The Past Speaks

Techniques of the Corporation Conference

May 4-6, 2017
University of Toronto

How do corporations know themselves and their world? Over the last 150 years, corporations, like universities and laboratories, have generated an abundance of knowledge-making techniques in the form of psychological tests, efficiency technologies, scenario planning, and logistical systems. As dominant forms of the last century, corporations are assembled with instruments, infrastructures, and interventions that arrange and rearrange the dynamics of capitalism. These techniques of the corporation have filtered into our daily lives, influencing everyday understandings of self, inequality, environment, and society.

Techniques of the Corporation will assemble an interdisciplinary network of established and emerging scholars whose work contributes to the critical study of the techniques, epistemologies, and imaginaries of the 20th-century corporation. This conference aims to foster a timely conversation between Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches and the recent histories of capitalism. We treat the corporation in the same way that historians of science and STS scholars have approached science, colonialism, and militarism as generative sites for knowledge production, value-making, and technopolitics. The conference takes as its starting place North American corporations with the understanding that corporations are multinational forms with complex transnational histories. Building from the recent history of capitalism, we attend to the entangled genealogies of corporations with slavery, exploitation, environmental destruction, colonialism, and inequality.

Hosted by the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto, this event will be an intimate multi-day conversation between established and emerging scholars in the fields of STS, history of science, and the history of capitalism. Techniques of the Corporation will be headlined by keynote speaker Joseph Dumit, and features invited talks by Dan Bouk, Elspeth Brown, Deborah Cowen, Orit Halpern, Louis Hyman, Michelle Murphy, Martha Poon, and Elise Thorburn. The conference will be an immersive experience in the Greater Toronto Area with meals and cocktails provided.We invite emerging and established scholars in diverse fields (including business history; labour history; anthropology; geography; economic sociology; media studies; critical race studies; architecture studies; feminist and sexuality studies; environmental studies; and cultural studies) to explore the techniques, epistemologies, and imaginaries of corporations. Our overall goal is to crystallize a new field, culminating in a field-defining publication. We welcome work on corporate practices that exceed calculative logics, such as work on social relations, affective and psychological states, and speculative futurities. In addition to traditional papers, the conference encourages creative methods to query corporate forms, including art installations, videos, interactive multimedia projects, and role-playing games. Applications for travel assistance will be arranged after acceptance.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words and a CV to the conference organizers at corporatetechniques@gmail.com by 13 January 2017.

Corporate practices, include, but are not limited to:

AS: I have just discovered that Howard Aldrich, has blogged a short review of Ged Martin’s Past Futures: the Impossible Necessity of History (University of Toronto Press, 2004).Howard E. Aldrich received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is Kenan Professor of Sociology and an Adjunct Professor of Business at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Some book titles are so compelling that you’d feel guilty if you didn’t at least pick the book up and skim it. Such is the case with Ged Martin’s book, Past Futures: the Impossible Necessity of History (University of Toronto Press, 2004), based on the 1996 Joanne Goodman lectures at the University of Western Ontario. Despite his thoroughly convincing arguments that historical explanation, as we know it, is methodologically and analytically impossible, he managed to convince me that it is nonetheless worth doing. This is the kind of book that people used to describe as a tour de force.

It is nice to see this book finally getting the attention outside of history departments that it deserves.

AS: Harwell Wells is a professor at the law school at Temple University. Since his research is mainly published in law journals, it isn’t well known among business historians, even though it deals with really important issues that interest many member of the business history community. I’m therefore going to promote his paper, A Long View of Shareholder Power: From the Antebellum Corporation to the Twenty-First Century, here.

Abstract:
For most of the twentieth century the conventional wisdom held — probably correctly — that shareholders in America’s large corporations were passive and powerless and that real power in a public corporation was wielded by its managers. Beginning in the 1980s, however, shareholders in the form of institutional investors started to push for a greater say in corporate decision-making. In the twenty-first century, hedge funds have upped the ante, fighting for major changes in corporations whose shares they own. Once-imperial CEOs have now become embattled, as they fight, but often lose, against activist shareholders demanding policy changes, new dividends, board representation, and even the sale or break-up of corporations. In short, things have changed. This Article situates the present-day rise of shareholder power by taking a long view over the previous two centuries, moving beyond traditional accounts to reach all the way back to the beginnings of the American business corporation in the early nineteenth century, then following the story of shareholder power up to the present day. This broad view reveals the complicated and shifting nature of shareholder power, documenting how periods of greater shareholder power were interspersed with periods where shareholders had little power, how the focus of shareholder power has moved from controlling shareholders to autonomous managers, and how shareholder power has ebbed and flowed across the last two centuries. It thus not only provides the backstory to present developments, but suggests that what has been seen as a hallmark of American corporate capitalism — the relative powerlessness of shareholders — may only have been typical of a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century.

I’m posting some quick, first-impression reactions to the stunning news that Donald Trump has been elected president.

I’ll begin with my reactions as a social scientist

1) The predictive power of academic political science and pollsters is now as discredited as that of macro-economics. I suspect that political scientists will engage in the same sort of forensic investigation of their collective failure at prediction that academic economists did after 2008. I strongly suspect that commercial pollsters will NOT do the same.

2) Social scientists will continue to debate whether support for Trump was driven by economics (losses due to globalization) versus race. The evidence is still murky, despite what Ezra Klein might say.

My reaction to Trump’s victory as a PhD in history is to think of all of the cases of events that seem very significant at the time turning out to be far less significant than earlier imagined. Many Americans are discussing Trump’s election in catastrophic terms– the end of the United States, etc. My reading of history suggests that people often over-react to electoral disappointment. We have been told by both sides that this is the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes or even since 1860. We will be able to judge the accuracy of this assessment in a couple of decades.

My reactions to the election as a business historian are as follows

1) This teachable moment is a wonderful opportunity for business historians to demonstrate the value of their skills to policymakers, firms, and other knowledge users. It remains to be seen whether they take advantage of this potential opportunity. Generally speaking, the business historical community failed to take advantage of the potential demand for their services after 2008– one or two business historians were able to use the crisis to increase the impact of their research (kudos to Stephen Mihm and his wonderful Bloomberg column) but for the most part business historians were unable or unwilling to take advantage of this opportunity.

2) If a Trump presidency does result in accelerated de-globalization, historians of the international business, particularly those who do research on political risk and managerial responses to earlier eras of deglobalization may be able to provide advice to MNEs, particularly non-American ones. There will be demand for good narrative histories of deglobalization in the tradition of Charles Kindleberger.

3) It is impossible to understand the rise of Donald Trump without thinking about race and globalization. A toxic cocktail of protectionism and anti-migrant xenophobia pushed him into the most powerful job in the world. Business historians and historians of capitalism need to do more to understand the long-term roots of this phenomenon.

My reactions to Trump victory as a citizen of the UK is to wonder about whether this perceived sudden change in the geopolitical system will discourage the UK government from taking its leap into the dark (Brexit). Given that Trump has attacked the core principles of NATO, perhaps European army dreamt of by Eurofederalists might not be such a bad idea after all.

My reaction to the Trump victory as a citizen of Canada is to ask whether Prime Minister Trudeau is equal to the task of dealing with the risk and opportunities this election may create. The fear many educated Americans have of Trump may create an opportunity for Canada to increase its supply of human capital. However, the fact that the Canadian immigration website crashed on the morning of the election does not suggest that the Canadian government has the administrative capacity to fully exploit this potentially wonderful opportunity.

I’m sharing the campaign video that Trump broadcast in the final day of his campaign.

It hasn’t received a lot of attention in the financial press, so I thought I would share a
recent news item related to the theme of corporate governance. I see from the CBI blog that the organization that represents the largest firms in the UK has now responded to Theresa May’s (surprising radical) plans to force all large companies in the UK to put workers on their boards.

As you can see, the CBI is countering May’s proposal with the idea that all UK companies be required to _explain_ what steps they have taken to give workers a say in corporate governance. In other words, companies would not have to give workers’ representatives seats on corporate boards, provided they publish their reasons for doing so. It will be interesting to see how the government reacts to this proposal, which is really an attempt to water down May’s idea. As I have pointed out in a previous blog post, Theresa May appears to be channelling the spirit of Joseph Chamberlain, the Edwardian collectivist Conservative whose ideas transcended the divisions between left and right.

In a press release dated 4 November, CBI president Paul Drechsler alluded to the thorny question of whether the non-British employees of UK companies deserve to be given representation on UK corporate boards.  I can certainly understand why this issue occured to Mr Drechsler, as he is himself a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, born in Dublin. Drechsler writes:

“Most companies have an excellent relationship with their employees and recognise that they are at the very core of their business success. Nevertheless, they are committed to continuously improving employee engagement, whether their staff are based just in the UK or across the globe.” [Emphasis Added].

Dreschler’s observations about non-British employees raises some extremely profound economic, legal, and moral issues that are worth unpacking. First there is the possibility of double representation. Let’s say for the sake of argument that large UK companies are required to give board seats to the representatives of both their UK workers and their overseas workers, say one seat for the UK workforce and one for the overseas workforce. What happens if some of the overseas workers are employed by a subsidiary of a UK company that is located in a country where workers are represented by a works council or by seats on a corporate board. Wouldn’t these workers be represented twice?  Is that fair?

Second, what if there is a conflict of interests between the UK workers and the overseas workers over offshoring?  Imagine an intra-company dispute over the location of a new call centre. Suppose that a company has 50 employees in its UK call centre and 200 in its India call centre and it is trying to decide whether to expand the UK or the Indian facility. Now do the 50 UK workers get equivalent representation on the board to the 200 workers in India? Or is there representation by population, as in the US Congress and the UK House of Commons? What happens then?

As well, I’m wondering how UK company managers would be expected to go about balancing the interests of foreign workers with those who are fellow citizens. If company managers are expected to take worker as well as shareholders into account, in keeping with the spirit of the “enlightened shareholder” provision of the Companies Act 2006,  does this mean that they should value the livelihoods of fellow British people more than those of foreigners?  Would company managers be allowed to take the objectively greater need of people in poor countries into account in making decisions about the location of call-centre and other jobs?

If we were to accept that workers in India have a greater need for a call centre job than workers in the UK, which has a social-safety net, managers  would, as servants of a socially-enlightened company, be obliged to move the call centre jobs to India. (Of course, I’m assuming here that the “enlightened shareholder” envisioned by the Companies Act would subscribe to the moral doctrine of  cosmopolitan prioritarianism rather than Angus Deaton’s view that one has greater responsibilities to one’s fellow citizens than to the holders of foreign passports (see here as well).

Also, would non-citizens working in UK workplaces be entitled to representation on company boards under Theresa May’s proposal? This detail is also unclear, as are many other features of her proposal.

Theresa May recently declared that ‘If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” Speaking in India today, she has confirmed that this jibe was directed at multinational firms rather than at Mark Carney, the Canadian-born Governor of the Bank of England.

Manfrieg Grieger is in the centre.

Later this month, I will be attending a workshop in Sweden that is about corporate archives and their uses. I am, therefore, extremely interested in the rapidly evolving case of Manfred Grieger, who was recently fired as the official historian of Volkswagen. As did many other German firms, Volkswagen tried to come to terms with its Nazi past in the 1990s: it commissioned Grieger to wrote a warts-and-all expose of the firm’s use of slave labour during the Second World War. Under Grieger’s leadership, the corporate archive was opened up to the use of a wide range of academic researchers.

For reasons that are not yet clear, VW’s attitude towards its Nazi past appears to have reverted to its pre-1990s attitude to denial and secrecy. Grieger has been fired and the speculation is that his dismissal is in retaliation for research that alienated members of the family that still control a block of VW’s equity. 75 German academics have signed a letter of protest.

Interesting times.

Through the list-serv of the European Association for Banking and Financial History, I’ve learned of a forthcoming talk that uses economic-historical research in a very practical way– to help inform investment strategy.
‘The rate of return on everything. Asset returns: a long term perspective’

4 November 2016, 12:00

AllianzGI, Bockenheimer Landstraße 42, 60323 Frankfurt am Main

eabh in cooperation with  AllianzGI

This talk will be the premiere presentation of Moritz Schularick’s (University of Bonn) recent study on the development of all asset returns during the 20th  century in all industrial countries. In view of the current extremely low interest rates, his view on historical episodes with extraordinary low nominal and real interest rates promises interesting insights.

Based on Moritz’s  argument, Stefan Hofrichter (Head of Global Economics & Strategy Allianz Global Investors) will continue to give an outlook to long-term asset returns taking into account current evaluations and historical parallels.

Discussion with the audience is planned and all participants are kindly invited to join the discussants for a networking lunch kindly sponsored by AllianzGI.

You can register here.

Unite is a company that runs for-profit student residences located near British universities. (They are popular with students who couldn’t get a room on campus).  Signs that the UK government is about to sharply curtail the number of foreign students allowed into the country caused shares in the firm to nosedive on Friday, according to the Evening Standard.

Shares in the FTSE 250 company fell 23.25p or 4% to 558.75p after analysts at Morgan Stanley cut its rating from Overweight to Underweight, worried that Rudd’s new restrictions on overseas students could leave uni halls empty.

“We think the Home Secretary’s intention to continue reducing student visas risks deterring international students further and could affect Unite’s properties near lower-ranking universities,” analyst Bianca Riemer said, adding that non-EU students make up a quarter of Unite’s tenants.

This is an early warning sign of the possible implications for university finances of a reduction in the numbers of students admitted into the country.

I’m very interested in how the past is used within organizations. I was, therefore, very encouraged to learn of ongoing research on a parallel topic, the uses of the past in international economic relations. I’m referring to a new HERA-funded project Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations (UPIER). UPIER is a joint research programme between the Universities of Glasgow, Geneva, Madrid and Uppsala. As part of this project, there will be a two year Post-Doctoral Research post at the University of Glasgow.  Full details are here. To support the HERA-funded project Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations (UPIER). UPIER is a joint research programme with partners in Geneva, Madrid and Uppsala, which seeks to understand how policy-makers and market participants constructed and used the past to respond to economic and financial crises. Full details are here.

It’s an EU-funded post but based on the pronouncements by the UK Treasury, applicants won’t have to worry about the job vanishing once Article 50 is invoked.

If you are interested send an email to Professor Catherine Schenk (catherine.schenk@gla.ac.uk).

Deadline 15 November 2016.

All business historians in management schools will likely be interested in the new issue of the Academy of Management Review, which contains articles that engage with historical themes.

Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies
Mairi Maclean, Charles Harvey, and Stewart R. Clegg

The promise of a closer union between organizational and historical research has long been recognized. However, its potential remains unfulfilled: the authenticity of theory development expected by organization studies and the authenticity of historical veracity required by historical research place exceptional conceptual and empirical demands on researchers. We elaborate the idea of historical organization studies—organizational research that draws extensively on historical data, methods, and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines. Building on prior research, we propose a typology of four differing conceptions of history in organizational research: history as evaluating, explicating, conceptualizing, and narrating. We identify five principles of historical organization studies—dual integrity, pluralistic understanding, representational truth, context sensitivity, and theoretical fluency—and illustrate our typology holistically from the perspective of institutional entrepreneurship. We explore practical avenues for a creative synthesis, drawing examples from social movement research and microhistory. Historically informed theoretical narratives whose validity derives from both historical veracity and conceptual rigor afford dual integrity that enhances scholarly legitimacy, enriching understanding of historical, contemporary, and future-directed social realities.

http://amr.aom.org/content/41/4/609.abstract?etoc

Taking Historical Embeddedness Seriously: Three Historical Approaches to
Advance Strategy Process and Practice Research
Eero Vaara and Juha-Antti Lamberg

Despite the proliferation of strategy process and practice research, we lack understanding of the historical embeddedness of strategic processes and practices. In this article we present three historical approaches with the potential to remedy this deficiency. First, realist history can contribute to a better understanding of the historical embeddedness of strategic processes, and comparative historical analysis in particular can explicate the historical conditions, mechanisms, and causality in strategic processes. Second, interpretive history can add to our knowledge of the historical embeddedness of strategic practices, and microhistory can specifically help us understand the construction and enactment of these practices in historical contexts. Third, poststructuralist history can elucidate the historical embeddedness of strategic discourses, and genealogy in particular can increase our understanding of the evolution and transformation of strategic discourses and their power effects. Thus, this article demonstrates how, in their specific ways, historical approaches and methods can add to our understanding of different forms and variations of strategic processes and practices, the historical construction of organizational strategies, and historically constituted strategic agency.

http://amr.aom.org/content/41/4/633.abstract?etoc

A Rolling Stone Gathers Momentum: Generational Units, Collective Memory,
and Entrepreneurship
Stephen Lippmann and Howard E. Aldrich

We draw on the historiographical concepts of “generational units” and “collective memories” as a framework for understanding the emergence of entrepreneurially oriented cohesive groups within regions. Generational units are localized subgroups within generations that have a self-referential, reflexive quality by virtue of the members’ sense of their own connections to each other and the events that define them. Collective memories are shared accounts of the past shaped by historical events that mold individuals’ perceptions. The two concepts provide a valuable point of departure for incorporating historical concepts into the study of entrepreneurial dynamics and offer a framework for understanding how entrepreneurs’ historically situated experiences affect them. Our framework breaks new theoretical ground in several ways. First, we synthesize disparate bodies of literature on generational units, collective memory, and organizational imprinting. Second, we specify mechanisms through which imprinting occurs and persists over time. We develop analytical arguments framed by sociological and historiographical theories, focusing on the conditions under which meaningful generational units of entrepreneurs may emerge and benefit from leadership and legacy building, technologies of memory, and institutional support that increases the likelihood of their persistence.

History, Society, and Institutions: The Role of Collective Memory in the
Emergence and Evolution of Societal Logics
William Ocasio, Michael Mauskapf, and Christopher W. J. Steele

We examine the role of history in organization studies by theorizing how collective memory shapes societal institutions and the logics that govern them. We propose that, rather than transhistorical ideal types, societal logics are historically constituted cultural structures generated through the collective memory of historical events. We then develop a theoretical model to explain how the representation, storage, and retrieval of collective memory lead to the emergence of societal logics. In turn, societal logics shape memory making and the reproduction and reconstruction of history itself. To illustrate our theory, we discuss the rise of the corporate logic in the United States. We identify two sources of discontinuity that can disrupt this memory-making process and create notable disjunctures in the evolution of societal logics. We conclude by discussing how changes in collective memory and the historical trajectory of societal logics shape organizational forms and practices.

Historic Corporate Social Responsibility
Judith Schrempf-Stirling, Guido Palazzo, and Robert A. Phillips

Corporations are increasingly held responsible for activities up and down their value chains but outside their traditional corporate boundaries. Recently, a similar wave of criticism has arisen about corporate activities of the past, overseen by prior generations of managers. Yet there is little or no scholarly theorizing about the ways contemporary managers engage with these critiques or how this corporate engagement with the past affects the legitimacy of current business. Extending theorizing about political corporate social responsibility and organizational legitimacy, we address this omission by asking the following: (1) What is the theoretical basis for holding a corporation responsible for decisions made by prior generations of managers? (2) What is the process by which such claims are raised and contested? (3) What are the relevant features that render a charge of historical harm-doing more or less legitimate in the current context? (4) How will a corporation’s response to such charges affect the intensity of the future narrative contests and the corporation’s own legitimacy?

On the Forgetting of Corporate Irresponsibility
Sébastien Mena, Jukka Rintamäki, Peter Fleming, and André Spicer

Why are some serious cases of corporate irresponsibility collectively forgotten? Drawing on social memory studies, we examine how this collective forgetting process can occur. We propose that a major instance of corporate irresponsibility leads to the emergence of a stakeholder mnemonic community that shares a common recollection of the past incident. This community generates and then draws on mnemonic traces to sustain a collective memory of the past event over time. In addition to the natural entropic tendency to forget, collective memory is also undermined by instrumental “forgetting work,” which we conceptualize in this article. Forgetting work involves manipulating short-term conditions of the event, silencing vocal “rememberers,” and undermining collective mnemonic traces that sustain a version of the past. This process can result in a reconfigured collective memory and collective forgetting of corporate irresponsibility events. Collective forgetting can have positive and negative consequences for the firm, stakeholders, and society.