My research collaborators on the Empire Timber project have posted a photo essay that chronicles the recent research trip to Bermuda. I wasn’t able to make it but I’m looking forward to working with to help write up this research and get it published in a variety of journals.
The Copenhagen Business School Initiative “Re-Thinking History” is working for some time now on the topic of Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Research. One of the members of the group, R. Dan Wadhwani (visting Professor at CBS) has organised together with David A. Kirsch, William B. Gartner, Friederike Welter, and Geoffrey Jones, a call for papers for a special issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal on this topic.
Guest Editors
R. Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific
David A. Kirsch, University of Maryland
William B. Gartner, California Lutheran University & Copenhagen Business School
Friederike Welter, IfM Bonn and University of Siegen, Germany
Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Business School
In recent years, scholars have grown increasingly interested in the promise of historical approaches to entrepreneurship research. History, it has been argued, can be valuable in addressing a number of limitations in traditional approaches to studying entrepreneurship, including by providing multi-level perspectives on the entrepreneurial process (Tripsas, 1997; Forbes and Kirsch, 2010; Agarwal and Braguinsky, 2014), in accounting for contexts and institutions (Baumol, 1990; Welter, 2011; Haveman et al, 2012, Zahra and Wright 2011), in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic change (Schumpeter, 1947; Casson and Godley, 2005; Baumol and Strom, 2007; Lippmann and Aldrich, 2014), and in situating entrepreneurial behavior and cognition within the flow of time (Popp and Holt, 2013). History, in this regard, points the direction to both valuable sources and data for addressing such topics (Forbes and Kirsch, 2010) and to a body of historical theory from which to conceptualize context, time, and change analytically (Wadhwani and Jones, 2014; Wadhwani, 2010). Indeed, it is for many of these same reasons that Schumpeter (1947) called on theorists and historians to collaborate in the study of entrepreneurship. For this special issue, we seek theoretical and empirical work that significantly advances our understanding of whether and how historical research and reasoning can contribute to our understanding of entrepreneurship. In this regard, we encourage submissions that not only make contributions to entrepreneurship research and theory, but also engage the methodological and theoretical issues involved in using historical approaches in the management disciplines (Ingram, et al, 2012; Bucheli and Wadhwani, 2014; Rowlinson, et al, 2014; Kipping and Üsdiken, 2014). We welcome a broad range of ways to conceptualize and integrate history in entrepreneurship research, including as a set of sources and methods, as context (e.g. industry evolution), as an independent variable (experience at firm or founder level), as a mechanism (process, path dependency, or way of interpreting the past), or an outcome (e.g. historical performance).
Matching Business Historians and Business Archives: Can We Look to eHarmony to Improve the Efficiency of the Process?
Business Historians and Corporate Archivists need to find more efficient ways of connecting researchers with primary sources. We should look to the online dating world for possible models.
Let’s think for a second about the evolution of matching technologies in the marriage market. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most people had a very limited pool of marriage partners. Over the last few hundred years, our society has evolved a variety of increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for matching men and women in urban centres. Lonely hearts ads, which have been in newspapers for since Victorian times, evolved to supplement more spontaneous ways of meeting potential mates in the big anonymous world of the big city. In the 1970s and 1980s, we saw the emergence of singles bars, which were a different mechanism for accomplishing the same goal. The 1990s witnessed the birth of online dating, which was perhaps a step to greater efficiency. Speed dating in person developed about the same time. In the last few years, advances in computing power have resulted in the creation of new forms of online dating with sorting algorithms designed to pair compatible individuals. eHarmony has become a successful business because it uses clever algorithms to run a highly effective online romantic clearinghouse that matches likeminded souls: neat freaks with fellow neat freaks, triathletes with fellow triathletes, and so forth.
Academic research is never a solitary pursuit, even in disciplines that remain dominated by the single-author paper. As Susann Fellman and Andrew Popp have noted in a recent working paper, “the production of history is always a collective endeavor. Numerous participants are involved, from past generations of historical actors, through past generations of historians, others involved in the gathering and preservation of the traces left by the past, to the historical interpreters of the present… A key site of this collective endeavor – even if it is certainly not the only one – is the archive.” (Fellman and Popp, 2015, 1).
In recent years, academics throughout the world have been introduced to the concept of academic speed dating. Regular speed dating is about finding a partner in life. Academic speed dating is about finding research collaborators with intersecting research interests and complementary skillsets. An increasing number of disciplinary conferences feature academic speed-dating events and the speed-dating format is used within universities to create collaborations between departments and faculties. For instance, a university located in the Strand area of London recently used speed dating to encourage legal academics and social scientists to discuss possible co-authorship. The apparent reasoning was that since many social-scientific topics have a legal dimension that could be discussed in paper. On one side of a long table were all of the legal academics who signed up to participate. On the other were an equal number of researchers from outside the law department (political scientists, historians, economists, etc). At the start of the event, each social scientist sat in front of a randomly selected legal academic. They had three minutes to describe their research, after which the law lecturer discussed his or her research for three minutes. In the remaining four minutes, they chatted about possible collaboration on papers, grant applications, and the like. After ten minutes, a bell rang and the academics shuffled down the table, repeating the process with another potential collaborator. At the end of the event, there was a reception with drinks and the chance to resume earlier discussions. The costs of the event were underwritten by senior research administrators who were eager to promote research collaboration between different REF units of assessment. There is some preliminary evidence to suggest that academic speed dating is a fairly efficient way of bringing together research collaborators. The academic speed dating concept can also be adapted to promoting collaboration between academics and non-academic stakeholders (e.g., management academics and the member firms of a local chamber of commerce).
For business historians, perhaps the most important type of collaboration with firms involves access to company archives. Much like academic speed dating or indeed speed-dating of the original, romantic kind, archival research is an activity carried on for mutual benefit. For the business historian, the benefits of archival research are pretty straightforward: getting access to the primary sources required to write a publishable article. From the standpoint of the corporate archivist, and the perspective of the firm who is his or her principal, the benefits are a bit more complex. Firms give outsiders access to their archives for a wide variety of reasons that include the desire to promote a positive company image, the need to know more about the organization’s own history, and perhaps the tax advantages that come with opening up their archive to academics. A sense of corporate social responsibility may also be part of the firm’s motivation for allowing outsiders access to once confidential documents. Most corporate archivists are eager to encourage academic researchers to use their archives, at least insofar as they have the time and other resources needed to host outsiders and escort them around buildings. Although corporate archivists have a fiduciary duty to exclude muckrakers and other researchers who might use documents to hurt their employers, corporate archivists also have incentives to maximize the number of “safe” researchers who pass through the door of their archives. After all, an archivist will want to be able to demonstrate to their superiors that the archive is indeed in frequent use. Corporate archivists are also frequently motivated by a desire to share their knowledge of their holdings with researchers and a sense of curiosity about their employers’ histories. In my experience, corporate archivists love telling researchers: “you know, there is this obscure piece of correspondence that’s really relevant to your research question. Let me dig it out of deep storage.”
In short, business historians need corporate archivists and corporate archives needs business historians. The challenge is to find an efficient way of putting archivists in contact with the right business historian. How can we use technology to reduce transaction costs, improve markets, and put researchers and business archives together? Online services such as eBay have brought buyers and sellers of lawnmowers together for years. Various online dating apps are doing the same thing for the romantically inclined.
There is no doubt that the existence of the National Register of Archives and other online directories of business archives has simplified our lives and have thus increased the quality and the quality of the business history being produced. Corporate archives are now putting more detailed descriptions of their holdings online (see the Barclays Group Archive’s stunning new website), which will further increase utilization. The fact that all academic researchers now have an online presence, which allows corporate archivists to verify the identities of people who email asking for archival access, has also helped. However, the business-history community needs to do more if we are to increase the efficiency of our research process in an increasingly competitive environment.
The UK business-history community could try to organize speed-dating events in central locations (e.g., London or Birmingham) to bring archivists and business historians together. If the speed-dating event were held in the summer, when researchers are normally free of teaching duties, many academics would attend. Unfortunately, few corporate archivists have the funds and indeed travel authorization to attend such events.
A somewhat better option would be arrange an online speed-dating event. However, this arrangement would still be somewhat time-consuming. The best option would be to create an online resource that would combine detailed descriptions of archival holdings with academics’ personal statements of research interests and then an algorithm for matching. Our colleagues in the field of genetics, a discipline that is pre-occupied with, er, various forms of matching, have already established a model we can use. In 2014, Cambridge University geneticist Rafael Carazo Salas and two Italian colleagues wrote an algorithm that matched attendees at an international conference with a view to introducing people to potential research collaborators and co-authors. [It appears that their programme may have been inspired by the fictional character Sheldon Cooper from the TV show The Big Bang Theory]. Dr Carazo-Salas had earlier observed that while chance conversations at conferences sometimes lead to international scholarly collaborations, the attendee of a large conference will only have the opportunity to speak to a small percentage of the other attendees. As a result, many opportunities for collaboration go undiscovered. The Times Higher Education supplement (2014) quoted Dr Carazo-Salas as saying that he wished to treat conference delegates in the same way “we treat genes, and used mathematical algorithms to build a connectivity picture that could enable new links to be made.”
Business historians and archivists should initiate a conversation about how we adapt the procedure of Dr Carazo-Salas to our needs. In constructing an algorithm, business historians and business archivists will likely need to form collaborations with the following groups: research funding councils, computer scientists, and business historians in other countries. Considerable effort will be required at first but the benefits could be substantial and would likely include a number of happy relationships between business historians and business archivists. Such relationships would produce conference papers that would hopefully grow up into articles in top-ranked ABS-ranked journals. Such publications would doubtless make both of their parents extremely proud.
Works Cited
Barclays Group Archive. (2015). http://www.barclays.com/about-barclays/history/barclays-group-archive.html
Fellman, S. and A. Popp. (2015). “Owners, Archivists and Historians: Towards a Stakeholder Perspective on Corporate Archives.” Unpublished working paper.
Reisz, M. (2014). “’Speed dating’ helps conference academics mix” Times Higher Education Supplement, 23 February.
The Fifth Reading-UNCTAD International Business Conference will take place on 13-14 June 2015 at Henley Business School at the University of Reading. My panel is called History in International Business.
Chair Geoffrey Jones
Andrew Smith The persistence of liberal norms in a Hong Kong-based MNE: HSBC in the First World War Discussant: Lucy Newton
Peter Miskell The movie multinationals: why was it only American firms that managed to compete
successfully in international film markets, and how did they do it?
Discussant: Peter Scott
Peter Scott & James Walker, Why Was There so Little Multinationalisation in Retailing Before The 1990s: And Did It
Matter? Discussant: Marcelo Bucheli
Marcelo Bucheli Navigating the regulatory environment through political strategies: the
telecommunications multinationals in twentieth-century Chile Discussant: Peter Miskel
Lucy Newton Multinationals, image and identity: HSBC and the construction of corporate identity through the portrait Discussant: Andrew Smith
Little Multinationalisation in Retailing Before The 1990s: And Did It Matter? Discussant: Marcelo Bucheli Marcelo Bucheli Navigating the regulatory environment through political strategies: the telecommunications multinationals in twentieth-century Chile Discussant: Peter Miskell
AS: I’m posting the abstract of the paper I will be presenting at the Business History Conference in Miami later this month. I would like to thank the archivists at the HSBC Group Archive and the School of Oriental and African Studies who helped make the research for this paper possible.
This paper examines the words and deeds of the British merchant banker Charles Addis. Addis was a leading figure in the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), which was and is an important multinational. In the early twentieth century, he promoted the ethos of commercial cosmopolitanism, a mental framework in which national loyalties are subordinated to other abstract principles, such as a code of commercial honour, loyalty to business partners irrespective of nationality, and the teachings of classical liberalism. Commercial cosmopolitanism was the hegemonic ideology in Britain during Addis’s youth, but it became increasingly unpopular before and especially during the First World War. A committed classical liberal, Addis articulated the ideology of commercial cosmopolitanism in his diary, private correspondence, and many public statements. The paper links Addis’s ideology to the strategy of the HSBC and shows how the firm sought to continue trading with German firms in China as far as British law and public opinion would permit. A robust methodological individualist, Addis firmly distinguished the actions of the German state from the German individuals and firms with which he interacted. The paper shows that Addis sought to reduce the impact of the war on the business operations of HSBC and the overall international economy. Addis’s ideas about wartime developments in British and German financial services, particularly the bank merger wave experienced by both countries, are also explored, as are his prophetic comments about the Too Big To Fail problem in banking. The paper also examines Addis’s role in the British deliberations that proceeded the Versailles conference of 1919. The paper observes that Addis was allied with John Maynard Keynes, another
prominent opponent of the Versailles peace settlement.
That’s the title of a paper I will be presenting at a development workshop at the Business History Conference in Miami. To represent Chinese entrepreneurship in this period, I’ve included a picture of a Shanghai street scene in the early twentieth century. The scene shows several micro-entrepreneurs at work, although the main focus of my paper is Western perceptions of Chinese entrepreneurship more generally. The picture is from a website called SeeShanghai.
Abstract: This paper will examine the analysis of Chinese entrepreneurship in English-language texts published between 1842 and 1911. During this period, Western expatriates advanced a variety of competing explanations for why Chinese entrepreneurship was retarded relative to the West. These opinions were shared through the media of books, consular trade reports, newspapers, and learned journals. The paper will show that these discussions were informed by conflicting theories of culture, political institutions, and human nature. This paper will show that while some Western observers advanced institutionalist explanations, such as insecure property rights, for the relative retardation of Chinese entrepreneurship, others argued that Chinese culture was the problem. Since 1978, China has once again been integrated into the world economy and Westerners have resumed their discussion of the topic of Chinese entrepreneurship. The ongoing academic discussion of entrepreneurship in mainland China and other Chinese societies exhibits some striking parallels with the similar debates on the pre-1911 period. The lessons scholars of present-day entrepreneurship should draw from this research is that all lenses for viewing entrepreneurship have historical roots and philosophical foundations of which the scholar may be unconscious. By historicizing present-day theoretical debates about entrepreneurship, this paper should encourage greater scholarly reflexivity.
People who are attending the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences meeting in Ottawa may wish to check out the meeting of business historians on 1 June. The Congress is made up of the meetings of nearly 70 disciplinary associations that range from the very small (e.g., the meeting devoted to Hungarian Studies) to the annual conferences of the Canadian Historical Association and the Canadian Political Science Association. Since business history is inherently interdisciplinary, I suspect that interested scholars from all disciplines would be welcome to show up at the event on 1 June. The session listed below is part of the Canadian Historical Association meeting but the commentator, Herb Emery, is an economist.
I’m intrigued by the news that there will be a mysterious “big announcement” at the meeting of business historians on 1 June.
1 June 2015
3:15-4:45 / 15h15-16h45 [location TBD]
Panel 34. Canadian Business History: Critical and Interdisciplinary / L’histoire du monde des affaires au Canada : approche critique et interdisciplinaire
Facilitator / Animateur: J. Andrew Ross (University of Guelph)
Jason Russell (Empire State College – SUNY): Making Managers Beyond Canada: The Canadian International Development Agency, the Western Business School, and the University of the West Indies in the 1970s
Stephen Salmon (Steamer Consulting): “… the worst cases”: Swan, Hunter and the Canadian Great Lakes Trades, 1921-1940
Commentator / Commentateur: Herbert Emery (University of Calgary)
Sponsored by the Business History Group / Parrainée par le Comité d’histoire des affaires
5:00-6:00 [Location TBD]
Business History Group meeting where there will be a preview of an upcoming big announcement!
Yet more business-historical research will be presented at the meeting of Canada’s Administrative Science Association. For some reason, the ASAC 2015 conference isn’t part of the Congress and will be held in Halifax. The ASAC should really be part of the Congress to make it easier for historians, political scientists, and management scholars to organize interdisciplinary sessions and exchange knowledge.
Anyway, here are the business history panels at the ASAC conference.
Symposium: Lessons in Writing History for MOS Journals
Chair/Président
:
William (Bill) Bonner (Univ ersity of Regina)
Panelists: William Bonner (University of Regina), Gabrielle Durepos (Mount Saint Vincent University), Albert J. Mills (Saint Mary’s University), Patricia Genoe McLaren (Wilfrid Laurier University) & William Foster (University of Alberta)
Practices and Processes in Managing
“Performing Budget Histories” Lawrence Corrigan (Saint Mary’s University)
“The Who, Why, How and Justification for Health Information Abuse: Problematizing the Past”William (Bill) Bonner (University of Regina)
“Are Corporations Managed by Machines? A Late Response to Herbert A. Simon” Alex Ramirez (Carleton University)
ANTi-History at Work
Chair/Présidente : Patricia Genoe McLaren (Wilfrid Laurier University)
“The Organizing of Farmers: History and Understanding in 1970s Nova Scotia” Christopher Hartt (Dalhousie University) & Gretchen Pohlkamp (Province of Nova Scotia)
BEST PAPER / MEILLEURE ARTICLE “The British Airways Heritage Collection: An Ethnographic ‘History’” Kristene Coller (University of Lethbridge), Jean Helms Mills (Saint Mary’s University) & Albert J. Mills (Saint Mary’s University)
Management History in the Service Sector
Chair/Président : Allan Dwyer (Mount Royal University)
“Is it Safer if There is a Historic Bomb Shelter in a Five-Star Hotel?” Kien Le (Saint Mary’s University), Albert J. Mills (Saint Mary’s University) & Jean Helms Mills (Saint Mary’s University)
“Rainy River District: A Study of Rail by Mail” John McCutcheon (Wilfrid Laurier University)
“The Introduction of External Audit and Financial Accounting to the Hudson’s Bay Company: An Historical Performativity Analysis” Alison Kemper (Ryerson University) & Gary Spraakman (York University)
AS: Management academics are increasingly interested in the evolution and function of corporate archives and the people who manage these important corporate assets. I’ve pasted below the abstract of Roy Suddaby’s new paper “The Professionalization of the Corporate Archivist” Roy is the Winspear Chair of Management at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria and a Professor and Strategic Research Advisor, Newcastle University Business School
Abstract
The corporate historian is a fairly recent innovation. Although historians have had a long association with corporations, as biographers, consultants and advisors, the formal role of corporate historian or archivist appears to emerge as a distinct professional category in large US corporations in the early 1980s. The emergence of the corporate historian as a distinct occupational category raises a number of important theoretical and empirical questions. Why did the occupational category emerge now and not contemporaneously with the emergence of the corporate form? What is the professional project of the corporate historian? What does the emergence of the corporate historian tell us about the way in which non-traditional professions are constructed in the twenty first century? What are the implications for history when the core institutional affiliation of the historian is with a corporation rather than the university?
This paper addresses these questions through a detailed analysis of the emergence of the corporate historian. Drawing from archival data as well as ongoing interviews with a variety of corporate historians and archivists from Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 corporations. Initial results demonstrate the important symbiotic dynamics of institutions and professions in generating occupational categories. A key conclusion of the study is that, as an ascendant institution, the modern corporation is as capable of generating new professions as were previous institutions such as the nation state and the university.
Banff, Alberta
AS: I’m going to be presenting at the RNAS conference in Banff this summer. I am sharing the programme here.
Remaking North American Sovereignty: Towards a Continental History of State Transformation in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
July 30-Aug. 1, 2015 at the Banff Centre
Banff, Alberta, Canada
Thursday, July 30, 2015
3:00-5:00 pm Registration, Banff Centre
5:30-6:30 pm Opening reception, Whyte Museum of the Rockies, Banff
6:30-8:45 pm Keynote Session I, Whyte Museum of the Rockies, Banff. This event is free and open to the public.
Friday July 31, 2015
8:00-8:45 am Publishing Transnational History: Breakfast roundtable with Susan Ferber, Editors, Executive Editor for America and World History, Oxford University Press and Len Husband, Acquisitions Editor, University of Toronto Press.
9:00-11:15 am Plenary session I: States
Pre-circulated papers to be discussed in roundtable/seminar format). Plenary session papers will be securely made accessible to participants and registered attendees through the conference website (rnas.ca) as of July 2, 2015.
11:30-12:45 pm Lunch
1:00-3:00 pm
Panel 1: Slavery
Panel 2: Borderlands
3:00-3:15 pm Break
3:15-5:15 pm
Panel 3: Filibustering
Panel 4: Divided Sovereignty
6:15-8:30 pm. Dinner & Keynote Session II
Saturday, August 1, 2014
9:00-11:15 am.
Plenary session II, Sovereignty.
Pre-circulated papers to be discussed in roundtable/seminar format. Plenary session papers will be securely made accessible to participants and registered attendees through the conference website (rnas.ca) as of July 2, 2015.
11:30-12:45 pm Lunch
1:00-3:00 pm
Panel 5: Rebel States
Panel 6: Race and Empire
3:00-3:15 pm Break
3:15-5:15 pm
Panel 7: Transnational histories
Panel 8: Contemporary Comparisons
5:25-5:40 pm Closing remarks: Frank Towers, University of Calgary
*This conference is sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University and supported by the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech University and the following academic units at the University of Calgary: the Department of History; the Centre for Military, Security, and Strategic Studies; the Faculty of Arts; the Latin America Research Centre; and the Office of the Vice President for Research. Support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is pending.
Yes, according to new research by James Bessen.
Bessen argues that it’s not surprising for new technologies to be associated with stagnant wages. Indeed, something similar happened in America’s first high-tech boom: the textile industry of the mid-1800s. From 1830 to 1860, cloth production skyrocketed; wages barely budged.
But then weavers’ wages started rising. By 1900, they were more than twice their level from 40 years earlier. Bessen argues that this and other historical examples offer important lessons about the state of the labor market today.
Some people, such as economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, have portrayed a future in which computers destroy more and more jobs, leaving millions out of work. Bessen is skeptical. Computers obviously do eliminate some jobs, but they almost always create other jobs in the process. The tricky thing is that these new jobs often demand different skills, and workers are struggling to keep up. Still, Bessen paints a basically optimistic view of a future in which technologies mature and create new, higher-paying jobs for ordinary workers.
Hat tip to Timothy B. Lee.
Oh well, another book to put on my summer reading list.
The Past Speaks 