The Past Speaks

Joanne Bailey has posted a lengthy and very positive review of my colleague Andrew Popp’s book Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage, and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century (Studies in Business History, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2012).

I think that the main lesson we can take away from the discussion that Popp’s book has generated is that we need additional research into the mental and social landscapes of historical entrepreneurs.

The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, which this month is celebrating its 7th Anniversary, invites submissions from business and economic historians. As the only scholarly journal dedicated entirely to historical themes in marketing, it features world-class research on the history of distribution and retail formats, advertising, direct marketing and public relations, market research, branding and product development, exporting, marketing policy and regulation, and the history of marketing thought. Over the past years, it has devoted special issues to marketing history and histories in Canada, Ireland and Italy, the history of sports marketing, the evolution of retail formats, and the contribution of female marketing scholars and practitioners, amongst other themes.

JHRM’s impact factor continues to improve: average cites per article are 2.44, and the H-index is 10. This compares very favourably with highly ranked business history journals (Source: Harzing’s ‘Publish or Perish’ and Google Scholar Database, January 27, 2015).

Please join us on the journey that continues to explore the complex and exciting history of marketing. More information on the journal’s content, call for papers, and submission procedures can be found on the journal’s website.

Editorial team

Editor
Professor Brian Jones
Quinnipiac University, School of Business / SB-DNF, 275 Mount Carmel Avenue, Hamden Ct 06518-1949, USA
bjones1@quinnipiac.edu

Associate Editors
Stefan Schwarzkopf
Associate Professor in Business History, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Eric H Shaw
Professor, Florida Atlantic University, USA

Explorations and Insights
Mark Tadajewski
Professor of Marketing, Durham University, UK

Teaching and Learning
Stanley J Shapiro
Professor of Marketing, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Editorial Advisory Board

Andrew Alexander, University of Surrey, UK
Fred Beard, University of Oklahoma, USA
Russell W. Belk, York University, Canada
John Benson, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Hartmut Berghoff, German Historical Institute / Göttingen University, USA
Barry Boothman, University of New Brunswick, Canada
Blaine Branchik, Quinnipiac University, USA
Stephen Brown, University of Ulster, UK
Robert Crawford, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Peggy Cunningham, Dalhousie University, Canada
Teresa da Silva Lopes, University of York, UK
Judy Foster Davis, Eastern Michigan University, USA
Tracey Deutsch, University of Minnesota, USA
O. C. Ferrell, University of Wyoming/Colorado State University, USA
Ronald Fullerton, Independent Scholar, Nigeria
Shelby D Hunt, Texas Tech University, USA
William Keep, The College of New Jersey, USA
Philip Kotler, J. L. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA
Pamela Laird, University of Colorado at Denver, USA
William Lazer, Florida Atlantic University, USA
Marilyn Liebrenz-Himes, George Washington University, USA
Jan Logemann, Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Germany
Pauline Maclaran, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Elizabeth Moore, University of Notre Dame, USA
Leighann Neilson, Carleton University, Canada
Ross Petty, Babson College, USA
Richard Pollay, University of British Columbia, Canada
Thomas Powers, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Jacqueline Reid, Duke University, USA
Daniel Robinson, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Ronald Savitt, University of Vermont, USA
Jonathan Schroeder, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Jagdish N Sheth, Emory University, USA
Inger Stole, University of Illinois, USA
Göran Svensson, Oslo School of Management, Norway
Robert Tamilia, Retired, Canada
Laura Ugolini, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Kazuo Usui, Saitama University, Japan
William Wilkie, University of Notre Dame, USA
Ian F Wilkinson, The University of Sydney, Australia
Terrence Witkowski, California State University, USA
Ben Wooliscroft, University of Otago, New Zealand – See more at: http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/editorial_team.htm?id=jhrm#sthash.ed6HTVN3.dpuf

LSE Campus

Terry Gourvish, the long-standing director of the Business History Unit at the LSE, has announced that the unit is closing.  This is sad news, as the Unit has been an important centre for business historical research since its establishment in 1978. The Unit’s seminar series has served a very important role in the business history community. In part because of its location in central London, the seminar series had attracted large numbers of excellent speakers and very engaged attendees. It’s a great venue for feedback on papers that are about to be submitted. The BHU has long had strong ties with private industry and government, thanks again to its central London location (it’s just a few Tube stops from the City).

[The only bad thing about the BHU unit was that access to it was through a labyrinthine route that included the bridge seen in the picture above].

Although the news of the closure of the unit is sad, there may be an opportunity here for another university in central London. It seems to me that the Institute of Contemporary British History at King’s would be the ideal new home for the seminar series previously run by the BHU. King’s is just across the street from the BHU. The head of the Institute, Richard Roberts, is a business/financial historian. I think that a business history seminar series would complement the Institute’s thriving oral history programme. (A number of years ago I attended a fascinating oral history session in which finance professionals spoke about the Big Bang deregulation reforms of 1988).

The management school at Queen Mary, University of London, is also home to business historians. It could potentially take over the operation of the BHU seminar.

Anyway, these are just suggestions from a sympathetic outside observer up in Liverpool.

P.S. Here are some of Terry’s publications:

Gourvish, Terry (2006) What can business history tell us about business performance? Competition and Change, 10 (4). 375-392. ISSN 1024-5294

AS: I’m posting this CFP on behalf of a colleague.

Call for Papers – Hello Kitty and International Relations
(12th June 2015)

Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), University of Warwick

Shocking news was revealed about Hello Kitty on her 40th birthday in summer 2014: ‘Hello kitty is not a cat – she’s a British girl’ named Kitty White and lives with her sister and parents in suburban London. But this has hardly affected the global popularity of this character created by the Japanese company Sanrio in the 1970s.
Her fandom has a large following around the world. She can be seen in Tokyo, New York, or Rio de Janeiro. 25,000 fans flocked to her convention in Los Angeles last year. The world’s first Hello Kitty theme park opened in China.
Illuminating on the intersection of popular culture and international relations (IR), the Hello Kitty and International Relations workshop aims to explore deeper, more nuanced understandings of IR through an interdisciplinary dialogue on the Hello Kitty phenomenon. International relations is not defined here as a narrow subfield in politics, but an interconnecting constellation with cultural, social, economic, and linguistic implications. It is the production of ‘relations international’ (Christine Sylvester) that incorporates questions of gender, relations among ethnic/racial groups and bridges between local and regional communities.
In the spirit of the aesthetic turn in IR (Roland Bleiker), this workshop recognises Hello Kitty’s potential to invite us to challenge granted dogmas in everyday life, interrogate in new ways global issues that affect our life-worlds, and reinvigorate silenced or marginalised debates. Above all, despite her commodification, she is an artistic expression that reifies and epitomises hope in and for the everyday. As the Japanese-American conductor Kent Nagano claims, the main purpose of art is to plant the seed of hope, through impassioning our innermost feelings.

This ubiquity of Hello Kitty is a result of her ‘emptiness’, or what Roland Barthes calls ‘the empty sign’ that embodies ‘an empty point-of-affluence of all its occupations and its pleasure’. Christine Yano’s recent monograph on Hello Kitty concurs: Hello Kitty ‘inhabits the “thingness” of the “thing” in the physical properties of cuteness she brings to meaning making’. Hello Kitty is then a ‘liminal space’ to posit academic conjectures on the everyday and the international.
This workshop welcomes contributions from a variety of approaches that discover Hello Kitty’s relevance in the contemporary world, especially in consideration to the three following sub-themes:
Resurgence of the global (political) subjects
Performing IR in everyday life
Speaking in silence: reconstructing marginalised voices in IR

Keynote Roundtable Speakers: Dr Kyle Grayson (Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle), Dr Jason Dittmer (Geography, UCL) and Dr Erzsébet Strausz (Politics and International Studies, Warwick)

Please send a word-processed abstract of no more than 200 words to Misato Matsuoka (m.matsuoka@warwick.ac.uk) before 25th February 2015, indicating also the subtheme to which your paper would make a contribution. There are plans to publish the workshop papers in an edited volume, and details will follow.