It’s Out! The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC

10 03 2015

The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC by David Kynaston and Richard Roberts was published a few days ago. This book has been eagerly anticipated by a number of historians.

The Lion Wakes tells the modern story of HSBC, starting in the late 1970s, when the bank first broke out of the Asia-Pacific region with its purchase of Marine Midland Bank in the US. It follows HSBC’s battle to purchase Midland Bank in1992, the subsequent move of head office from Hong Kong to London, and the string of acquisitions that brought the bank to its pre-eminent place in global finance today. Acclaimed historians Richard Roberts and David Kynaston chronicle the bank’s struggles as well as its successes: the last part of the book deals with the ill-fated move into consumer finance in the US, as well as the financial crisis of 2008 and its effect on HSBC. Impeccably researched and generously illustrated from the HSBC archives, this is a valuable addition to global financial history.

At least one review has already been published. Given that HSBC has been in the news a fair bit recently, I’m certain that this book will be a publishing success!

David Kynaston is a critically acclaimed historian and author, and the recipient of a Spear’s Book Award for his lifetime achievement as a British historian. His books include a three volume history of postwar Britain; Austerity Britain (longlisted for The Orwell Prize), Family Britainand Modernity Britain (longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize), which has sold 150,000 copies, as well as a four-volume history of the City of London, and the centenary history of the Financial Times. Richard Roberts, a professor at King’s College London, is the author of studies of Schroders, Equitable Life, Orion, and the financial crisis of 1914.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: ,
Categories : The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC

Request for Help With JEL Codes

9 03 2015

I’m trying to find out how many articles there are that correspond to the JEL code D8, “Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty.” I don’t have access to the JEL database, since it  is restricted to members of the American Economics Association. Do you know of a quick way of finding out this information? Can a kind reader help me?

I just want to get a sense of the relative size of this field. I need this information for the literature review section of a paper on environmental knowledge flows.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags:
Categories : JEL classification codes

Managing the Past

8 03 2015

MandOHlogo

Stephanie Decker of Aston Business School is currently managing an ESRC-funded seminar series in Management & Organizational History.  Although managed out of Birmingham’s Aston Business School, the seminar series is really a joint venture of a number of management schools, including Manchester, Queen Mary, and Copenghagen Business School.

The ESRC-sponsored seminar series provides a platform for international research on historical analysis of organizations, heritage and reflective societies. All events revolve around three interlinked themes: archiving and archival research as resources for organizational analysis, organizational remembering, , and emerging methodologies that challenge organizational histories. Leading international scholars will discuss current research initiatives.

In conjunction with this series, Aston have created a website that is intended to become a hub scholars who work in this area. At the moment, the website is still a little sparse, but it waiting to be filled with announcements, links to interesting content and news stories from you.

There is also a facility to sign up with a small profile, with links to their institutional websites where appropriate.

To access this platform, please see visit here.

The first event in the seminar series, “Managing the Past: The Role of Organizational Archives” will take place at Aston Business School Wednesday 18 March 2015, 10 am to 5pm. Free registrations are now closed, further places are available for £35, including refreshments, three course lunch, and tickets for the cocktail reception at 5pm. You can register here. Registrations will close Friday 13 March 2015. Here is the programme for the day:

10:00-10:15 Refreshments and welcome by seminar series organizers Stephanie Decker, Michael
Rowlinson and John Hassard
10:15-11:30 Roy Suddaby (University of Victoria & NUBS), “The Professionalization of the
Corporate Archivist” Note that Suddaby is the Francis G. Winspear Chair of Business at University of Victoria
11:30-12:30 Maria Sienkiewicz (Barclays Group Archives), “The Role of Archivists in Creating
Organizational Memory Assets”
Andy Mabett (Wikimedian), “Working with Wikipedia and its sister projects”
Discussants: Alistair Mutch & Margaret Procter
12:30-14:00 Buffet lunch
14:00-15:00 Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Business School), “Potential and perils of electronic
access to the archive”
Susanna Fellman (University of Gothenburg) and Andrew Popp (University of
Liverpool), “Owners, archivists and historians: allies or enemies in creating
organizational memory?”
Discussants: Maria Sienkiewicz & Stephanie Decker
15:00-15:30 Refreshments
15:30-16:45 Roundtable “The Practice of Archiving and the Future of Corporate Heritage”
Speakers: Michael Anson, Margaret Procter & Michael Rowlinson
17:00-19:00 Cocktail reception (MBA lounge)

The next events in the series are:

Organizational remembering as an alternative framework Date: 15 July 2015 Location: Queen Mary University, London Organisers: Michael Rowlinson & Andrew Hoskins

The Narrative construction of memory Date: 11 November 2015 Location: Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Organizers: Michael Rowlinson & Mads Mordhorst

Organizational ethnography and phenomenological approaches Date: 27 January 2016 (tentative) Location: Manchester Business School, Manchester Organiser: John Hassard

Challenging organizational histories Date: 13 April 2016 (tentative) Location: Aston Business School Organiser: Stephanie Decker

Organizations as heritage and history as a useful resource Date: July or September 2016 (tentative) Location: Queen Mary University, London Organiser: Michael Rowlinson

I would also encourage my readers to check out the CFP for the Special Issue of Management & Organizational History Special issue on “Revisiting the Historic Turn 10 years later”, closing 31 March 2015. You can download the Special Issue Call For Papers here.

m&oh cover


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: ,
Categories : Managing the Past: The Role of Organizational Archives”

Barclays Group Archive Website

5 03 2015

The new website for the Barclays Group archive is now online. It will doubtless be a wonderful resource for scholars who want to access the archival materials held by this global banking giant. Over the last few centuries, 250 financial institutions have merged to form this huge group. As a result, the corporate archive in Manchester holds the papers of a large number of firms.

This story is best told through our rich archive of photographs, ledgers, letters, minute books, equipment and a range of, in some cases unexpected, curiosities housed in the Barclays Group Archives in Manchester, UK. The material in these archives is unique, irreplaceable and priceless. They don’t just tell the story of Barclays’ businesses around the world, they also communicate the strength and depth of the Values that have underpinned Barclays from the very beginning.

The archives in cover 1.5 miles of shelving and are held in secure, environmentally-controlled strong rooms. Our oldest artefact dates back to 1567 and new material is added every day. Every precious bit of history is listed on a searchable database which you can access when visiting the archives. A small specialist reference library of Barclays and external publications on the history of financial services is also open for daily use by appointment.

I get the impression that the creation of this website is largely due to the energies of Maria Sienkiewicz, although I might be wrong about that.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags:
Categories : Uncategorized

CFP: Revisiting the Historic Turn 10 Years Later

5 03 2015

Back in 2004, Peter Clark and Michael Rowlinson called for a “historic turn.” Their seminal article critiqued organization studies for being ahistorical. Their demand for more historical research paralleled calls from others for the integration of “more history” into research and teaching in management schools. Recent years have seen the accumulation of evidence that the historic turn is indeed taking place in a variety of management fields (O’Sullivan and Graham, 2010; Decker, 2010; Keulen and Kroeze, 2012; Rowlinson, 2013; Rowlinson,  Hassard and Decker, 2013; Greenwood and Bernardi, 2013).  The historic turn appears to be taking place. Fingers crossed, it will continue. The fact top management journals such as Academy of Management Review are publishing articles on historical research methods is a very encouraging sign to all business historians.

If you have been involved in the historic turn you may wish to investigate the CFP for the Special Issue of Management & Organizational History Special issue on “Revisiting the Historic Turn 10 years later”, closing 31 March 2015. You can download the Special Issue Call For Papers here.

m&oh cover

Greenwood, A., & Bernardi, A. (2013). Understanding the rift, the (still) uneasy bedfellows of History and Organization Studies. Organization, 1350508413514286.

Kroeze, R., & Keulen, S. (2013). Leading a multinational is history in practice: The use of invented traditions and narratives at AkzoNobel, Shell, Philips and ABN AMRO. Business history, 55(8), 1265-1287.

O’Sullivan, M., & Graham, M. B. (2010). ‘Guest Editors’ Introduction’. Journal of Management Studies, 47(5), 775-790.

Rowlinson, M. (2013). ‘Management & Organizational History: the continuing historic turn’. Management & Organizational History, 8(4), 327-328.

Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., & Decker, S. (2013). ‘Strategies for organizational history: A dialogue between historical theory and organization theory’. Academy of Management Review, amr-2012.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Uncategorized

The East India Company and Our Times

5 03 2015

The  author William Dalrymple has published an excellent and lengthy online essay that draws on his forthcoming book on the East India Company and which draws lessons for the present.

For the corporation – a revolutionary European invention contemporaneous with the beginnings of European colonialism, and which helped give Europe its competitive edge – has continued to thrive long after the collapse of European imperialism. When historians discuss the legacy of British colonialism in India, they usually mention democracy, the rule of law, railways, tea and cricket. Yet the idea of the joint-stock company is arguably one of Britain’s most important exports to India, and the one that has for better or worse changed South Asia as much any other European idea. Its influence certainly outweighs that of communism and Protestant Christianity, and possibly even that of democracy.

Companies and corporations now occupy the time and energy of more Indians than any institution other than the family. This should come as no surprise: as Ira Jackson, the former director of Harvard’s Centre for Business and Government, recently noted, corporations and their leaders have today “displaced politics and politicians as … the new high priests and oligarchs of our system”. Covertly, companies still govern the lives of a significant proportion of the human race.

The 300-year-old question of how to cope with the power and perils of large multinational corporations remains today without a clear answer: it is not clear how a nation state can adequately protect itself and its citizens from corporate excess. As the international subprime bubble and bank collapses of 2007-2009 have so recently demonstrated, just as corporations can shape the destiny of nations, they can also drag down their economies. In all, US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets from January 2007 to September 2009. What Burke feared the East India Company would do to England in 1772 actually happened to Iceland in 2008-11, when the systemic collapse of all three of the country’s major privately owned commercial banks brought the country to the brink of complete bankruptcy. A powerful corporation can still overwhelm or subvert a state every bit as effectively as the East India Company did in Bengal in 1765.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: ,
Categories : Uncategorized

A Profile in Courage: the Noble Suicide of a College

4 03 2015

Sweet Briar College

Here’s a story about university leaders with real courage: rather than attempt to limp on and deliver an increasingly mediocre quality of education, the board of the struggling Sweet Briar College decided to shut the place down in an orderly fashion and use their remaining funds to help students and faculty to transfer to other colleges. They concluded that a college that is 30 minutes from the nearest Starbucks would just never become viable no matter what it did.

In other words, they decided that the interests of the human beings who make up the college take precedence over the interests of the college as a self-perpetuating organism. Very enlightened.

We all know of far too many organizations that strive for perpetual life when they should really be allowed to close once they no longer serve a purpose.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags:
Categories : Uncategorized

Peter Temin: Lessons from the Great Depression

4 03 2015

This wide-ranging interview with Professor Peter Temin is certainly thought provoking. I don’t agree with everything he says, especially his use of anecdotal from Kensington Market to understand the Canadian labour market, but it is certainly worth watching. The topics discussed include: the Tea Party, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Piketty, the Second World War, Bernard Baruch, and much else.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : New Deal, Peter Temin, Welfare state

Trouble in Paradise: Canadian Banks in the Caribbean

4 03 2015
I’m involved in a collaborative research project that investigates, among other things, the history of trade between Canada and the British West Indies. I was, therefore, interested an article that recently appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper.  It’s about how the Canadian banks are losing money in the Caribbean yet again. The article mentions that the economic ties between Canada and the West Indies are very old.  I think that the Globe article underscores the social relevance of our research project.

Canada’s commercial ties to the Caribbean run deep. Starting in 1864, the group that founded Merchant’s Bank in Halifax financed trade with British-owned islands in the Antilles. Ships leaving Canada packed with timber and flour returned home with sugar, rum and cotton.

Scotiabank planted roots in the British West Indies, as they were then known, by opening a branch in Jamaica in 1889. RBC began its Caribbean foray even earlier, in 1882, and CIBC set up shop in Barbados and Jamaica in 1920. Canadians were so enamoured with the region that Prime Minister Robert Borden talked to his British counterpart, David Lloyd George, about taking over some islands in 1919 (or so legend has it).

For all that history, our banks are sometimes still chided for being from afar. “Everybody always talks about these ‘foreign banks,’” says Anya Schnoor, a Jamaican who runs Scotiabank Trinidad. “I always say to everybody: If you’ve been in a region 125 years, we’ve kind of gone beyond” that line of reasoning. 

Comments : 2 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

Open Access, Canadian Style

3 03 2015

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been following the issue of Open Access academic publishing for quite some time. When the British government first mooted the possibility that all RCUK research would need to be published in Open Access format, I liked the idea. I then realised that the devil is in the details. Publishing an article in Open Access format means requires the author (or the author’s employer) to pay a fee that is typically around £1k to £2k. (When I published an article last year in a journal owned by Springer, a German firm, the fee was over €2,000). The requirement that an article has be published in Open Access to count for the next REF has been very controversial. I’ve covered this controversy in my blog posts on the Finch Report, Green Open Access, Gold Open Access, Open Access Week, etc. The key issue is that someone needs to pay for the costs of running journals and if people can read articles for free, it will be the authors and their employers who pay. Luckily, the minister in the UK government who was pushing the Open Access agenda, David Two-Brain Willetts, realised this and decided to set aside from money to be given to some British universities to cover article processing fees for their staff publications.  He made this change in response to criticism by Adrian Bailey MP who rightly pointed out that the rush to Open Access was going to cost universities more than anticipated.

I see from Ian Milligan’s blog that the Tri-Council research agency in Canada, which is equivalent to the RCUK, has decreed that funded research outputs there now need to be published Open Access. This story is of interest to me because I am part of collaborative grant funded by SSHRC, the social science research council in Canada.  I hope that the Canadian government has fully costed the impact of this move and has set aside funds so that it is revenue neutral for both academics and universities.  Let’s hope that the Canadian parliament has MPs who are as intelligent and far-sighted as Adrian Bailey. Unfortunately, Canadian parliaments typically have a lower level of human capital than their British equivalents.


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags:
Categories : Open access

« Previous Entries Next Entries »