The Past Speaks

I was asked to share this job advert for our university’s history department.

The School of Histories, Languages and Cultures wishes to appoint a Head of Department and Chair in History. The role of Head of Department will be fixed term until 31 July 2021 initially and will be offered in combination with a permanent post at Professorial level. You will be a leading researcher with an outstanding track-record of internationally excellent publications and ambitious research plans for the future. Experience of winning major research council funding and/or a proven record of securing other sources of research income and experience in organisational leadership is essential. You will demonstrate a track-record of innovation in (research-led) teaching and you may be specialised in any field of History. We particularly encourage applications from scholars with a specialisation in Public History or Medieval History, as these are two areas the Department is looking to strengthen.

More details here.

David C.  Mowery, “Steven Klepper and business history.” Industrial and Corporate Change (2015): dtv023.

The impressive body of research published by the late Steven Klepper spanned a diverse array of topics, but among the most important were issues related to the evolution of industry structure. This survey of Steve Klepper’s work on these issues compares his scholarly legacy with that of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Both scholars addressed similar topics, and a comparison of Klepper’s work on firm and industry evolution with that of Chandler highlights enduring research challenges in economics, strategy, and business history.

This new working paper by Chris Colvin is a must-read for anyone who does banking history.

This essay discusses trends in new banking history scholarship. It does so by conducting bibliometric content analysis of the entire literature involving the history of banks, bankers and banking published in all major academic journals since the year 2000. It places this recent scholarship in its historiographical context, and speculates on the future of the field.

AS: My former colleague Mark Kuhlberg has published an important new book in the field of Canadian business history.

For forty years, historians have argued that early twentieth-century provincial governments in Canada were easily manipulated by the industrialists who developed Canada’s natural resources, such as pulpwood, water power, and minerals. With In the Power of the Government, Mark Kuhlberg uses the case of the Ontario pulp and paper industry to challenge that interpretation of Canadian provincial politics.

Examining the relationship between the corporations which ran the province’s pulp and paper mills and the politicians at Queen’s Park, Kuhlberg concludes that the Ontario government frequently rebuffed the demands of the industrialists who wanted to tap Ontario’s spruce timber and hydro-electric potential. A sophisticated empirical challenge to the orthodox literature on this issue, In the Power of the Government will be essential reading for historians and political scientists interested in the history of Canadian industrial development.

My employer, the University of Liverpool. has a joint-venture university called the Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. The academics there are our colleagues and one of them, Professor Ron Schramm, has just published an important new book The Chinese Macroeconomy and Financial System: a US Perspective (Routledge, April 2015)

Another book to put on my summer reading pile!

The impact of political risk on multinational corporations is an important theme in the literature in the fields of International Business and Strategic Management. Traditionally, academic researchers examined the management of political risk by MNEs through either the bargaining power approach (BPA) or the political institutions approach (PIA). The BPA approach, which derives from Vernon (1971), focuses on the relative bargaining power of a MNE and a given host country government. The PIA approach, in contrast, examines the mechanisms by which public policy in a host country is determined. Authors who use the PIA approach suggest that it is easier for MNEs to manage political risk in host countries in which decision-making authority is dispersed among a variety of individuals (e.g., through the US-style separation of powers) than in host countries in which authority is concentrated is concentrated in fewer individuals.

Both of these approaches have some value, but I’ve never been happy with them, not least because they tend to exclude the analysis of the cultural and intellectual contexts in which firms operate. That’s why I was intrigued by a new piece in the Strategic Management Journal by Charles E Stevens, En Xie, Mike W Peng.

Stevens, Charles E., En Xie, and Mike W. Peng. “Toward a legitimacy‐based view of political risk: The case of Google and Yahoo in China.” Strategic Management Journal (2015).

As the authors point out, the BPA and PIA lens is applied most frequently the forms of political risk confronted by MNEs who operate in the “asset-intensive extractive and infrastructure sectors” in developing countries. While recognizing that these approaches often provide the best way of understanding political risk, they argue persuasively that these approaches are less suitable for understanding political risk in the home country  (i.e., the country where the multinational has its headquarters) and in relatively “complex and interconnected” sectors in industries such services or the high-tech sector. S

Citing such scholarly articles as  Marquis and Quin (2014), Bucheli and Salvaj (2013), Kostova and Zaheer (1999), and Bitektine (2011),  Steven et al. identify an emerging approach to writing about political risk in multinationals that they call the Legitimacy-Based View (LBV). They then proceed to develop a formal conceptual model for the LBV. The LBV recognizes that corporations are granted legitimacy by a range of actors rather than simply the state. Such actors can withhold a corporation’s “social licence” to operate. Moreover, they break down the broad term “the government”  by recognizing that each national government is a far from monolithic entity: rather than being a single actor, the government is a collection of individuals, some of whom may have  very different ideas about the legitimacy of a given MNE. [This approach will be music to the ears of most political scientists, along with all methodological individualists].

The empirical information about Google and Yahoo in the paper is interesting to me, especially since I followed the saga of Google in China, but I am most interested in the theoretical framework the authors develop as it could be applied by a wide variety of IB, strategy, and business history scholars.

About the authors: Charles Stevens teaches at Lehigh University.  En Xie teaches at Xi’an Jiaotong University. Mike W. Peng is the Jindal Chair of Global Strategy Head, Organizations, Strategy, and International Management, University of Texas Dallas.