I’m looking forward the Business History Conference in Denver, Colorado. Here are the details of my panel.

A Commodity Cartels
Location TBA
Chair: Richard John, Columbia University
Discussant: Espen Storli, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Andrew D. Smith, University of Liverpool Management School
“An Evolutionary Economics Perspective on the Liverpool Timber Cluster, 1810-1913”

Elina Kuorelahti, University of Helsinki
“Small States, Big Risks: Nordic Diplomacy and the European Timber Cartel in the 1930s”

Malin Dahlström, University of Gothenburg
“The European Cement Cartel–A Swedish Cartel?”

This video is amusing and will delight any academic who is a parent and who has done media interviews with a child in the next room.

The way the mother in the video slides into the room reminds me of the character Kramer from the 1990s TV show Seinfeld.

AS: I’m drawing your attention to an important business-historical article that recently appeared in Human Relations, a journal that has been added to the prestigious FT50 list.

Stoyan V. Sgourev and Wim van Lent. “When too many are not enough: Human resource slack and performance at the Dutch East India Company (1700–1795).” Human Relations (2017): 0018726717691340.

Slack is an elusive concept in organizational research, with studies documenting a variety of relationships between slack and firm performance. We advocate treating slack not as a resource, but as a practice – a sequence of events and responses over time. A longitudinal analysis of the Dutch East India Company (1700–1795) highlights the use of slack as a response to a resource constraint (the shortage of skilled labor). After documenting the negative performance effects of skill shortage, we identify a trade-off in the use of human resource slack (number of sailors above what is operationally required), in which slack enhanced operational reliability, but reduced efficiency. Derived from a historical context, this trade-off has contemporary relevance and is helpful in reconciling contradictory evidence on slack.

Is it simply to maximize shareholder value? No, according to the Modern Corporation Project, which has produced an excellent video that explains the problems with shareholder value ideology in simple terms that would be accessible to a first-year undergraduate.

I’m sharing the video here in case it is useful to any of my readers in their teaching work.

Incidentally, some of the people behind the video have submitted a response to the UK Government’s Green Paper on Corporate Governance reform. Their paper, which was produced by a team of authors based at Cass Business School, Frank Bold and Sheffield Institute of Corporate and Commercial Law, can be downloaded here.

The Economic Times has published a short but interesting story about how India’s Tata Group uses its corporate archives in Pune to maintain its competitive advantage. This story is particularly interesting to me for while there is a growing body of literature on how firms in the West and in Japan use history,  much less has been published about the uses of the past in emerging market multinationals.

More information about the Tata Central Archives can be found here.

AS: I’m sharing this CFP for a very interesting workshop on the history of time preferences. The CFP is particularly important in light of the ongoing research on so-called patient capital, which is the subject of the current issue of the Socio-Economic Review.

I haven’t yet read the paper mentioned in the CFP, so I’m wondering whether the focus of the workshop will be solely on cross-national and cross-temporal variations in the time preferences of individuals or whether changes in the revealed time preferences of business corporations and other large organizations will also be a theme of the workshop. I ask because the time preferences of US corporations appear to have changed dramatically in the last generation (for the current debates on short-termism, see here, here, and here) while there isn’t much evidence that the mix of time preferences among the individuals who make up the US population. The evidence that US corporations have short time-horizons than they did in, say, 1980 suggests that changes in the systems for aggregating the time-preferences of different stakeholders (e.g., the corporate governance system) are the key variable here.

Anyway, the CFP is below:

Call for Papers on ‘Time Preference and Time Horizon in Historical Perspective’ There is a growing body of evidence that patience is an important driver of economic performance. Societies with a stronger ability to look into the future and save for the future are probably more prosperous in the long run. And for the transition towards a sustainable economy it is crucial to understand how present generations can take the interests of future generations into account. But what determines ‘time preference’ – the degree to which the (distant) future is taking into account – and ‘time horizon’ – the end of the period in the future that is still considered relevant for current decision making? How have the way we look into the future changed over time – from hunter gatherer societies via the spread of agriculture to today? And what explains spatial patterns in time preference and time horizon – why are certain societies more patient than others? And how can we measure such spatial differences and changes in time? Are interest rates a good guide? What are the causes and consequences of the recent rise of ‘short-termism’ among business leaders and politicians?

This is the subject of a workshop organized by the Centre for Global Economic History of Utrecht University in Stellenbosch (South Africa) on 6-7 November 2017.

A first attempt to review the literature and ideas about this topic can be found in the working paper on this subject by Gerarda Westerhuis and Jan Luiten van Zanden ‘Imagining the Future. Towards an Economic History of Time Preference and Time Horizon’ that can be mailed to you on request.

We welcome both detailed case studies (in particular relating to Sub Sahara Africa) and more general papers reviewing long term trends and/or global comparisons. Please send the abstract (500 words) of your paper before April 30 to: cgeh.workshops@uu.nl Gerarda Westerhuis and Jan Luiten van Zanden