Sadly, I wasn’t able to get to the 2023 Business History Conference in Detroit as the dates clashed with some teaching commitments. Next week is my last week of teaching at the University of Liverpool as I am about start work at the University of Birmingham’s Business School. With everything going on, the logistics of a flying visit to Detroit were just too complicated. However, I do have paper on the programme of the BHC, which will be delivered by my excellent co-author Emily Buchnea of Newcastle Business School, abstract below. I also have some observations about some patterns I’ve observed in the BHC conference programme that I would like to share.
Changes in theoretical orientation of the management theorist who attend the BHC. When I first started attending the BHC, most of the management scholars who attended were people who used theory taken from transaction-cost economics (think of Williamson, 1975) and whose working model of the world overlapped with that of Chandler. For instance, I encountered Richard N. Langlois at my very first BHC. Richard is going to be at the 2023 BHC to present a paper, which is great. However, I also see management academics who use different theoretical frames at this conference, such as Andrew Hargadon, University of California, Davis and Andrew Nelson, University of Oregon. This greater theoretical diversity is probably a good thing. (I supposed I would say that, as I tend to be a theoretical magpie, as I strongly believe in borrowing and combining theory from widely separated fields of social science).
The presence of the Canadian Business History Association (CBHA).
This year, the CBHA will be represented at the BHC in a serious way for the first time. (In the past, the CBHA sponsored a nice reception that was em-ceed by the late Chris Kobrak but it didn’t sponsor panels by researchers). At this year’s BHC, the CBHA is sponsoring a panel (details below). I think that this development should be welcomed by all business historians and not just those with a strong interest in Canadian topics. In recent years, the number of Canadians attending the BHC, the premier conference for academic research in business history on the North American continent, has declined. The number of Canadians presenting at the BHC has fallen even though the organization devoted to promoting research on Canadian business history has acquired substantial resources to cover the expenses of presenters. One would have thought that this funding would have incentivized Canadian scholars to attend the BHC, thereby reversing the decline in the representation of Canadian historical topics at the BHC. The CBHA recently completed a major fundraising drive that netted C$2m. It seems that this money is now being used to more effectively incentivize Canadian academics to attend the BHC and to engage with the interdisciplinary community of business historians who attend that conference. I’m encouraged to see this trend, as the business history of Canada is a massively under-researched, and important, topic.
Session a: Global Capitalisms and Commodities, Part 1 Founders A (3) Sponsored by the Canadian Business History Association Contact: Donica Belisle, donica.belisle@uregina.ca
Chair: Laurent Beduneau-Wang, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University Discussant: The Audience
M. Stephen Salmon, Canadian Business History Association ““Buffalo is also a strategic point”: The Imperial Economic Conference of 1932 and the Canadian Great Lakes Grain Trade” Kashia Arnold, University of California, Santa Barbara “Who Depends on the Global Economy?: Silk, Power, and Nationalist Narratives in the Global Pacific” Rob Konkel, Yale University “How to Build a Bloc: Strategic Minerals and Interwar Quests for Autonomy and Autarky”
A Family Firm Narrates Its History in War and Peace: Jardine Matheson And Its Histories
Presenting author Andrew Smith. Co-authors: Ian Jones (University of York Management School), Nick Wong (Northumbria University), Emily Buchnea (Northumbria University). Jardine Matheson remains an important conglomerate in the Asia-Pacific region. It continues to be controlled by the Keswicks, a British family. The firm traces its origins back to Jardine, Matheson & Co., a firm established in 1832 and which acquired great wealth importing opium into China. It later diversified into a range of less controversial industries. The firm, which now generates a majority of its profits in Greater China, has long been adept at managing political risk. This ability to manage political risks helps to explain why it has survived such cataclysmic events as the Second World War, the Maoist period, and decolonization. Since the 1930s, the firm and its controlling family have invested significant resources in preserving historical documents and narrating the firm’s history. The company has commissioned a succession of official histories, the first of which was published in 1934. Our focus is on understanding how the firm’s depiction of its own history has changed over time and how these changes reflected both shifts in its operating environment and changes in the overall strategy of the firm. In comparing different versions of the firm’s official history, we observed marked differences in how the firm’s history, particularly its controversial early period, is discussed. To learn more about the how the firm and its own family have narrated its past, we undertook a systemic comparison of the commissioned histories produced by the firm. Moreover, we used internal correspondence materials in the Jardine Matheson corporate archive to observe internal conversations within the firm about which materials should and should not be included in the official histories. Our findings should interest historians who study international business in the Asia-Pacific region and the growing number of management scholars interested in how family firms use historical narratives.
Management journals, including the most prestigious and selective ones such as AMJ and SMJ, are increasingly receptive to papers that use historical data and methods. I spotted this interesting paper in Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, a journal ranked CABS2, that use historical data to speak to debates in the field of International Business about so-called born global firms.
Schmidt, Heiko M., and Sandra Milena Santamaria‐Alvarez. “Born global in 1847: International entrepreneurship at Siemens.” Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences/Revue Canadienne des Sciences de l’Administration.
Paper abstract:
The early internationalization of new ventures has been described as a contemporary phenomenon enabled by globalization and digital technologies. However, today’s multinational enterprise Siemens, founded in 1847, fits extant definitions of born globals. Based on this historical case, this study seeks to answer the question: What are enduring and contextually invariant aspects of early internationalization processes? An abductive analysis of the company’s first 3 decades finds six relevant and emergent themes. We contribute to international entrepreneurship research by presenting evidence that early internationalization is not a new phenomenon, showing support for multiple extant findings, and providing new insights for otherwise underexplored themes. We also provide future research directions regarding personal-level processes in international new ventures based on the analyzed 30 years.
AS: there is a long-running debate among both academic and practitioners about whether, how much, and under which circumstances the personal characteristics of CEOs really matter to long-term firm performance (see here). Can business-historical research methods and data shed light on this important question? Business historian Michael Aldous seems to think they can. Here are the details of his upcoming CBHA webinar on this subject. Registration for this Zoom link is below.
Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) have become celebrities and rock stars in popular culture. Often viewed as visionaries they are seen by some as uniquely able to unlock new ways of generating wealth and economic growth for society. Conversely, others see them as grotesquely wealthy, using their roles to enrich themselves whilst destroying political, social, and environmental systems. However they are perceived, CEOs of the largest corporations are key players in global political systems, to the extent that they have ‘displaced politics and politicians as … the new high priests and oligarchs of our system.’ This raises important questions, Who becomes a CEO? What do they actually do in the role? How do they effect the companies they lead? Answering these questions reveals insights into social mobility, meritocracy, business organization, corporate governance, and strategy. Interestingly and importantly, the answers have changed overtime. In this talk we will look at a long run study of British CEOs across the 20th century to see how these trends have evolved. This helps us to understand how CEOs matter now, but what factors may shape the profile, role, and importance of CEOs in the future.
Thursday March 30th, 2:00 pm EST
Moderator: Associate Professor Richard Powers, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. National Academic Director, Directors Education Program and Governance Essentials Program.
Presenter: Michael Aldous, Senior Lecturer in Management at Queen’s Management School, and a Research Associate at Queen’s University Centre for Economic History. Currently Im working on a Leverhulme Trust grant investigating British CEOs in the 20th century, examining factors such as personality traits, career progression, and networks, on firm performance.
Yesterday saw the release of a study of the financial ties between the Church of England and the slave trade. Grant Thornton, the accounting firm, worked with two historians (Dr Helen Paul of Southampton and Professor Arthur Burns of King’s College London) to try to determine the magnitude of the church’s investment income from slave trading enterprises, chiefly the South Sea Company. For press coverage, see here, here, and here. See also the video below to get a sense of what the popular debate about the report is like. (I was amused when the Pentecostal preacher in this segment was accused by the other guest of being “woke”).
The report’s authors concluded that the church gained roughly a billion pounds in today’s money from its investments in the slave trade. They also note that the church took donations from individuals whose fortunes stemmed, in part or in whole, from slave trading. To make amends for what it did historically, the Church will allocate £100 million to some sort of impact investment fund, the precise details of which have not yet been announced. In effect, these assets will be invested not to firms that offer the best financial return, which is what the assets managers would normally do, but in companies that are trying to do good in the world via socially-responsible business practices. We often hear demands that the firms that historical profited from slavery now pay some form of reparations to the descendants of slaves. Such demands for corporate reparations for slavery are linked to the wider campaign for government reparations for slavery. The Church of England’s decision to atone for its historical ties to slavery by shifting a modest proportion of its vast assets into an impact investment fund, a decision that will likely cost the church some money, is a gesture in that direction. It’s a compromise move.
Now I see that Charles Read, a very talented young economic historian at Cambridge who sometimes writes for The Economist, has critiqued the methodology of this study, claiming that it somewhat over-estimates how much wealth the church got from slavery. Read, who is very well informed about the practical workings of the South Sea Company, the slave-trading firm in which the church invested, claimsthat most of the money remitted to the church from the South Sea Company came not from the profits of the company’s slave trading voyages but from government annuities (i.e., the British taxpayer).
My guess is that Dr Read’s calculations are more likely to be accurate than those of the forensic accountants of Grant Thornton simply because he has greater knowledge of how investments worked in the eighteenth century. The day job of the forensic accountants who were tasked with doing this historical research doesn’t involve looking at documents produced with quill pens! However, debating precise figures of this type is sort of beside the point. In my view, this scholarly debate about the actual facts of the case is unlikely to influence how the public and the Church of England’s many stakeholders are going to feel about this issue. (I say feel not think here because the vast majority of people will arrive at their positions on this issue not by closely examining the historical evidence but by adopting whatever position fits best with their pre-existing worldviews).
Conservatives of the type who love denouncing “wokery” (whatever that means) will immediately leap to the defence of the Church and will denounce the Archbishop of Canterbury for caving in to the radicals, while anti-clerical zealots will use the evidence that the Church had some sort of financial ties to slavery as an excuse to bash it once again.
For some time now, I’ve been working with co-authors on a study of how firms that historically profited from slavery (e.g., Lloyds insurance) have dealt with the recent demands that they apologise/pay reparations. Although the Church of England is a very different type of organisation than a profit-seeking company, I think that our research on how businesses have dealt with the reparations for slavery issue can shed light on why the Church of England has responded in the way it did. I’m going to be in London next week to present an overview of our (current) research findings at the Lambeth Palace Library. Lambeth Palace is the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. My talk will begin at 5.30pm on Wednesday 18 January. Full details of my talk can be found here. All are welcome, but those wishing to attend should book a free ticket via Eventbrite or email archives@churchofengland.org not later than 15th January.
Historical perspectives on business power and influence This Special Issue will address questions of business influence on policy formation, business organizations’ political activity, and business power. These are all topics of burgeoning scholarly interest. One reason for this growth in attention is the current political landscape. It is frequently assumed that interest and lobby groups have privileged access to political decision makers. This is not a new phenomenon, however. Both in the US and the EU, the significant role of lobby groups in the political system is recognized and well documented. Business and other lobby groups’ advocacy organizations have an established place within the political system. However, changes have occurred in the lobbying practices of business and in its actual ability to influence decision-making, and in the platforms for and channels of corporate political activity. New investigations are needed.
Lately, these topics have also been analyzed within the field of business history (e.g. Pitteloud 2021; Rollings 2021; Wuokko et al 2021; Eichenberger et al 2022). For example, Eichenberger et al (2022) addresses the role of organized business in the international arena in their pursuit of shaping global capitalism and globalization. Business interest associations (BIAs) and big business do not only aim to shape national policies, but also to affect the broader national and international institutional environment. This Special Issue contributes to this growing field.
Both business historians and those in the social sciences, have also noticed the difficulties in investigating these topics empirically. How do we detect influence? How do we measure it? How do we show the occurrence (or absence) of influence in a distinct and certain manner? Political scientist Andreas Dür and colleagues have addressed the challenges of defining, diagnosing, and measuring influence and power (esp. Dür 2008; Dür et al 2019; Pritoni 2015). Matt Grossman (2012) notes that scholars often have difficulties in consistently demonstrating interest groups’ influence on policy. Influence can occur through other channels than direct lobbying, for example by indicating potential (negative or positive) future consequences from specific decisions. In general, the lobbying success and lobbying strategies are dependent on the institutional context (see, e.g. Mahoney 2008).
The concept of power is also complex and therefore often avoided by historians entirely. As stated by Neil Rollings (2021), business historians acknowledge business power, but often leave it out of their analysis and “lurking” in the background. On the other hand, historians have some advantages. Historians often focus on the long-term, on temporal change, and on the political and institutional context (Grossman 2012; Hojnacki et al 2012). Historians often engage in-depth empirical work. As a result, there is huge potential for analyzing how the arenas and the means of wielding business influence have changed over time.
BIA’s influence, and its power, needs to be assessed, problematized and nuanced by new scholarship. Overall, BIAs are considered to be in general both strong and powerful. Big business and BIAs have better access to policy makers and better resources than many other advocacy groups (Dür 2008). Key industry also often holds structural power by, for example, deciding on where and when to invest (Bernhagen 2007). These factors do not mean that other groups would not be influential, or that it would be easy for BIAs to exercise influence. The capability of business to influence policymaking is almost certainly a more complex issue than has been asserted previously.
Some empirical research even suggests that lobbying and efforts to influence policy makers often have quite little direct effects (e.g. Baumgartner et al 2009). Grossman (2012) shows in an analysis of previous research that the studies more often identify other groups than BIAs as being influential for specific policy changes in the US. Effective group mobilization, large resources, or access to decision-makers do not necessarily lead to influence. There are limits to business associations’ influence, and the degree of influence varies between different policy areas, between countries, and over time. Business groups also need to be adaptive rather than active and confrontational (e.g. Paster 2017).
These complex and challenging phenomena call for in-depth historical and empirical studies of the transformations and varieties of business power. Overall, research into the significance, impact, and power of business interest organizations in historical perspective would benefit from a greater engagement with historical approaches. These can reveal temporal transformations in power and influence, and the connected adaptation of these groups. Historical research can contribute to this field by providing analyses that are deeply contextualized and cover longer periods of time and/or significant transformations. Business historical research also put a welcome focus on business organizations, industries, firms, and business leaders and by doing so, shed new light on corporate actors’ activities.
While challenging, business historians have recently attempted to adopt theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches from neighboring fields. This is a revitalizing approach to the field and has opened it up for fruitful cross-fertilization between various scholarly disciplines. Methods from other fields need to be adapted carefully to suit the needs of historical inquiry. Adopting new approaches has increased the awareness of the methodological problems and given new insights into how the obstacles can be solved. Broader discussions within the business history field on methodological problems are still few. The aim of this Special Issue is – besides presenting new empirical findings – to bring together a variety of methodological solutions that business historians have adopted. By doing so, it lays the foundation for a more coherent debate.
Possible topics and themes
The Special Issue brings together papers on empirically well-designed studies with explicit methodological discussions. The papers should explicitly discuss the methodology that has been utilized and the strengths and weaknesses of the chosen approach. No temporal or geographical limits are set. On the contrary, we encourage papers covering various time periods and different geographical locations.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
empirical studies detecting platforms for BIA and big business’ access to policymakers, and other channels for influence, and changes in these;
empirical studies of different policy areas, where influence has occurred (or not occurred), and efforts to trace, and possibly measure, the influence with new and innovative source materials and/or methods;
analyses of changes in business power over time and how this has affected businesses’ and business organizations’ political activities and efforts to influence policy-making;
analyses of how interest and policy preferences are formed in the business community, including how they are formulated to tie into political goals and BIAs’ changing lobby strategies;
analyses of how the political and administrative system and/or industrial/corporate structures have affected the possibilities and ways to exercise influence in political process.
Submission Instructions This is an open call for papers/submissions.
Deadline for submissions is 31st March 2023 via Business History electronic submission form ScholarOnline. Please indicate that the submission is intended for this Special issue.
We also intend to organize an on-line workshop/Paper Development Workshop with those papers that has passed the first round of the referee process, in late spring/early autumn 2023.
The number of papers include in this Special Issue will be 6 or 7 and they shall be based on original research. None of the papers should have been published previously. All papers pass a normal double-blinded peer review process.
Any inquiries should be addressed to Susanna Fellman, susanna.fellman@econhist.gu.se or Maiju Wuokko maiju.wuokko@helsinki.fi . The executive editor for this Special Issue is Victoria Barnes.
Catherine Welch (welchc@tcd.ie), Trinity College Dublin
Supervising Editor: Rebecca Piekkari (rebecca.piekkari@aalto.fi), Aalto University, School of Business
Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2023
Introduction
International business in all its forms, whether cross-border activities by multinational companies or non-equity forms of investment, and the international environment it operates in is shaped by the historical legacies of countries and their international relations. The analysis of historical data played an important role in early stages of the development of international business…
Historical Perspectives on Deglobalization’s Antecedents, Outcomes, and Managerial Responses
AS: I am reposting the Call for Papers for the JMS SI on Deglobalization that has now appeared on the website of the Society for the Advancement of Management studies– the charity that publishes JMS. This call for papers will likely interest many of the business historians who read this blog. JMS is, of course, a prestigious management journal that is on the FT50 list. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the issue of deglobalization is a pressing one that is currently facing policymakers, managers, consumers (geopolitically-induced deglobalization seems to be contributing to inflation and shortages), and increasing, theorists in management schools. The term deglobalization appears frequently in the business press (for some examples from just the last few days, please here, here, and here). There is a lot of evidence we are in another deglobalization episode and there is therefore a very strong case to support the claim that historical research into previous examples of deglobalization has the potential to produce research findings that are both theoretically important and potentially interesting to a wide range of research stakeholders.
Submission Deadline: 1 July 2023
Guest Editors:
Marcelo Bucheli (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
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
Daniel Raff, University of Pennsylvania and NBER: dan raff@wharton.upenn.edu
Andrew Smith, University of Liverpool: adasmith@liverpool.ac.uk
Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia: heidi.tworek@ubc.ca
SPECIAL ISSUE EVENTS
Pre-submission
Online workshops for individuals interested in submitting to the Special Issue will be held in the autumn of 2022. Potential contributors are strongly encouraged to attend at least one of these workshops, which will be held at times to accommodate researchers in different time zones. The guest editors will discuss the aims and scope of the Special Issue and will answer questions from potential contributors at these workshops. Those interested in attending these Zoom workshops should prepare a two-slide PowerPoint presentation that succinctly describes the aims of the paper they are planning to submit.
Post-submission
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.
REFERENCES
Aguilera, R., Henisz, W., Oxley, J. E. and Shaver, J. M. (2019). ‘Special issue introduction: International strategy in an era of global flux’. Strategy Science, 4, 61-69.
Argyres, N. S., De Massis, A., Foss, N. J., Frattini, F., Jones, G. and Silverman, B. S. (2020). ‘History-informed strategy research: The promise of history and historical research methods in advancing strategy scholarship’. Strategic Management Journal, 41, 343-68.
Boon, M. and Wubs, B. (2020). ‘Property, control and room for manoeuvre: Royal Dutch Shell and Nazi Germany, 1933–1945’. Business History, 62, 468-87.
Boussebaa, M. and Brown, A. D. (2017). ‘Englishization, identity regulation and imperialism’. Organization Studies, 38, 7-29.
Boussebaa, M., Sinha, S. and Gabriel, Y. (2014). ‘Englishization in offshore call centers: A postcolonial perspective’. Journal of International Business Studies, 45, 1152-69.
Buckley, P. J. (2020). ‘The theory and empirics of the structural reshaping of globalization’. Journal of International Business Studies, 51, 1580-92.
Buckley, P. J. (2021). ‘The role of history in international business: Evidence, research practices, methods and theory’. British Journal of Management, 32, 797-811.
Casson, M. and da Silva Lopes, T. (2013). ‘Foreign direct investment in high-risk environments: An historical perspective’. Business History, 55, 375-404.
Doh, J. P., Dahan, N. M. and Casario, M. (2022). ‘MNEs and the practice of international business diplomacy’. International Business Review, 31, 101926.
Donzé, P. Y. (2020). ‘The Advantage of Being Swiss: Nestlé and Political Risk in Asia during the Early Cold War, 1945–1970’. Business History Review, 94, 373-97.
Donzé, P. Y. and Kurosawa, T. (2013). ‘Nestlé coping with Japanese nationalism: Political risk and the strategy of a foreign multinational enterprise in Japan, 1913–45’. Business History, 55, 1318-38.
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Business History is an international journal concerned with the long-run evolution and contemporary operation of business systems and enterprises. Its primary purpose is to make available the findings of advanced research, empirical and conceptual, into matters of global significance, such as corporate organization and growth, multinational enterprise, business efficiency, entrepreneurship, technological change, finance, marketing, human resource management, professionalization and business culture.
The journal has won a reputation for academic excellence and has a wide readership amongst management specialists, economists and other social scientists and economic, social, labour and business historians.
Business History: The emerging agenda
The core strategy of Business History is to promote business history as a sui generis scholarly discipline, engaging on an equal footing with mainstream history and the wider social sciences. To achieve this, the journal…
I’m very proud to announce that my PhD student won the Coleman Prize of the Association of Business Historians (ABH). The prize, which is awarded annually to the best PhD thesis in the field of business history, is named in honour of the late D.C. Coleman. Congratulations to Ian, and to the other candidates short-listed for this prize.
On the 1st of July, the Association of Business Historians (ABH) held the Coleman Prize session which featured four excellent presenters: Ian Jones, Nicolaas Strydom, Jeannette Strickland, and Gaurav Pratap Sud. The eventual winner was Ian Jones with his thesis titled Using the past: Authenticity, reliability, and the role of archives in Barclays plc’s use of the past strategies. Ian’s thesis was completed at the University of Liverpool and he was supervised by Dr Margaret Procter and Dr Andrew Smith and Barclays Group Archivists Maria Sienkiewicz. Ian’s thesis analyses the role of Barclays Group Archives (BGA) in the delivery of Barclays’ strategic objectives, abstract below:
Recent scholarship in organisation studies has begun to address how organisations perceive and use their history. However, how organisations preserve and access their history, and how this affects how they are able to use their history is less researched. This thesis investigates how Barclays…
The main theme of the mid-year Business History Conference virtual conference is research methods. It looks like a really important event that should interest all business historians. Fees to participate will be “modest”, we are told.
The theme for the 2022 BHCMid-Year Conference is “Method and Madness: Reinventing Business History in a New Age of Extremes.” The one-day conference will be organized around three sets of 1.5 hour workshops. The first set of workshops will examine new sources and new uses of old sources in business history research. Sessions will include the uses of visual materials, legal records, account books, and big data, among other sources. The second set of workshops will cover interpretive and analytical techniques, including the interpretation of senses, network analysis, and the rhetorical uses of history. The third set of workshops will cover changes in the representation and dissemination of business history, including both conventional formats (books, scholarly articles) and newer formats (podcasts, social media, etc).
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The Past Speaks 