The Past Speaks

Inequality is the central theme of the 2015 Business History Conference. Thomas Piketty will be there and a number of papers use business history to address some of themes raised in Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I’ve posted a list of the most relevant panels below.

For a variety of methodological and philosophical reasons, I’m particularly interested in  Robert E. Wright’s paper Business History > Piketty. Like Bob Wright, I’m a primarily qualitative scholar who is interested in generalizing upwards from case studies, so I’ll be interested in what Bob has to say. I also expect to learn a great deal from Piketty’s keynote address.

7.A  Does Methodology Matter?
Chair and Discussant: TBA

Giovanni Favero, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Stephanie Decker, Aston Business School, and Niall MacKenzie and Andrew Perchard, University of Strathclyde
Quantitative Information in Organizations and Society: For a Micro-Historical Ethnostatistics

Takafumi Kurosawa, Kyoto University
Who Are We? History and Identity of Business History Societies

Daniel Raff, Wharton School, University of Pennsyvania/NBER
Competition and the Origins of Inequality

5.B  Defining Professional Boundaries and Creating Inequality: Why Organizations Matter
Chair: Jennifer Klein, Yale University
Discussant: Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Loyola University Chicago

Andrew Meade McGee, University of Virginia
Debating the “Business” of Government: New Management Practices and Professional Identity in Postwar Federal Agencies

Paige Glotzer, The Johns Hopkins University
National Standards, Local Sales: The Professional Culture of Real Estate and the Creation of an Exclusionary Housing Market

10.E  Non-Profits, Business, and Economic Inequality in the 1960s and Beyond
Chair: Julia Ott, The New School
Discussant: TBA

Joshua Clark Davis, University of Baltimore
Financial Feminism: Credit Unions in the Women’s Movement of the 1970s

Benjamin I. Holtzman, Brown University
Grassroots Revitalization, Private-Public Partnerships, and the Transformation of New York City’s Parks in the 1970s and 1980s

Claire Dunning, Harvard University
Capital Investment and Community Development in Boston, 1968-1991

Rahima Schwenkbeck, George Washington University
Holding the Invisible Hand: Economies of U.S. Countercultural Utopias

9.C  Corporations and Economic Inequality
Chair: Lucy A. Newton, Henley Business School, University of Reading
Discussant: TBA

Robert E. Wright, Augustana College
Business History > Piketty

Leslie Hannah, London School of Economics
Inequalities of Corporate Sizes before 1950

Richard Sylla, Stern School, New York University
Has Financial Development Increased Inequality Across and Within Nations?

Roni Hirsch, University of California Los Angeles
The Price of Risk and Its Social Costs