The Past Speaks

This new book from Columbia University Press looks interesting.

In the 1960s and ’70s, a diverse range of storefronts—including head shops, African American bookstores, feminist businesses, and organic grocers—brought the work of the New Left, Black Power, feminism, environmentalism, and other movements into the marketplace. Through shared ownership, limited growth, and democratic workplaces, these activist entrepreneurs offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models. By the middle of the 1970s, thousands of these enterprises operated across the United States—but only a handful survive today. Some, such as Whole Foods Market, have abandoned their quest for collective political change in favor of maximizing profits.

Vividly portraying the struggles, successes, and sacrifices of these unlikely entrepreneurs,From Head Shops to Whole Foodswrites a new history of social movements and capitalism by showing how activists embraced small businesses in a way few historians have considered. The book challenges the widespread but mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace. Joshua Clark Davis uncovers the historical roots of contemporary interest in ethical consumption, social enterprise, buying local, and mission-driven business, while also showing how today’s companies have adopted the language—but not often the mission—of liberation and social change.

July 10-11th 2017, People’s History Museum, Manchester, Left Bank, Spinningfields, M3 3ER

Paper session 3: Communities, Crises and Survival.                                   Chair: Des Williamson. Location: Coal Store

John Singleton

Approaches to Safety Management in Early 20^th Century British Coal Mining

Jack Southern

Survival and protectionism: Industrial communities and cotton weaving in Lancashire c1850-1950

David Weir

One Family: Management and Crisis, the Men of 1914

The University of York is a leading centre for Science and Technology Studies in the UK. Business historians who do research on how future technologies were envisioned by actors will be particularly interested in the CFP for a conference on “Imagining the History of the Future.” I suspect that my friend and co-author Bernardo Batiz-Lazo will be particularly interested in this CFP.

UNIVERSITY OF YORK, UK, March 27-29, 2018

The future just isn’t what it used to be … not least because people keep changing it.

Recent years have seen a significant growth of academic and public interest in the role of the sciences in creating and sustaining both imagined and enacted futures. Technological innovations and emergent theoretical paradigms gel and jolt against abiding ecological, social, medical or economic concerns: researchers, novelists, cartoonists, civil servants, business leaders and politicians assess and estimate the costs of planning for or mitigating likely consequences. The trouble is that thinking about the future is a matter of perspective: where you decide to stand constrains what you can see

With confirmed plenary speakers Professor Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside, USA) and Professor Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent, UK) this three-day conference will bring together scholars, practitioners, and activists to explore ways in which different visions of the future and its history can be brought into productive dialogue.

Focused on the long technological 20th century (roughly, 1887-2007) and looking particularly at the intersections between fictional/narrative constructions of the future, expert knowledge and institutional policy development, the themes of the conference will include but are not limited to:

• The relationship between lay and expert futures, especially futures produced by communities marginalised in public dialogue by ethnicity, gender, sexuality, species or political orientation
• How have different forms of fiction (novels, films, games, comics) created different visions of what’s to come? How have their audiences responded to and shaped them?
• The role of counterfactuals/alternate histories, as well as factional accounts and popular science: how have different forms of writing positioned the future?
• What’s the relationship between past and present scenario planning in government or commerce? How have they fed into wider cultural conceptions of impending developments?
• Disciplinary influences: how have different academic disciplines – sciences, humanities, arts, social sciences – fed into developing futures? Has this changed over time?
• The role of futures past: how can we recover them, and what do they tell us about futures present? What are the forgotten or marginalised sites of future-making?
• How have different themes – time, the apocalypse, the individual, among others – changed over the last century of future-thinking?

We invite proposals based broadly on these themes. Individual papers should take the form of 20 minute presentations, but we would also be delighted to consider three or four paper panel submissions on a related topic, workshops or round-table discussions.

Proposals for individual papers should include an abstract of no more than 250 words, together with a short (100) word author bio. Panel proposals should also include a short (150 word) commentary on the overall theme. Please email proposals to unsettling-science@york.ac.uk (as email attachments in Word format) by FRIDAY 15th SEPTEMBER. Authors will be notified of decisions by Friday 27^th October. Prospective organisers of other formats should contact the organisers by email as soon as possible to discuss possibilities. Please direct all enquires to unsettling-science@york.ac.uk.

This is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded event, run by the Unsettling Scientific Stories project based at the Universities of York, Aberystwyth and Newcastle.

Further information can be found here and via twitter:@UnSetSciStories #ImaginedFutures

—

Dr Sam Robinson

AHRC Research Associate
Unsettling Scientific Stories Project

Department of Sociology

University of York

sam.robinson@york.ac.uk

Professor Henry Mintzburg has published a characteristically thoughtful blog post on the subject of Canada’s 150th anniversary. At the end of the post, he reveals that he is working on an edited collection entitled Another America: A Canadian Perspectives on World Issues.  “It is a collection of writings from prominent Canadians who for many years have been expressing themselves on a variety of important subjects in a remarkable cohesive way.”

I’m looking forward to reading this book.

In a few days, I will be heading to the EGOS 2017 conference in Copenhagen, where I’ll be presenting  a co-authored paper to Sub-theme 43: Theorizing the Past, Present and Future in Organization Theory.

Session V: Friday, July 07, 14:00 to 15:30, FG 2C3 (2nd floor) Chair: Mar Perezts

Andrew Smith and Daniel Simeone

Resisting colonialism: Indigenous social activists challenge the rhetorical history strategy of a Canadian conglomerate

Michael Conger and Stephen Lippmann

Uses of the past in a new market category: The case of micro-distilling in the U.S.

Pasi Ahonen

Organisational death and remembering: Newspapers as mediators of organizational memory and makers of mnemonic communities

I have two other co-authored papers on the programme.

One will be presented to sub-theme 20: Financialization and its Societal Implications: Rethinking Corporate Governance and Shareholders.

Session I: Thursday, July 06, 11:00 to 12:30, FG 1B11 (1st floor) History of Corporate Governance

Chair: Jeroen Veldman

Andrew Smith, Jason Russell and Kevin D. Tennent

Berle and Means’ ‘The Modern Corporation and Private Property’: The military roots of a stakeholder model of corporate governance

Discussant(s): Donncha Kavanagh, Martin Brigham and Nicholas Burton

Donncha Kavanagh, Martin Brigham and Nicholas Burton

Changing the rules of the game: recasting the legal and ethical foundation of business and management

Discussant(s): Kevin D. Tennent, Andrew Smith and Jason Russell

My third EGOS paper will be presented to sub-theme 44: Rethinking Management and Management History.

Session II: Thursday, July 06, 14:00 to 15:30, FG 2C5 (2nd floor) Business and Entrepreneurship History Chair: Michael Rowlinson

Ida Jørgensen

Business history as cultural history: A complimentary view

Presenter(s): Albert J. Mills / Amy Thurlow / Jean Helms Mills

Ellen Mølgaard Korsager , Andrew Smith, Talia Pfefferman and Zoi Pittaki

A Conceptual History of “The Entrepreneur” in Four Languages

Presenter(s): Eve Lamendour

Christina Lubinski and R. Daniel Wadhwani

New entrepreneurial history and international entrepreneurship: Exploring the intersections

Presenter(s): Patricia McLaren

The Association of Business Historians conference 2017 was a brilliant success thanks to the hard work of the organizing committee in Glasgow. In addition to the excellent academic sessions, the conference included many additional social events, including a Ceilidh. I’m sharing some images of both below.

@zoipittaki on the word ‘entrepreneur’ in four languages and the frequency of the use of the ‘entrepreneur’ #abh2017 #Glasgow Photo by Maelle Duchemin-Pell

@ewangibbs on US manufacturing multinationals in #Scotland #abh2017 #Glasgow

The Association of Business Historians conference is currently taking place in Glasgow. On 1 July (Canada Day), it will feature panel sponsored by the Canadian Business History Association called Perspectives on the Development of Capitalism in Canada

Chair: Emily Buchnea
Don Nerbas (Cape Breton University)
Enclosing the Colonial Commons on Cape Breton Island

Andrew Smith (University of Liverpool)
Resisting Colonialism: Indigenous Social Activists Challenge the Rhetorical History
Strategy of a Canadian Conglomerate

Jason Russell (Empire State College — State University of New York)

Management Education at Canadian Community Colleges: the 1960s to the 1990s

Moshik Temkin is an associate professor of history and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He recently published a piece in the New York Times on the limits of analogical historical reasoning.  He observes that the chaotic Trump presidency has increased the demand for the services of historians.

Donald Trump might be disastrous for most Americans and a danger to the world, but he has been a boon to historians. The more grotesque his presidency appears, the more historians are called on to make sense of it, often in 30-second blasts on cable news or in quick-take quotes in a news article.

Temkin notes that one of the most popular analogies used to understand Trump is the Nixon presidency. Temkin cautions against the use of this historical analogy and all of the other historical analogies currently being used to make sense of Trump. He writes that

We teach our students to be wary of analogies, which are popular with politicians and policy makers (who choose them to serve their agendas) but often distort both the past and the present.

I’m not certain who the “we” here is, but I think that Temkin is talking about the historical profession more generally.

Temkin correctly identifies some of the flaws in the particular historical analogies that have been used to understand the Trump presidency (Nixon, Huey Long, and Hitler). However, I think that he errs in questioning the general utility of the mode of reasoning known as historical analogy. That’s because nobody has ever tested in laboratory conditions whether analogical-historical reasoning produces superior or inferior decision. It is simply premature for Temkin or anyone else to declare that analogical-historical reasoning is a good or a bad way of thinking about complex systems.

Let me explain a bit more why I say that. Temkin is on solid ground when he stresses the potential dangers involved in using the heuristic of historical analogy.  Those dangers are real, as are the dangers of misusing mathematical reasoning or micro-economic reasoning or geographical metaphors or any other type of thinking. Temkin is clearly less supportive of this mode of reasoning than Barry Eichengreen, who has stressed the benefits of the use of analogical-historical thinking (see my previous blog post on the subject).  I certainly understand why Professor Temkin is inclined to be sceptical of analogical-historical reasoning. As Professor Temkin doubtless knows there is a large body of literature in political science on the use and misuse of historical analogy in decision-making and persuasion.  Within philosophy, there are debates about whether or why analogical reasoning is justified. I would encourage any social scientist interested in whether historical analogy is useful to look at the article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Analogy and Analogical Reasoning, particularly the material on analogy and Bayesian epistemology. Even though the work of philosophers in this area isn’t data driven at all, their speculations can help us to generate testable hypotheses.  I suspect that Temkin is coming at the issue of whether analogical-historical reasoning is legitimate from this general direction.

Temkin concludes his piece in the New York Times by declaring that analogical-historical thinking is inferior to other ways of using history to understand the present.  He asks “If analogies and comparisons with former American presidents and politicians are deeply flawed” ways of understanding the present,  how should history be used? He argues that decision-making should be informed not by historical analogy but by a knowledge of “social and political change over time — really the meat and potatoes of the historian’s craft”. He suggests that the best way to understand Trump is to study the history of such phenomena as the “worship of celebrity; the persistence of gender, racial and economic inequality; the devastation of foreign wars; voter suppression; and a political system that does not reflect the diversity or policy preferences of the American people.”

Let me be clear, I am open to the possibility that Temkin is right and that the types of historical thinking he favours produce better decisions than the types of historical reasoning he dislikes. In fact, my first reaction is to want to believe that he is correct about this point. He could be right about his hypothesis that analogical-historical reasoning produces bad decisions. However,  until we try to test this hypothesis, he claim will sit on a flimsy foundation.

The main problem with Temkin’s excessively skeptical view of analogical-historical reasoning is that nobody has ever tested the claim that reasoning by historical analogy is “good or bad”. Moreover, his extreme scepticism about analogical-historical reasoning appears to be inconsistent with the research findings in cognitive science and strategic management on the benefits and drawbacks of different types of analogical reasoning. I would encourage to Temkin to look at the research of his colleagues across the river at the Harvard Business School who have a more nuanced understanding of the conditions under which analogical reasoning can be useful to decision-makers.  The 2005 paper by Giovanni Gavetti and Jan W. Rivkin in the Harvard Business Review can be a highly accessible gateway to this literature.

People with PhDs in history like to claim that thinking historically produces better decisions. Until very recently, I repeated these claims uncritically. The problem with this assertion is that it has not yet been proved with anything beyond anecdotal data and testimonies for successful decision-makers who assert that historical knowledge helped them to think better. Until someone does some serious research to test the claims made about the utility of different types of historical knowledge and different types of historical thinking,  the claim that historical knowledge improves understanding of the world will, unfortunately, not be taken seriously. We know from an experiment done at Stanford in the early 1980s (see the 1981 paper by Thomas Gilovich) that priming experimental subjects by exposing them to historical analogies changes their decisions, but this research did not try to measure whether analogical-historical reasoning produced better decisions.

Clearly more research in this area is required.  I can see a whole research programme designed to answer the question of which forms of historical knowledge and historical reasoning produce better decisions. Such research, which would involve interdisciplinary teams, would clearly require the mobilization of serious resources. Perhaps a part of this research project could examine how historical knowledge interacts with biochemistry in shaping decision-making [Giving men a does of testosterone has a negative impact on their ability to correctly answer certain types of questions, as was demonstrated by Amos Nadler of the Richard Ivey School of Business and his co-authors] .

However, until we historians admit that do not yet know whether historical knowledge produces better decisions, we are unlikely to begin doing research experimental in this area. The first step towards gaining knowledge is to admit ignorance.

July 1st, the 150th anniversary of the creation of the Canadian federation, is rapidly approaching. In an interview yesterday with CBC Radio 1 Halifax’s Mainstreet Show, Shirley Tillotson of Dalhousie University was presented readers with an overview of why the London merchant bank called Baring Brothers was the “real” father of Confederation. Profesor Tillotson mentioned my research and that of Tom Naylor.