I just finished a fantastic two-day conference at EDHEC business school. I would like to thank the EDHEC Family Business Centre for organizing such a stimulating event  that included purely academic sessions, meetings with practitioners, and a behind-the-scenes tour of Les Galleries Lafayette.

I would particularly like to thank Prof. Fabian Bernhard for pointing me in the direction of an important paper that had previously escaped by attention. Kammerlander, N., Dessì, C., Bird, M., Floris, M., & Murru, A. (2015). The impact of shared stories on family firm innovation: A multicase study. Family Business Review, 28(4), 332-354.

In 2000, the Canadian government began investing resources in a project to attract top international researchers to Canadian universities. The Canadian Research Chair program essentially gives money to universities to allow them to induce promising and accomplished researchers to relocate to Canada. The creation of this program was motivated by a belief that Canadian universities were  losing talent to wealthier universities in other countries, chiefly the United States. The program may also have been inspired by the seminal 1997 book The War for Talent, although I don’t know whether McKinsey consultants actually played a role in its design (readers with insider knowledge are welcome to contribute in the comments section below). In any event, the creators of this program, who were in the centre-left Liberal government of the day, were aware that universities play a very important role in nurturing innovation and anchoring clusters. (Everyone knows that Stanford University played a crucial role in the rise of Silicon Valley). During the 1990s, there were complaints that Canadian universities were losing their top researchers to other countries and  that this loss of talent was ultimately going to undermine Canada’s capacity to raise the global research profile of its universities, engage in R&D,  and create entrepreneurial ecosystems. The Canada Research Chair project was thus a logical and targeted response to this perceived problem.  The CRC program has since been emulated by other countries, most notably by China’s famous Thousand Talents program, which provides big bucks to foreign researchers willing to move to Chinese universities.

More recently, a number of exogenous forces began to help Canada to compete more successfully in the global war for talent. In the wake of the UK’s vote to leave the EU, many foreign academics working in British universities have expressed the desire to leave the country. The people who are speaking of leaving include both researchers from continental Europe as well as British academics who fear that Brexit and the xenophobic policies associated with it, such as the plans to dramatically slash the number of international students the UK admits each year, will endanger the finances of their employers.  The need to capitalize on the narrow window of opportunity associated with Brexit by poaching top researchers from the UK has been discussed by the Presidents of the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo, two important hubs for innovation (see here). Then there is the Trump effect—US academics seeking to leave the country due to the election of a President who is xenophobic and, more importantly, is likely to cut budgets for science and technology. Canada’s current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is known throughout the world (unlike his immediate predecessors who had close to zero name recognition outside of Canada) and has helped to make Canada’s  place brand even better. (Shortly before the final round of the French presidential election, I heard some French people joke that if Le Pen wins, they would move to Quebec and live in Justin Trudeau’s house).  I’m currently at a conference at EDHEC Business School in France and can attest that Canada is today regarded as a very attractive employment destination by many European management academics. The Atlantic, a US magazine, just published an article on whether the Toronto-Waterloo corridor can ever become Silicon Valley North. As the article notes, there is tremendous interest in the potential of this innovation hub.

In an uncharacteristically swift move,  the Canadian government announced in early April that it was going to create 150 new endowed research chairs to bring the world’s best researchers to Canada.  The government selected the number 150 to refer to the 150^th anniversary of the creation of Canadian state in 1867. The real reason for this sudden investment, I suspect is all of the factors discussed in the previous paragraph.

Let me quote from the press release:

The Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, announced today at the University of Waterloo that the Government of Canada will invest $117.6 million over eight years for the new Canada 150 Research Chairs program. The program provides one-time funding in celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary. It is designed to attract approximately 25 internationally esteemed researchers and Canadian expatriates who wish to relocate to Canada so they can further knowledge in the sciences, technology, health, engineering and the social sciences and humanities.

The Canada 150 Research Chairs program will be open to top-tier international scholars and researchers from across all disciplines, including Canadian expatriates.

The Government anticipates that the drive to recruit new chairs will take months, not years

The press release suggests that the Canadian government is going to act swiftly and boldly to take advantage of the situation. Indeed, reading the press release would cause one to think that it had been prepared by the government of Singapore, a nation characterised by a thoroughly modern and professional approach to policy implementation.

Now just a few weeks later, the Canadian government announced that the entire Canada Research Chair program may be scrapped unless universities agree to fulfil some sort of equity mandate by filling more of the positions thereby created with women and members of certain domestically-defined ethnic minority populations.  By calling this entire program into question, the Canadian government reduced the incentive to academics to invest time in applying for jobs under this scheme. This lack of policy coherence is astonishing to me. The ability of the Canadian government to disappoint through the shoddy implementation of policies never ceases to disappoint me.

Now if the Canadian government was truly serious about recruiting the best and the brightest to its universities, it would change the immigration laws so that Canadian academic job ads no longer contain the alienating and vaguely xenophobic words:

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply, however, Canadian Citizens and Permanent Residents will be given priority. 

The policy represented by these words is ignored by most of the U15 universities anyway and all it does is to suggest that potential applicants that Canada is a place where factors other than professional competence are considered when hiring for academic jobs.

My co-author Margaret Procter will be presenting our paper at a conference at the Federal Reserve of Saint Louis (see picture above).  The theme of the conference is Innovative Solutions for Banks and Financial Archives. The title of our paper is “Accounts with Interest:” An Interdisciplinary Research Project at Barclays Group Archives.  The paper falls into the broad category of “the uses of the past” and considers how banks can make use of the historical information in their archives so as to better achieve their objectives. The project is designed to speak to the interest of scholars in strategy and archive science as well as practitioners.  Our co-authors are Maria Sienkiewicz of Barclays and Ian Jones, my excellent PhD student.

The conference in St Louis looks very interesting, as the other speakers include the renowned historian Harold James, leading economic historians such as Michael Bordo, Larry Neal, and Eugene N. White as well professional archivists from such organizations as the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements.

The full programme is here.

Unfortunately, I can’t be at this event, as I’m at the 2017 Family Business Conference, which is running at EDHEC business school in Lille today and then in Paris tomorrow.

Making the Canadian Constitution:  the Fathers of Confederation

Benjamin Oliphant  (@BenOliphant) is a Vancouver-based lawyer and writer (see Google Scholar profile here), whose work focuses on constitutional, administrative, labour and employment law. He is also an adjunct professor at the UBC Allard School of Law. He has published a very interesting piece on Originalism, Beer, and Interprovincial Trade Barriers in Policy Options, a Canadian outlet.  His piece, which discusses the R. v. Comeau court case (see my blog posts about being the expert witness in this case here), talks about the competing schools of thought about how to interpret the text of written constitutions– “originalism” versus the “living tree approach”. This seemingly arcane issue was very relevant to this case, because while the text of the 1867 Canadian constitution clearly mandates that there should be free trade within the Canadian federation, Canadian courts have often interpreted this text in a fashion that authorizes the existence of internal trade barriers).  To lawyers of a certain school of thought, this mode of interpreting the constitution seems totally logical. To someone who has a PhD in history from a history department,  and was thus socialised to think about the past in a particular fashion, this conclusion seems totally bizarre– at odds which what the primary sources say.

There are many disciplines that involve studying the past- law, of course, but also political science, economic history, international relations, sociology, as well as what I call “history-department history.” Each of these disciplines has its own internal debates about methodology and but also a set of shared assumptions about how to think about the events in the past. I suppose as I’ve matured as a scholar, I’ve become more accepting of the use of these different disciplinary lenses for viewing the past. I’ve become far more methodologically tolerant, especially since I started teaching management. (In between teaching in a history department and working in a business school I had a brief spell teaching International Relations students).

Benjamin Oliphant

I’ve been asked a few times whether I’m an originalist. I was first asked that more than a decade ago.  I’ve always replied “No, I’m just a historian who knows a great deal about the making of the Canadian constitution and the business history of that era.” In fact, the first time I was asked this question by a lawyer, I wasn’t entirely certain what the term originalism meant.

My curiosity stimulated, I’ve since done some reading on what “originalism” means in US, Canadian, and Australian constitutional jurisprudence (see here, here, here, and here). The philosophy of originalism differs in subtle and important ways between these three countries and has evolved over time, as this recent piece by a US history-department historian named Jonathan Gienapp shows. Gienapp, who is a young man, appears to be a methodologically intolerant history-department historian, as he insists that originalist legal scholars have waged a decades-long war against the “methods of history” — by which he appears to me the ways of interpreting history that are derived from Leopold von Ranke and which have been taught in US graduate programmes since the 19th century.   Despite what Gienapp says, it seems to me that some forms of originalism, particularly what Gienapp calls Originalism 1.0, are indeed  consistent with the rules of evidence/modes of inquiry that are taught in graduate programmes in history in English-speaking countries.  Of course, these modes of inquiry aren’t the only legitimate way of approaching the past, as Gienapp’s colleague Dave Donaldson, the winner of the 2017 John Bates Clark Medal, would doubtless attest!

Anyway, Oliphant’s piece is interesting reading. If you are interested in the underlying issues, I would also check out the 2013 C.D. Howe’s Institute paper Beer, Barristers, and Butter— a great title by the way.

Arnold Kling, a US libertarian economist and blogger, has posted some thoughts about the differences between the US and Canadian banking systems. His conclusions:

1. The best part of Canadian banking is their mortgage design.

2. The worst part of Canadian banking is the high concentration in large banks. As in Europe, this goes along with a very stunted equity market. Firms raise capital using debt, and they owe that debt to big banks. The U.S. system, with its much more prominent stock markets, is better.

3. The worst part of the U.S. financial system is the political power of trade associations and large banks. 

4. Over the last thirty years, we have seen a decline in the relative importance of the stock market in the U.S… Household wealth also has become more highly concentrated.

I’m not at all certain why Kling believes that the greater prominence of the US stock market is a good thing. Anyway, for readers interested in learning more about the comparative evolution of the banking systems of the two countries, I would recommend From Wall Street to Bay Street: The Origins and Evolution of American and Canadian Finance By Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin

From the publisher’s blurb:
From Wall Street to Bay Street is the first book for a lay audience to tackle the similarities and differences between the financial systems of Canada and the United States. Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin reveal the different paths each system has taken since the early nineteenth-century.

Joseph E. Martin is the Director of the Canadian Business and Financial History Initiative at the Rotman School of Management as well as President Emeritus of Canada’s History Society.

The late Christopher Kobrak was the Wilson/Currie Chair of Canadian Business and Financial History at the Rotman School of Management as well as a professor emeritus of finance at ESCP, Paris.

Amazon link is here.

AS: One of the best places on earth do a PhD in Business History right now is Copenhagen Business School. I’m therefore very happy to share this announcement, which concerns opportunities to do funded PhD research at CBS in a variety of fields, including business history.

PhD Scholarships in “Time and Societal Challenges in a Changing Global Economy”

PhD Scholarships in “Time and Societal Challenges in a Changing Global Economy”

Copenhagen Business School invites applications for 6 vacant PhD scholarships within the field of “Time and Societal Challenges in a Changing Global Economy”. The successful applicants will be organized as a cross-departmental cohort with a number of common PhD courses and other activities such as workshops. The positions will be based in the four Departments associated with the OMS Doctoral School: Department of Business and Politics (DBP), Department of Organisation (IOA), Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy (MPP) and Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC).

Theme of the Cohort

The notions of time and temporality have increasingly become the object of study across the social sciences. Temporality refers to the linear progression of time, historicity, the perception of time, processes of sequencing and order and rates of change as well as the social organization of time. In sociology, for instance, it is becoming increasingly recognized that existing theoretical frameworks, largely rooted in traditional approaches, do not adequately explain the active role of time in a globalizing economy. In the political sciences, the historicity of practices, norms and political ideas and the concept of “political time” have received increased attention particularly in association with questions about the character of continuity and change. Furthermore, analyses of the ways in which political, institutional and ideational processes unfold over time are central to the study of political economy and the shaping of policy processes. Also, in the area of Business Studies, there is an increasing turn of attention to the strategic use of historical narratives in corporate action.

The work of the cohort will challenge prevailing chronological, linear and sequential theories of time in politics and the study of organizations to embrace an active and dynamic view of time. Using innovative theories and methods, it will seek to explain how and why temporal dynamics shape and impact contemporary challenges. These challenges include, for example, globalizing and de-globalizing processes, state capacities in an era of limited economic growth, and the changing relationships between actors, organizations and the institutional frameworks. A particular focus will be put on how temporal structures and processes of sequencing constrain, but at times also empower individual and collective actors (e.g. business, workers, policy makers, civil society representatives), and the ways in which, within that context, those actors seek to reconfigure past, present and future. The work of the cohort will furthermore explore how processes of temporal construction affect the interactions between different actors and institutions in the context of these challenges.

The proposed PhD cohort will draw upon central ideas in philosophy, sociology, political science, history, cultural studies and organization theory. Although students may choose to write a PhD within a particular disciplinary perspective they will be encouraged to draw upon some of the other disciplines that will be utilized and explored within the cohort. We see this interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary cohort which is expected to use a range of innovative theoretical frameworks and sound research designs (including qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods alongside experimental approaches) as the only viable way forward in new research endeavors. There will be a shared understanding that differences in temporalities constituted by factors such as past and future time horizons, mechanisms of connecting past and future in the present, pace and acceleration of change, lead to increased temporal complexity.

Pool of possible topics within the overall theme

Department of Business and Politics (DBP)

• The politics and history of social challenges in a comparative perspective (such as sustainability, inequality, 4th industrial revolution)

• The political economy of European crises: politics, polity and policy
Department of Organization (IOA)

• The role of time in organizing for societal challenges

• Organizational time, learning and innovation

• Organizing time, routines and change
Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy (MPP)

• Time, history and entrepreneurship in a globalized world

• Time and transformations in private-public relations

• The philosophy of time and chronology
Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC)

• Temporality and talk-action dynamics in CSR

• Varieties of time perceptions attached to multi-stakeholder initiatives

• Colliding temporal orders and new forms of organizing

The PhD programme

The PhD programme at CBS is highly international. It allows you to conduct research under the supervision of CBS professors, supported by research training courses (30 ECTS points). You are expected to participate in international research conferences and spend time abroad as a visiting PhD student. For further information on the CBS PhD programme please consult this page: http://www.cbs.dk/en/research/phd-programmes/phd-skoler
It is also required that the applicant shows an interest in joining the respective Department’s research environment. You find information on the departments here: http://www.cbs.dk/en/research/departments-and-centres

CBS PhD graduates are held in high esteem not only in academia and research institutions but also in government and business where their research qualifications are increasingly demanded. One third of CBS PhD graduates go on to employment outside universities and public research institutions.

Copenhagen Business School has a broad commitment to the excellence, distinctiveness and relevance of its teaching and research programmes. Candidates who wish to join us should demonstrate enthusiasm for working in organization of this type (highlighting, for example, relevant business, educational and dissemination activities).

For further information please contact the head of department of the respective department:

• DBP: Prof MSO Caroline de la Porte +4538153550

• IOA: Prof MSO Signe Vikkelsø +4538152827

• MPP: Prof Lotte Jensen +4538153637

• MSC: Associate Prof Dorte Salskov-Iversen +4538153181
For administrative information please contact Henrik Hermansen +45 3815 3656, heh.mpp@cbs.dk.
General information

A PhD scholarship runs for a period of 3 years, and includes teaching obligations equivalent of 1⁄2 year’s work (840 work hours). The scholarships are fully salaried positions, according to the national Danish collective agreement. The scholarship includes the tuition fees, office space, travel grants plus a salary, currently starting with per month app. DKK 23.770 (app. 3,160 euro) up to DKK 28.964 (app. 3,860 euro) depending on seniority, plus a pension contribution totaling 17,1 % of 85 per cent of the base salary.

The salary level and appointment is determined by the Ministry of Finance’s collective agreement with the Central Academic Organization.

The PhD student will be enrolled at the PhD School in Organization and Management Studies (OMS). To be considered, the candidate should have a degree at the Masters level (similar to the 3 + 2 Bologna process). An educational background in philosophy, sociology, political science, history, cultural studies and organization theory or related fields is necessary. The applicant must have successfully completed the Master’s degree before commencing a PhD at CBS. The applicants must be fluent in English.
The application must include a 5 page research proposal following the guidelines available here: http://www.cbs.dk/en/research/phd-programmes/admission
In addition to the research proposal, the application must include copies of a Master’s degree certificate or other certificates of a corresponding level, brief curriculum vitae (CV), a list of papers and publications, and one copy of a selected written work (e.g. Master’s thesis). Applicants must enclose documentation for English language skills if not mother tongue.
Recruitment procedure

The Recruitment Committee will shortlist applicants. The shortlisted applicants will be assessed by the Assessment Committee. All applicants will be notified of their status in the recruitment process shortly after the application deadline.

The applicants selected for assessment will be notified about the composition of the Assessment Committee and later in the process about the result of the assessment.

Once the recruitment process is completed each applicant will be notified of the outcome of their application.

The successful applicants are expected to start their position on September 1 2017.

Closing date: June 1, 2017

Copenhagen Business School must receive all application material, including all appendices (see items above), by the application deadline.

Details about Copenhagen Business School and the departments are available at www.cbs.dk

As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, there are an increasingly number of data points that support the thesis that economic nationalism is on the rise and that political developments may be contributing to the ongoing process of deglobalization. Brexit and the election of Trump are perhaps the most famous of these events.  Public intellectuals and business people are now talking about deglobalization as never before (see here). I’ve also pointed out that academics in business schools have yet to provide managers with concrete and practical advice about how to manage the political risks associated with elevated levels of economic nationalism and protectionist sentiment.  For instance, one of my blog posts critiqued Michael Witt, a political scientist at INSEAD, for failing to give managers advice that was non-obvious and useful. Here’s what I wrote

Late last year,  Dr Witt wrote two pieces in which he pondered what deglobalization means for multinational firms. His first piece did an admirable job of summarizing the political science literature on globalization and deglobalization and tells people how two of the three main schools of thought in IR (Realism and Liberalism) view these phenomena. Somewhat curiously, Witt doesn’t say much as about Constructivism, another interpretative tradition in IR, which is unfortunate since constructivism has a great deal  to offer here. Anyway,  his second piece, which was published a week after the first one, sought to offer concrete advice to business executives interested in this topic. Sadly, the main pieces of managerial advice he provided weren’t that useful to managers

I am, therefore, glad that my fellow business historians are now preparing to enter the conversation and to give advice to managers. A special panel on historical perspectives on managerial responses to rising nationalism will be held at this year’s American Academy of Management conference in Atlanta.  Business historians have written extensively about how firms managed previous episodes of deglobalization and my impression is that this panel will draw on this research. In a sense, the panel in Atlanta will complement a recent British Academy of Management event that was held in the city of Coventry. (A few months ago, I blogged about the unfortunate choice of venue for this otherwise excellent event, which included such speakers at  Steven McGuire, University of Sussex, Thomas Lawton, Open University Business School, and Neil Rollings,  University of Glasgow).

My hope is that the events in Coventry and Atlanta will result in publications that give advice to practitioners that goes beyond simply stating the obvious (e.g., “in times of elevated political risk, consider creating an in-house department for engaging in political risk analysis”). Given the calibre of the scholars who attended the two events, I’m very optimistic that high quality manager-relevant research outputs will emerge. It also occurs to me that the volume of the extant business-historical research on managerial responses to rising levels of economic nationalism may now be sufficient to support a meta-analysis paper targetted at a journal such as the International Journal of Management Reviews.

Anyway, here are the details.

Sunday  10.30-12.00pm, Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Spring
Chair: Daniel Wadhwani, U. of the Pacific

Panelist: Matthias Kipping, Schulich School of Bus, York U.

Panelist: Takafumi Kurosawa, Kyoto U.

Panelist: Stephanie Decker, Aston Business School

History can provide management scholars with a unique lens for understanding the current rise of nationalism, and the choices that businesses, managers, and entrepreneurs face in response to those changes. In part, this is because both supporters and critics of the current wave of nationalism point to historical examples and their consequences in justifying their positions. But, even more so, historical waves of globalization and de- globalization allow us a mirror for reflecting on the options and consequences that both policymakers and managers face today. For instance, on the eve of World War I, much of the world economy was economically integrated, with the relatively free mobility of firms, people, and capital across borders. This earlier wave of global integration fell apart with the rise of nationalism and nationalist policies during the interwar period, and a different kind of globally integrated economy had to be rebuilt by policymakers and businesspeople in the post-World War II world. This panel will discuss the lessons of such earlier waves of nationalism and de-globalization for our own time. It draws together four leading business historians, with expertise in four different regions of the world as well as in different aspects of management research. The panel will examine how rising nationalism affected not only the global context in which managers operated, but also consider its implications for business strategy, organizational behavior, social and political legitimacy, labor mobility and entrepreneurship. The goal of the panel will remain focused on the relevance of history for understanding managerial choices and consequences in the face of nationalism in our own time.