and history-informed papers that deal with such questions as:
· Which strategies have managers developed to deal with deglobalization?
· How can managers draw on their knowledge of history in trying to respond to deglobalization? How have they done so?
· Does deglobalization create profit opportunities for entrepreneurs and firms and, if so, how are such opportunities identified and exploited?
· What ethical dilemmas does deglobalization create for managers and how do they resolve them?
· How might deglobalization change how the managers of multinational firms make decisions about how to enter new markets and manage political risk?
SUBMISSION PROCESS
Submission deadline: 1 July 2023
Expected Publication: Late 2025
• Submissions should be prepared using the JMS Manuscript Preparation Guidelines
• Articles will be reviewed according to the JMS double-blind review process.
• We welcome informal enquiries relating to the Special Issue, proposed topics, and potential fit with the Special Issue objectives. Please direct any questions on the Special Issue to the guest editors.
· Marcelo Bucheli, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: mbucheli@illinois.edu
It is anticipated that the guest editors will organize a special issue in-person revision workshop (date and location TBA) for authors who have received an initial R&R decision on their manuscript. Please note that participation in the workshop does not guarantee acceptance of the paper. Participation in this workshop is also not a prerequisite for publication.
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In the Black Lives Summer of 2020, a variety of venerable organizations in the UK and the US faced calls that they apologize/pay reparations for their historical involvement in African chattel slavery. Firm such Barclays Bank, Lloyds of London, and Bank of America faced accusations that their current wealth was based, in part, on profits they accumulated during the period in which African chattel slavery was widely used in the countries around the Atlantic. The accusations against these companies were usually backed up by the citation of historical documents that provide pretty clear evidence that the firm or its predecessors either owned slaves or somehow took decisions that contributing to the maintenance of the system of African chattel slavery, such as insuring the vessels that engaged in the dangerous business of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Since 2020, a variety of companies have either apologised for their historical role in slavery or have apologized and promised to undertake some sort of remedial action in the present. The media, especially conservative media, brand such remedial action “reparations”, which connects this issue to the wider campaign for governmental reparations payments to the descendants of enslaved Africans, a cause that has been championed by politicians in the Caribbean and by activists in the United States. The idea of corporate reparations for slavery is actually about 20 years old—it emerged around the year 2000 in New York and was, according to a research project I’m involved in, inspired by the 1999 out of course settlement by which German companies agreed to pay reparations to the surviving Nazi era slave labourers. During the Second World War, more than 3,100 German firms, some of which are still global household names exploited Jewish and non-Jewish slave labour. In 1999, they agreed to pay $2.4 billion in compensation to the now elderly slave labourers. This precedent inspired African Americans whose ancestors has been enslaved to try to get compensation out of some companies with historical ties to antebellum slavery. Although the litigation against British and American firms by the African-American activists in the early 2000s failed in the courts due to a combination of questions about standing and statutes of limitations, the underlying idea of corporate reparations for slavery persisted, resurfacing during the BLM summer of 2020
In the summer of 2020, critics began to charge that the Guardian, a left-wing London paper that began life as the Manchester Guardian in 1821, is also guilty of historical financial ties to slavery. The accusation was that because the newspaper was founded in a city that famously specialised in the processing of imported cotton and because most of Britain’s pre-American Civil War cotton imports were produced by enslaved people in the American South, the business that owns the Guardian, the Guardian Media Group, is guilty of historical involvement in slavery and should pay reparations as well. This accusation, which may have originated with activists on the left of the political spectrum, was gleefully repeated by conservative talk-radio hosts, as the Guardian, an expensive, upmarket, very left-wing paper, exemplifies much of what they dislike.
In response to these accusations, the paper’s owners commissioned some historians to do some research on the paper’s historical ties to slavery. The Guardian Media Group is owned by a non-profit entity called the Scott Trust, which was established in 1936 by John Russell Scott, the paper’s owner, who was worried about death duties/inheritance tax. This week, the Scott Trust published the results of the historians’ research. The paper and the Trust have issued an apology for their historical role in slavery and have promised to make investments in remedial action. The historical researchers found that a number of the entrepreneurs who initially bankrolled the Guardian newspaper in 1821 had made their fortune in cotton manufacturing. These entrepreneurs, who mainly owned factories in Manchester, were in the business of processing fibres that had been harvested on plantations in the New World One of the early investors in the Guardian also appears to have owned a slave plantation overseas. The historical researchers noted that while the Guardian generally supported the cause of the abolition of slavery, during the American Civil War it expressed hostility towards the North and some sympathy for the slaveholding southern Confederacy. While Manchester was a note centre of pro-Northern sentiment in Britain during the American Civil War, the Manchester Guardian was hostile to the North and condemned those who held pro-Northern meetings.
Personally, I don’t think that either the Scott Trust or the Guardian Media Group should apologize for the predecessor firm’s highly indirect ties to slavery. I say this as someone who is a strong believer in the norm that corporations should be held to account for what they did in previous centuries and the firms such as Lloyds insurance should indeed and pay reparations for their role in supporting African chattel slavery. The involvement of Lloyds in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was substantial and direct enough to warrant an apology and payment of compensation in some form. The decisions taken by members of the Society of Lloyds caused real harm and we want to discourage analogous decisions from being taken in the present. That’s why Lloyds needs to apologise and pay a noticeably painful amount of compensation now. Incentives matter. I certainly think that the Church of England, which invested in a slave trade corporation, should also apologise and pay compensation, as it is now doing. (My thinking about how that compensation should be structured, which is informed by the Effective Altruism movement, is a subject I’ll leave for another blog post). I just think that the Scott Trust’s ties to slavery are so indirect that it shouldn’t apologise here. In fact, I suspect that it would be positively harmful for the Guardian to apologise for its alleged role in slavery because doing so would reduce the pressure on the other corporations whose antebellum managers took decisions that are actually morally blameworthy. If everyone is a little bit guilty of everything, then nobody is really guilty of anything. The Guardian just isn’t Lloyds.
Systems of guilt, innocence, punishment, and compensation are the most effective at incentivizing good behaviour when they target decision-makers and force them and their firms to internalize costs. If a reckless motorist kills someone, we blame that individual and focus punishment on them. This approach incentivizes good behaviour. If our response to a death caused by a reckless motorist is to blame all of the drivers who were on the road that day or all drivers in general or “car culture” or the fact we have built our cities so that taking public transport is frequently not a viable option, them that lets the reckless driver off the hook. Moreover, we don’t blame the factory workers who produced the car that was driven by the reckless driver. Indeed, one can one imagine an individual who has just killed someone through his reckless driving wanting to change the subject of the conversation from their own choices to broader, societal level issues. “I didn’t kill that child, car culture did. I blame it!”
Now in the 19to century, virtually everyone in Britain aside from a very small group of religious zealots who refused to consume sugar (the anti-saccharites) and cotton was somehow indirectly connected to slavery. Cotton garments were popular because they were comfortable and rapidly displaced wool undergarments. Virtually everyone, even passionate abolitionists wore cotton, even though they knew that much of the cotton currently being imported into Liverpool was produced by slave labour rather than yeoman farmers in the upland regions of the American South. There was a brief effort in the 1830s to create a market in cotton that was certified as being the product of slave labour but it soon collapsed. (I briefly mention this episode in my Journal of Business Ethics paper on free-grown sugar in nineteenth-century Britian). Abolitionists argued that the abolition of slavery in America would increase the world’s supply of cotton, doing so on the ground that this system of labour was economically inefficient and harmful to all concerned, including the millowners of Manchester. Richard Cobden (1804-1865), a leading cotton entrepreneur, was one of a prominent British supporter of the Northern cause in the American Civil War. Anyway, lots of people had slight connections to slavery and the profits generated from it. Money that had passed through the hands of slaveowners circulated in the economy. For instance, if a slaveowner went into a pub and purchased a pint of beer, the pub owner can be said to have benefitted from slavery. Should that pub’s owner now apologise for its historical connection to slavery? Most people would have had some degree of connection to individuals who benefited from slavery through the seven degrees of separation principle. In the same way, lots people today are indirectly connected to the human rights abuses that take place in some countries overseas—every time I put petrol in the car, I am creating demand for oil from some regimes we don’t much like. Only a small number of individuals and firms in 19th century Britain, however, took decisions that bolstered slavery, such as investing in overseas plantations or issuing insurance policies to ships involved in the slave trade. We need to focus on their decisions and that means criticising the successor companies of those firms, and no other firms. Nobody has pointed to any business decisions taken by the employees of the 19th century Manchester Guardian that helped to perpetuate slavery. The founders of the paper took money from some individuals, a few of whom had taken morally blameworthy decisions such as investing in plantations. At most, they can be accused of not doing the due diligence in screening their investors that we might want in the present day.
Let’s go back to first principles to see why this formerly abolitionist newspaper should not apologize/pay reparations. The ultimate test of whether a norm or rule should exist is whether widespread adherence to that norm will make the world a better place by promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. That’s true whether the norm in question is a formal norm (say a tort law that is backed up by the state and its court system) or an informal norm (such as the sub-legal rule that says if you knock a man’s pint glass over in the pub, you are obliged to buy him a replacement). Let’s call that way of judging whether norms should exist rule utilitarianism, which is indeed what many philosophers call it. John Stuart Mill, who has a hardcore abolitionist back in the day, was an advocate or rule utilitarianism
In our society, there is a long-standing rule that says that if a driver injures another person with their car, they must apologise and pay reparations. I think that we would all agree that drivers are safer and life expectancy is longer thanks to the existence of this rule, which gives all of us a stronger incentive to drive carefully. Life expectancy goes up, making insurance actuaries happy. Moreover, we have less vigilante justice. Similarly, corporations have long been held liable both in the formal legal system and in the wider court of public opinion (informal norms) if they commit harms against individuals. For instance, if the manager of a firm decides to cheap out on essential maintenance and a customer is injured on a poorly maintained staircase, the customer can sue. That arrangement incentivizes good behaviour on the part of firms. Yes, I’m aware of the argument that the balance in favour of injured customers has gone too far in this direction in many common-law jurisdictions, creating inefficient outcomes, but I think we can all agree that some sort of liability for property owner who don’t keep their assets in safe condition is a good thing to have.
The formal and informal norms that incentive drivers to be careful and property owners to ensure their staircases aren’t slippery are old ones. What is new is the informal norm that the corporations should be held responsible for human rights abuses they committed a long time ago, before any of the current managers or shareholders were even alive, let alone in decision-making positions within the company. For decades now, a variety of formal and informal norms have held companies responsible when they or their subsidiaries commit human rights abuses overseas. The foreign torts law introduced in the US during the Carter Administration forces companies to pay attention to whether they are involved in human rights abuses overseas. More importantly, there are informal norms that companies need to follow—many Western firms pulled out of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine not because of sanctions but because to continue doing business there would violate a set of informal norms about not doing business with terrible regimes that emerged in the 1980s during the anti-apartheid movement.
The new informal norm that is emerging, thanks in part to the precedent set in 1999 by the German firms, extends this responsibility to responsibility to corporate involvement in human rights abuses long ago, rather than just yesterday or last year. In other words, the new norm gets rid of the living memory statute of limations equivalent here. The BLM campaign for corporate reparations for slavery is just one example of this new norm.
Personally, I think that the advent of this new norm, perpetual corporate historical responsibility, is a positive development that will incentivise the right types of behaviour. I think that this norm will incentivise good behaviour because I reject the theory that decision-makers in firms only care about their immediate self-interest and have very short time horizons. The available evidence (see the research on socioemotional wealth maximisation) strongly suggests that this model of managerial behaviour is just inaccurate and that many actual managers care about their legacies and what posterity will think of them after they are dead. For every Gordon Gekko there are numerous family firm managers who want to be respected by their great-grandchildren. If all managers were Gordon Gekko, the new norm wouldn’t have any impact on corporate decision-making and thus would be pointless. At least enough managers care about what posterity will think about them for us to conclude that the advent of a norm that holds firms responsible for human rights abuses regardless of when they were committed will be effective at discouraging corporate involvement in human rights abuses in the future.
For that reason, I think that public opinion should only require firms to apologise and pay reparations for historical human rights abuses when there is evidence that decision-makers in the firm made decisions that contributed to human rights abuses, such as deciding to rent Jewish slave labourers from the SS or insuring ships that were clearly involved in the slave trade. When firms that were essentially uninvolved in the human rights abuses start apologising, that takes the pressure off the truly guilty parties, which will be observed by today’s businesspeople and which may affect their calculus about whether or not to engage in immoral behaviour that involves human rights abuses.
The Past Speaks 