The Past Speaks

People who are attending the ​Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences meeting in Ottawa may wish to check out the meeting of business historians on 1 June. The Congress is made up of the meetings of nearly 70 disciplinary associations that range from the very small (e.g., the meeting devoted to Hungarian Studies) to the annual conferences of the Canadian Historical Association and the Canadian Political Science Association. Since business history is inherently interdisciplinary, I suspect that interested scholars from all disciplines would be welcome to show up at the event on 1 June. The session listed below is part of the Canadian Historical Association meeting but the commentator, Herb Emery, is an economist.

I’m intrigued by the news that there will be a mysterious “big announcement” at the meeting of business historians on 1 June.

1 June 2015

3:15-4:45 / 15h15-16h45 ​[location TBD]​

​Panel 3​4. Canadian Business History: Critical and Interdisciplinary / L’histoire du monde des affaires au Canada : approche critique et interdisciplinaire

Facilitator / Animateur: J. Andrew Ross (University of Guelph)

Jason Russell (Empire State College – SUNY): Making Managers Beyond Canada: The Canadian International Development Agency, the Western Business School, and the University of the West Indies in the 1970s

Stephen Salmon (Steamer Consulting): “… the worst cases”: Swan, Hunter and the Canadian Great Lakes Trades, 1921-1940

Commentator / Commentateur: Herbert Emery (University of Calgary)

Sponsored by the Business History Group / Parrainée par le Comité d’histoire des affaires

5:00-6:00 [Location TBD]

​Business History Group ​meeting where there will be a ​preview of an upcoming big announcement!

Yet more business-historical research will be presented at the meeting of Canada’s Administrative Science Association. For some reason, the ASAC 2015 conference isn’t part of the Congress and will be held in Halifax. The ASAC should really be part of the Congress to make it easier for historians,  political scientists, and management scholars to organize interdisciplinary sessions and exchange knowledge.

Anyway, here are the business history panels at the ASAC conference.

Symposium: Lessons in Writing History for MOS Journals

Chair/Président

:

William (Bill) Bonner (Univ ersity of Regina)

Panelists: William Bonner (University of Regina), Gabrielle Durepos (Mount Saint Vincent University), Albert J. Mills (Saint Mary’s University), Patricia Genoe McLaren (Wilfrid Laurier University) & William Foster (University of Alberta)

Practices and Processes in Managing

“Performing Budget Histories” Lawrence Corrigan (Saint Mary’s University)

“The Who, Why, How and Justification for Health Information Abuse: Problematizing the Past”William (Bill) Bonner (University of Regina)

“Are Corporations Managed by Machines? A Late Response to Herbert A. Simon” Alex Ramirez (Carleton University)

ANTi-History at Work

Chair/Présidente : Patricia Genoe McLaren (Wilfrid Laurier University)

“The Organizing of Farmers: History and Understanding in 1970s Nova Scotia” Christopher Hartt (Dalhousie University) & Gretchen Pohlkamp (Province of Nova Scotia)

BEST PAPER / MEILLEURE ARTICLE “The British Airways Heritage Collection: An Ethnographic ‘History’” Kristene Coller (University of Lethbridge), Jean Helms Mills (Saint Mary’s University) & Albert J. Mills (Saint Mary’s University)

Management History in the Service Sector

Chair/Président : Allan Dwyer (Mount Royal University)

“Is it Safer if There is a Historic Bomb Shelter in a Five-Star Hotel?” Kien Le (Saint Mary’s University), Albert J. Mills (Saint Mary’s University) & Jean Helms Mills (Saint Mary’s University)

“Rainy River District: A Study of Rail by Mail” John McCutcheon (Wilfrid Laurier University)

“The Introduction of External Audit and Financial Accounting to the Hudson’s Bay Company: An Historical Performativity Analysis” Alison Kemper (Ryerson University) & Gary Spraakman (York University)

AS: Management academics are increasingly interested in the evolution and function of corporate archives and the people who manage these important corporate assets. I’ve pasted below the abstract of Roy Suddaby’s new paper “The Professionalization of the Corporate Archivist” Roy is the Winspear Chair of Management at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria and a Professor and Strategic Research Advisor, Newcastle University Business School

Abstract

The corporate historian is a fairly recent innovation. Although historians have had a long association with corporations, as biographers, consultants and advisors, the formal role of corporate historian or archivist appears to emerge as a distinct professional category in large US corporations in the early 1980s. The emergence of the corporate historian as a distinct occupational category raises a number of important theoretical and empirical questions. Why did the occupational category emerge now and not contemporaneously with the emergence of the corporate form? What is the professional project of the corporate historian? What does the emergence of the corporate historian tell us about the way in which non-traditional professions are constructed in the twenty first century? What are the implications for history when the core institutional affiliation of the historian is with a corporation rather than the university?

This paper addresses these questions through a detailed analysis of the emergence of the corporate historian. Drawing from archival data as well as ongoing interviews with a variety of corporate historians and archivists from Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 corporations. Initial results demonstrate the important symbiotic dynamics of institutions and professions in generating occupational categories. A key conclusion of the study is that, as an ascendant institution, the modern corporation is as capable of generating new professions as were previous institutions such as the nation state and the university.

Banff, Alberta

AS: I’m going to be presenting at the RNAS conference in Banff this summer. I am sharing the programme here.

Remaking North American Sovereignty: Towards a Continental History of State Transformation in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

July 30-Aug. 1, 2015 at the Banff Centre

Banff, Alberta, Canada

Thursday, July 30, 2015

3:00-5:00 pm Registration, Banff Centre

5:30-6:30 pm Opening reception, Whyte Museum of the Rockies, Banff

6:30-8:45 pm Keynote Session I, Whyte Museum of the Rockies, Banff. This event is free and open to the public.

• Andrew Smith, University of Liverpool, “Confederation as a Hemispheric Anomaly: Why Canada Choose to Remain a Colony”
• Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania, “The United States from the Inside Out and the Southside North”
• Comment: Thomas Bender, New York University
• Moderator: Frank Towers

Friday July 31, 2015

8:00-8:45 am Publishing Transnational History: Breakfast roundtable with Susan Ferber, Editors, Executive Editor for America and World History, Oxford University Press and Len Husband, Acquisitions Editor, University of Toronto Press.

9:00-11:15 am Plenary session I: States

Pre-circulated papers to be discussed in roundtable/seminar format). Plenary session papers will be securely made accessible to participants and registered attendees through the conference website (rnas.ca) as of July 2, 2015.

• Rachel St. John, Harvard University, “Alternative Nations and the History of State and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-century North America”
• Gregory Downs, City College & Graduate Center, CUNY, “The Age of North American Revolution: Rethinking the 1850s and 1860s as a Revolutionary Wave”
• Marcela Terrazas, UNAM, “Indian Raids within Northern Mexico, Conflicts with the American Government and the Construction of Mexican Sovereignty”
• Susan-Mary Grant, Newcastle University, “‘Universal Yankee Nation’: Securing the Soldiers’ State in Nineteenth-Century America”
• Philip Buckner, University of New Brunswick, “’British North America and a Continent in Dissolution, 1861-1871′: The role of the American Civil War in the making of Canadian Confederation”
• Comment: Jeffrey McNairn, Queen’s University
• Moderator: Nancy Janovicek, University of Calgary

11:30-12:45 pm Lunch

1:00-3:00 pm

Panel 1: Slavery

• Anthony E. Kaye, Penn State University, “Federalism, Slavery, and Antislavery in American Empire”
• John Craig Hammond, Penn State University, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empire in the North American Borderlands, 1840 – 1861”
• Alice L. Baumgartner, Yale University, “Fugitive Slaves, Free Soil, and the Contest over Sovereignty in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1829-60”
• Comment: Lynn Kennedy, University of Lethbridge
• Moderator:  Joseph Anderson, Mount Royal University, Calgary

Panel 2: Borderlands

• Martín González de la Vara, El Colegio de Michoacán, “Changing Borders and Sovereignties: the Bi-National Region of El Paso, 1850-1871”
• Ryan Hall, Yale University, State-Making in a Fur Trade World:
Divergent Sovereignties on the Northwest Plains, 1855-1877
• James Nichols, City University of New York, Queensborough Community College, “Ephemeral Sovereignty and Elite Cooperation: Border Crossers in the era of La Reforma and the French Intervention”
• Comment: Amie Kiddle, University of Calgary
• Moderator: George Colpitts, University of Calgary

3:00-3:15 pm Break

3:15-5:15 pm

Panel 3: Filibustering

• Amy S. Greenberg, Penn State University, “Walker to Riel: Empire on the Margins”
• Benjamin Johnson, Loyola University Chicago, “Reconstructing North America: Borderlands in the Age of National Consolidation”
• Beau Cleland, University of Calgary, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Confederate Diplomatic-Commercial Network in the British Colonies”
• Comment: Adam Rothman, Georgetown University
• Moderator: Elizabeth Jameson, University of Calgary

Panel 4: Divided Sovereignty

• Jane Dinwoodie, University of Oxford, “Beyond Removal: Indians, States and Sovereignties in the American South”
• Robert Bonner, Dartmouth College “North America’s Federative Moment: Capitals and Borders Across the Short 1860s”
• Andrew L. Slap, East Tennessee State University, “The Multiple Divisions of Sovereignty”
• Comment: Paul Quigley, Virginia Tech University
• Moderator: Lyndsay Campbell, University of Calgary

6:15-8:30 pm. Dinner & Keynote Session II

• Erika Pani, Colegio de Mexico, “‘Political crimes are, perhaps, not crimes at all’: Allegiance and Sovereignty during Civil War, Mexico, 1857-1867”
• Pekka Hämäläinen, University of Oxford, “The Industrial East, the Nomadic West, and the Search for Sovereignty in the Heart of the Continent”
• Comment: Elliot West, University of Arkansas
• Moderator: William Blair, Pennsylvania State University, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center

Saturday, August 1, 2014

9:00-11:15 am.

Plenary session II, Sovereignty.

Pre-circulated papers to be discussed in roundtable/seminar format. Plenary session papers will be securely made accessible to participants and registered attendees through the conference website (rnas.ca) as of July 2, 2015.

• Jay Sexton, University of Oxford, “Steam Transport and the Remaking of Sovereignty”
• Brian Delay, University of California, Berkeley, “The Civil War Arms Frenzy and the Ascent of State Sovereignty in North America”
• Christopher Clark, University of Connecticut, “Political, Financial, and Popular Sovereignty in Agrarian North America, 1850s-1890s.”
• Mary P. Ryan, Johns Hopkins University, “City Sovereignty in Mexico and the United States 1846-1865”
• María Dolores Ballesteros Páez, Postdoctoral Fellow CH-CIALC-UNAM, “Indigenous population in the Mexican, U.S. and Canadian congressional debates and bills in the consolidation of the new national states, 1865-1867”
• Comment: Bruce Levine, University of Illinois
• Moderator: Hendrik Kraay, University of Calgary

11:30-12:45 pm Lunch

1:00-3:00 pm

Panel 5: Rebel States

• Arielle Gorin, Yale Unversity, “Samandlin’s Grave: Stories, Sovereignty, and the Contest for the Tsilhqot’in Homelands”
• Stephen Neufeld, California State University, Fullerton, “A War of Savagery and Sovereignty: Seeking Power over Mexico’s Indigenous Margins, 1860-1910”
• Caleb McDaniel, Rice University, “Beyond Failure: Rethinking the Afterlives of Confederate State Policies on its Western Frontier”
• Comment: Sheila McManus, University of Lethbridge
• Moderator: Jewel Spangler, University of Calgary

Panel 6:  Race and Empire

• Michael Vorenberg, Brown University, “Anti-Imperialism and the Elusive End of the American Civil War”
• Karl Jacoby, Columbia University, “Reconstructing Race and Nation: The U.S. and Mexico, 1849-1925”
• Andres Resendez, University of California, Davis, “The Other Slavery and the Other Emancipation”
• Comment: Christopher Phillips, University of Cincinnati
• Moderator: Stephen Randall, University of Calgary

3:00-3:15 pm Break

3:15-5:15 pm

Panel 7: Transnational histories

• Brian Schoen, Ohio University, “Reform Wars, Royal Visits, and US Views of Popular Sovereignty in 1860”
• Patrick J. Kelly, The University of Texas at San Antonio, “The Lost Continent of Abraham Lincoln”
• Pablo Mijangos CIDE (Mexico City), “The Holy See and the North American Civil Wars”
• Comment: Marc Egnal, York University
• Moderator: David Marshall, University of Calgary

Panel 8: Contemporary Comparisons

• Marise Bachand, Universtié du Québec á Trois-Riviéres, “Créoles and Canadiennes at the Intersection of Nations, States, and Empires, 1830-1890”
• John W. Quist, Shippensburg University, “’A Long Cherished Plan’: Detroit and the US Dream of Canadian Annexation during the Nineteenth Century”
• David T. Gleeson, Northumbria University, “‘Shall we sink to the Helpless Condition of Ireland in the British Parliament?’: Britain, Ireland and Confederate Concepts of National Sovereignty”
• Comment: Ryan Keating, California State University, San Bernadino
• Moderator: TBA

5:25-5:40 pm Closing remarks: Frank Towers, University of Calgary

*This conference is sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University and supported by the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech University and the following academic units at the University of Calgary: the Department of History; the Centre for Military, Security, and Strategic Studies; the Faculty of Arts; the Latin America Research Centre; and the Office of the Vice President for Research. Support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is pending.

Yes, according to new research by James Bessen.

Bessen argues that it’s not surprising for new technologies to be associated with stagnant wages. Indeed, something similar happened in America’s first high-tech boom: the textile industry of the mid-1800s. From 1830 to 1860, cloth production skyrocketed; wages barely budged.

But then weavers’ wages started rising. By 1900, they were more than twice their level from 40 years earlier. Bessen argues that this and other historical examples offer important lessons about the state of the labor market today.

Some people, such as economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, have portrayed a future in which computers destroy more and more jobs, leaving millions out of work. Bessen is skeptical. Computers obviously do eliminate some jobs, but they almost always create other jobs in the process. The tricky thing is that these new jobs often demand different skills, and workers are struggling to keep up. Still, Bessen paints a basically optimistic view of a future in which technologies mature and create new, higher-paying jobs for ordinary workers.

Hat tip to Timothy B. Lee.

Oh well, another book to put on my summer reading list.

Stefan Schwarzkopf, Associate Professor, Copenhagen Business School and active business historian, will be presenting a paper in Paris on Friday, 22 May.

The Theopolitics of Markets
Vendredi 22 mai 2015, de 11h à 13h, Salle 1, RDC, bât. Le France, 190-198 avenue de France, 75013 Paris

“Following on from the seminar on marketing and political ideology, this seminar aims at discovering an as yet hidden connection between specifically protestant religious sentiments on the one hand, and the modernization of marketing management since 1900 on the other hand. This hidden connection I call the ‘theopolitics of markets’. It can be shown that virtually all early American marketing management thinkers and marketing practitioners, including opinion pollsters and market researchers, had strong roots in Protestant sects (Wesleyan Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians). Key figures in the American movement to create wider acceptance for marketing as a ‘science’, and for advertising as a modern communication means, were either lay preachers themselves or sons of Protestant and/or Reformed preachers from the mid-West. Historical research of this kind provides us with key insights into possible explanations for why a customer-driven market ideology shares so many characteristics of a secular religion.”

Contact : Marie Chessel (chessel@ehess.fr) – Stefan Schwarzkopf (ssc.mpp@cbs.dk)

AS:  As a business historian who works in a management school, this editorial in the Administrative Science Quarterly reminds me of the debates within the historical profession that have been prompted by the rise of digital history, a research tradition that often involves the combination of really impressive research technologies (e.g., distant reading and the analysis of vast numbers of texts) with poorly conceived research questions.

Gerald F. Davis, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

Organizational research is guided by standards of what journals will publish and what gets rewarded in scholarly careers. This system can promote novelty rather than truth and impact rather than coherence. The advent of big data, combined with our current system of scholarly career incentives, is likely to yield a high volume of novel papers with sophisticated econometrics and no obvious prospect of cumulative knowledge development. Moreover, changes in the world of organizations are not being met with changes in how and for whom organizational research is done. It is time for a dialogue on who and what organizational research is for and how that should shape our practice.

ESRC Seminar Series

Organizations and Society: Historicising the theory and practice of organization analysis

Seminar 2

Organizational Remembering as an Alternative Framework

Wednesday 15^th July 2015

School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London,

Mile End Campus, E1 4NS.

Keynote: Professor Andrew Hoskins, University of Glasgow

“Organizational Memory and the Archive”

Guest Speakers:

William Foster (University of Alberta)

The Role of Archivists in Creating Organizational Memory Assets

Stephanie van de Kerkhof (University of Mannheim)

Memory and Narratives of World War I and II in European Enterprise During the Cold War

Anna Linda Musacchio Adorisio (Copenhagen Business School)

Storying the Past in Banking

Debra Ramsay (University of Glasgow)

Organizational Memory and the War Diary

Michael Rowlinson (Queen Mary University of London)

Organizational Remembering as an Alternative to Organizational Memory Studies

Roundtable

Memory Studies and Organization Studies

Seminar Abstract:

In this session we bring together scholars from history, communication studies, and organization studies with an interest in the emerging field of organizational remembering.

Please book your place here.

I’m really looking forward to my panel at the Reading-UNCTAD International Business Conference. Here are the details:

Andrew Smith, “The persistence of liberal norms in a Hong Kong-based MNE: HSBC in the first world war”
Discussant: Lucy Newton

Lucy Newton, “Multinationals, image and identity: HSBC and the construction of corporate identity through the portrait”
Discussant: Andrew Smith

Peter Miskell, “The movie multinationals: why was it only American firms that managed to compete successfully in international film markets, and how did they do it?” Discussant: Peter Scott

Peter Scott & James Walker, “When does recent experience matter in sequential location choice? The moderating role of institutional duality in outward investment from emerging country” Discussant: Peter Miskell