The Past Speaks

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.

Giacomin, V., & Lubinski, C. (2023). Entrepreneurship as emancipation: Ruth Handler and the entrepreneurial process ‘in time’and ‘over time’, 1930s–1980s. Business History, 1-28.

Paper Abstract:

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.