The Past Speaks

The UK’s Association of Business Schools has long produced rankings of management journals. The rankings are used in many European management schools assessing the perceived quality of a given article and are thus used in making decisions about hiring and promotion. This screenshot gives you a sense of what the rankings look like.

In March of this year, the ABS finally released version 5 of the rankings. It replaced version 4, which has been freely available online as a pdf since 2010.  To access the 2015 rankings, one had to register on the ABS website, log in, and then search through a cumbersome interface. Dr Steffan Roth of the Department of Management and Organization, ESC Rennes School of Business, has found a way to download the entire guide as a pdf. He has placed it online. Since it is a handy thing to have when making publication strategy, I thought I would share the guide. You can download it from Dr Roth’s website.

This sounds interesting. AS.

The Financial Times is working with the British Library to open up access to FT Digital Archive for academic research.

Extracts from the archive materials were used to produce the feature about Britain’s 1975 referendum on European Community membership that was published on FT.com today.

The archive consists of scanned images of each of the 903,029 pages comprising all 37,464 print editions of the Financial Times published between 1888 and 2010… The full 123-year dataset is 2.5 terabytes in size.

In addition to researchers interested in 20th-century economic history, this vast dataset is likely to be of interest to linguists interested in studying a large corpus of specialist news, or computer scientists interested in techniques for digitising large volumes of printed documents.

FT journalists and developers will be participating in a British Library hackathon on November 16 to explore how these datasets can be used.

Centre for Business History – Copenhagen Business School

Paper Development Workshop

The Centre for Business History at Copenhagen Business School will host a paper development workshop (PDW) for scholars conducting research on the uses of history and memory in organizations and organizing on Wednesday, December 9, 2015.

We welcome applications from scholars of all backgrounds conducting research on the question of why, how, and what affects the past is used by managers and organizations. The goal of the PDW is, in part, to support the development of research and foster dialogue among scholars who may be interested in submitting papers to the Special Issue of Organization Studies devoted to the same topic, though neither application nor attendance at the workshop is required for full consideration of papers submitted for the special issue.
More information about the Special Issue can be found here.
Limited funds may be available on a competitive basis for applicants who are unable to get funding from their home institutions.

Deadline for Abstracts: October 13, 2015

To apply, please email an abstract of between 300 and 500 words describing your research, along with a cv or bio to one the PDW organizers below. Applications should be sent by October 13, 2015 to receive full consideration. Please submit your paper to Mads Mordhorst (mmo.mpp@cbs.dk) and Dan Wadhwani (dwadhwani@pacific.edu).

Applicants will get a feedback October 19 and successful applicants will be asked to submit either short papers (approx. 3,000 words) or full papers (8-10,000 words) by December 1 in order for other participants to read them before the PDW.
PDW Organizers:

Mads Mordhorst, Copenhagen Business School, mo.mpp@cbs.dk
Andrew Popp, University of Liverpool, Andrew.Popp@liverpool.ac.uk
Roy Suddaby, University of Victoria, rsuddaby@uvic.ca
Dan Wadhwani, University of the Pacific, dwadhwani@pacific.edu

There is some great historical context in an important working new paper by Edward L. Glaeser, Giacomo AM Ponzetto, and Yimei Zou. “Urban Networks: Spreading the Flow of Goods, People, and Ideas.” (2015). The draws on historical research and discusses differences between the evolution of US and European cities in the course of coming up with policy advice for China.

Should China build mega-cities or a network of linked middle-sized metropolises? Can Europe’s mid-sized cities compete with global agglomeration by forging stronger inter-urban links? This paper examines these questions within a model of recombinant growth and endogenous local amenities. Three primary factors determine the trade-o§ between networks and big cities: local returns to scale in innovation, the elasticity of housing supply, and the importance of local amenities. Even if there are global increasing returns, the returns to local scale in innovation may be decreasing, and that makes networks more appealing than mega-cities. Inelastic housing supply makes it harder to supply more space in dense conÖnes, which perhaps explains why networks are more popular in regulated Europe than in the American Sunbelt. Larger cities can dominate networks because of amenities, as long as the benefits of scale overwhelm the downsides of density. In our framework, the skilled are more likely to prefer mega-cities than the less skilled, and the long-run benefits of either mega-cities or networks may be quite different from the short-run benefits .

My co-author Kirsten Greer will be presenting this paper at “Canada-Quebec-Caribbean: Trans-American Connections” conference at the universite de Montreal Oct 8-9.

“Sugar philanthropy: Redpath Sugar and Civic improvement in the Dominion Metropolis of Montreal, 1854-1888”

Kirsten Greer, Assistant Professor, Departments of Geography and History, Nipissing University, Ontario

Andrew Smith, Lecturer in International Business, Management School, University of Liverpool

The connection between metropolises such as London and Liverpool in the British Isles and resource-producing islands in the tropics is a major theme in the history of the British Empire. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a city in the British colony of Canada developed similar relationships with the tropics. The metropolis of Montreal experienced rapid industrialization and became Canada’s largest city.  Previously, Montreal had been a transit point for Canadian raw materials en route to consumers in Britain. Canada’s industrialization and rapidly evolving relationship with the Caribbean allowed Montreal to join the rank of the Empire’s resource importing cities. This paper investigates the connected geographies of the island of Montreal with the sugar islands of the Caribbean by focusing on the Redpath Sugar Refinery and its reliance on raw sugar from Cuba and Brazil.  With increased profits made from slave-produced sugar until the late 1880s, Redpath Sugar Refinery invested in civic improvement projects such as museums, education, and science, all of which helped to position Montreal as the metropolis of the Dominion of Canada in the late nineteenth century.  This paper gestures towards makingbroader connections between industrialization, nationalism, race, and slavery in the histories of Quebec, and Canada more generally.