Business History at the Academy of Management Conference 2014

8 08 2014

AS:  The recent Academy of Management conference attracted 10,000 scholars from around the world. There were a number of panels that are of interest to business historians.

 

Program Session #: 142 | Submission: 13414 | Sponsor(s): (OMT, MH, ENT)
Scheduled: Friday, Aug 1 2014 3:15PM – 4:45PM at Pennsylvania Convention Center in Room 120 C

Historical Approaches to Management and Organization Studies: Sources and Methods
History & Organization Studies

Research-oriented

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Speaker: JoAnne Yates; MIT Sloan;
Coordinator: R. Daniel Wadhwani; U. of the Pacific;
Speaker: Steven Kahl; Dartmouth College;
Speaker: David A. Kirsch; U. of Maryland;
Speaker: Michael Rowlinson; Queen Mary U. of London;
Facilitator: Marcelo Bucheli; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;
In recent years, management researchers have begun to use historical sources and methods in their study of management, organizations, and markets. Building on earlier pleas for an engagement with historical reasoning about organizations (Zald, 1993; Kieser, 1994; Clark and Rowlinson, 2004), these more recent developments have included efforts to develop historical approaches to organizational and institutional theory (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2009; Marquis, 2003), strategy (Kahl et al, 2012; Ingram et al, 2012), innovation and entrepreneurship (Tripsas, 1997; Forbes and Kirsch, 2010; Wadhwani and Jones, 2014), and critical management studies (Rowlinson and Proctor, 1999), among other subfields. The turn towards history, however, has also raised a number of complex questions for researchers about the nature of historical knowledge, how it might be employed to address organizational questions, and how to analyze historical sources and data (Bucheli and Wadhwani, 2014; Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, forthcoming). This PDW will introduce participants interested in historical sources and research methods to the core theoretical and methodological issues involved in historical research, and discuss the variety of ways in which history is being used in organization and management studies today. Led by an interdisciplinary group of historians and management scholars, the PDW will provide participants with both a broad orientation to the theoretical and practical issues involved in historical research, and an opportunity to apply it to their own research using smaller breakout groups based on the specific ways they are seeking to engage history.

 

Program Session #: 225 | Submission: 10041 | Sponsor(s): (MH)
Scheduled: Saturday, Aug 2 2014 8:00AM – 9:30AM at Loews Philadelphia Hotel in Parlor 2

New Tools for Old Data: Data Visualization
New Tools

Research-oriented

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Organizer: James M Wilson; U. of Glasgow;
Data visualization uses a variety of graphic tools to enhance the exploration, development, understanding and presentation of historical data and information. These tools are effective alternatives and supplements to purely textual or statistical approaches and the workshop focuses on introducing them to researchers in business history topics. Applications from the presenter’s own research will form the foundation for the presentation along with suitable other historic examples; and where appropriate modern analyses may be shown to have parallel applications to historic cases. The session will take two popular expressions as starting points: “A picture is worth a thousand words” and “Seeing is believing” revealing that a graphic representation can incorporate a great deal of information in a compact, readily comprehensible format. This is true not just for presenting information but even more so in exploring research questions where identifying relationships and behaviour over time, or along other dimensions may be problematical to perceive in numerical data, but graphs and other visual representations may more readily clarify relationships and help in hypothesizing relationships and interactions, and revealing their nature. The objective is to familiarize attendees with visualization techniques and the spreadsheet tools commonly available for implementing them; and so their research may benefit from these improved skills, and their seminar and teaching presentations may be more effective. Data visualization tools offer a great variety of powerful analytical and presentation techniques, and this workshop will describe and show their application in researching historic management topics, with clear parallels and applications to current topics.

Search Terms: Management History , Data Collection , Data Analys

 

Paper Session
Program Session #: 855 | Submission: 18539 | Sponsor(s): (MH)
Scheduled: Monday, Aug 4 2014 8:00AM – 9:30AM at Loews Philadelphia Hotel in Regency Ballroom C2

Economics Lessons from History
Economics Lessons

Practice-oriented

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Chair: John Norman Davis; Hardin Simmons U.;
An exploration of lessons learned from historical economic events.

Search Terms: Economics , History , Lessons
MH: “Results of the Decade” and Bond Rating Stability During the U.S. Great Depression Practice-oriented Research-oriented
Author: John Donnellan; New Jersey City U.;
Author: Berry Wilson; Pace U.;
This study analyses Moody’s railroad bond ratings over the period: 1925-1933 to examine the stability of Moody’s ratings during this critical period in U.S. economic history. One core principal applied by Moody was “results of the decade,” under which Moody derived quantitative measures from a 10-year moving average of the underlying credit data. Although related to “rating through the cycle,” “results of the decade” was a more explicit way of capturing secular trends in bond quality. Moody decomposed the ratings construction process into two components. The first constructed a statistical rating from two risk factors. These were: (1) security, a measure of a bond’s solvency, and (2) salability, a measure of a bond’s liquidity. Moody then combined these two factors with his personal judgment to construct the final rating. Our study analyzes the stability of both the statistical rating and Moody’s judgment. Our results contradict the “results of the decade” principal, and show that Moody made substantial changes in the rating process during the Great Depression.

Search Terms: security , salability , rating through the cycle
Paper (and optional supplemental information) is Available to Registrants Only: Please login at the left.

MH: The New Deal for Management & Organization Studies:Lessons, Insights and Reflections Theme-oriented: The Power of Words Research-oriented
Author: Albert J. Mills; Saint Mary’s U.;
Author: Terrance G. Weatherbee; Acadia U.;
Author: Jason Foster; Athabasca U.;
Author: Jean Helms Mills; Saint Mary’s U.;
In this paper, drawing on ANTi-History (Durepos and Mills 2012), we set out to recover the New Deal and some of its leading figures for the field of management and organizational studies. In so doing we do not simply seek to add New Deal studies to existing histories of MOS but rather our aim is to show how MOS histories have served to narrowly define the field and constrain what is considered a valid area of study. Through exploration of the neglected phenomenon of the New Deal, we conclude that MOS needs be more imaginative in its choice of stories and exemplars when dealing with the broad range of economic, behavioral, social and political factors that confront humankind’s ability to organize and manage its affairs.

Search Terms: New Deal , ANTi-History , Management History
Paper (and optional supplemental information) is Available to Registrants Only: Please login at the left.

MH: The 2008 Financial Crisis: A historical rethinking of a predictable evolutionary disaster Practice-oriented Theme-oriented: The Power of Words Research-oriented
Author: Michael G. Jacobides; London Business School;
This paper revisits the 2008 financial crisis, considering how we can draw on the historical record not only to revisit our understanding of what really drove the problems, but also to help inform theory. It looks at some relatively neglected factors which can be fruitfully documented through historical methods: the nature of the selection environment, the agency of actors, and the influence of structure (industry architectures and business models), which are discussed in detail, theoretically and empirically. On the basis of that evidence, as well as the promise that feedback, rather than foresight, drives behavior, we come to a fresh set of conclusions on what drove the crisis, and to an exciting opportunity for historical methods to inform theory. This potentially challenges some of the current policy views in terms of the current focus on “Too Big To Fail” and the direction of regulatory energy; it also helps us revisit the lessons that we should take from this crisis, taking us away from macro-economic factors on the one hand and on individual malfeasance on the other, highlighting structure instead. In all, the analysis suggests that a theoretically based, historical institutional and evolutionary analysis can add a fresh perspective.

Search Terms: financial crisis , evolutionary theory , business history
Paper (and optional supplemental information) is Available to Registrants Only: Please login at the left.

 

Paper Session
Program Session #: 1706 | Submission: 18538 | Sponsor(s): (MH)
Scheduled: Tuesday, Aug 5 2014 11:30AM – 1:00PM at Loews Philadelphia Hotel in Congress Room B

Learning from a Re-examination of the Past
Re-examining the Past

Research-oriented

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Chair: Matthew Sargent; California Institute of Technology;
Authors look back at historical contexts to learn new lessons for the field of management.

Search Terms: Historical Research , Context , Lessons
Selected as a Best Paper MH: Integrating Libertarian Paternalism into Paternalistic Leadership: H.J. Heinz as Choice Architect Research-oriented
Author: John Humphreys; Texas A&M U.-Commerce;
Author: Brandon Randolph-Seng; Texas A&M U.-Commerce;
Author: Stephanie Pane Haden; Texas A&M U.-Commerce;
Author: Milorad M. Novicevic; U. of Mississippi;
Extant theory suggests that paternalistic leadership is not a unified construct and that benevolent paternalistic and exploitative paternalistic leader styles are independent. However, this representation ignores the emerging concept of libertarian paternalism. In order to explore this prospective style of leader paternalism, we performed a historiographically-informed examination of prominent paternal capitalists from the era of industrial paternalism in the United States. We discovered that the paternalistic leadership of H.J. Heinz lacked the degree of coercion and intrusion found in other paternalistic leaders of the period, even when compared to those motivated by benevolence. As this resonated well with current notions of libertarian paternalism, we analyzed the paternalistic leadership style of Heinz alongside contemporaneous archetypical exploitative (George Pullman) and benevolent (Henry Ford) paternalistic leaders. We interpret the historical evidence to integrate emergent ideas of libertarian paternalism into a more comprehensive typology of paternalistic leadership.

Search Terms: paternalistic leadership , libertarian paternalism , H.J. Heinz
Paper (and optional supplemental information) is Available to Registrants Only: Please login at the left.

MH: Contributions of Lillian M. Gilbreth to Management Theory through the Context of Critical Biography Practice-oriented Research-oriented
Author: Jane Whitney Gibson; Nova Southeastern U.;
Author: Russell W. Clayton; Saint Leo U.;
Author: Jackie W. Deem; Kaplan U.;
Author: Jacqueline Einstein; Nova Southeastern U.;
Author: Erin Henry; Harvard U.;
In this paper, the lens of critical biography is used to examine the life and contributions of Lillian M. Gilbreth, widely known for instilling the human factor into scientific management theory. This paper looks at Lillian Gilbreth’s background, the important work and family roles she held, the turning points in her life, and the societal context in which her contributions to management thought were made. Against this backdrop, Gilbreth’s key contributions to management theory are discussed including those relating to the human element of scientific management, the application of scientific management to homemaking and the conceptualization of women as intelligent consumers and workers. The authors comment on how Gilbreth’s life experiences interfaced with her key contributions in these areas.

Search Terms: Lillian Gilbreth , Management History , Critical Biography
Paper (and optional supplemental information) is Available to Registrants Only: Please login at the left.

MH: Management as fantasy. The managerial work of Catherine Cappe and Faith Gray, 1782-1820.
Author: Linda Perriton; U. of York;
Sage Publishers Award for Best Management History Division Paper in Leadership

In the years between 1782 and 1820, Catharine Cappe and Faith Gray, with the help of an extended kinship and social network of middle-class women, managed two progressive philanthropic organizations in York, England. The work of Cappe and Gray and their wider network of managing women is used as the subject of an analysis of management as fantasy, adapting Joan Scott’s (2001) ideas about the significance of psychoanalytic concepts within gender history. The paper explores how the historiography of management and organizational history could respond to this analytical frame.

Search Terms: Gender , Philanthropy , Desire
Paper is NOT Available: Please contact the author(s).

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MH: Genesis of Management Thought: Comparison between Early American & British-Indian Railroads
Author: K.V. Mukundhan; Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode;
The contribution of early American railroads to the development of management thought is a topic that has been heavily researched and written about. The need for managerial governance in the American railroads sparked off a revolution in thought creation that cascaded to the other industries of the American economy. The conditions that existed in America in the years that followed the industrial revolution were conducive to the creation, documentation and dissemination of management thought. There is prima facie evidence to believe that the economic context of India under British imperialism provided a fertile ground for management thought creation and development. Though the colonial Indian railroads were established by the British as early as 1853, their contribution to the development of management thought is either conspicuous by its absence or has lacked academic interest to bring it to the fore. In this paper, I have attempted to explore this historical anomaly by comparing the economic, social and political climate that existed in America with that of India during the period of this study (1850-1925). By comparing the contexts on three parameters that are necessary for the development and proliferation of management thought, I have tried to account for the void in the contributions of British Indian railroads in this paper.

Search Terms: Railroad , History , Management
Paper (and optional supplemental information) is Available to Registrants Only: Please login at the left


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A Bad News Day

8 08 2014

I gotta stop reading news items during my lunch. In addition to the depressing news that at least five different religious groups are being slaughtered by their fellow theists in the Middle East (see video), there is the knowledge that the military-industrial complex of a liberal democracy is about to transfer a new warship over to Russia. The Russian crew are parading through the streets of the French port city where the ships has been built. They will sail the vessel back to Russia later this month.  Note how the Russian crews are not allowed to communicate with the local population when they go ashore to stretch their legs.

 

The shipyard that is building this weapon for Putin is owned by a company in which a third of the shares belong to the French government. This fact illustrates the dangers is state ownership. The French government agreed to the imposition of sanctions on Russia that cost privately-owned firms some sales, but when it has a bit more skin in the game, it’s business as usual. Nice one.

Ok. Here is some info about one of the religious groups in the Middle East that is currently slated for extermination by Islamists.  The sin of this group, which follows a religion that is a variant of Zoroastrianism, is that they worship some sort of peacock angle rather than Allah. At the same time, of course, we have seen the following examples of the positive role of religion in the life of the Middle East: Sunnis killing Shias; Shias killing Sunnis; Muslims killed Jews; Jews killing Muslims; Muslims killing Christians. I can see why the reflex of undergraduates is to say “religion is the root of all evil.”

 

 

 

 


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David Olusoga’s Challenge to Business Historians

7 08 2014

I rarely watch TV documentaries about history, as many of them are quite badly researched. I saw a brilliant exception this generalisation last night. 

When he unveiled the BBC’s plans to mark the centenary of the First World War with four years of WWI-themed documentaries and dramas, Director-General Tony Hall promised that the programs would have “a profound impact on the way we think about World War One”. In other words, they wouldn’t just rehash old interpretations of the war but would be based on cutting-edge academic research. The BBC is producing 2,500 hours of programming about the war!

Last night, BBC Two broadcast The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire a moving documentary that showed the ways in which racism influenced the conduct of the war. (Any serious student of this war must recognized that the imperialist and racist assumptions of the era make the moral universe of the various combatant nations utterly different from that of liberal democratic people today, which is why efforts to depict the war as a crusade for liberty are hilarious). Anyway, the documentary shown last night was hosted by the Anglo-Nigerian journalist David Olusoga. It’s about told the four million non-European, non-white soldiers who got caught up in what started as an intra-European struggle.The documentary looked at the experience of Sikh soldiers in the British Army and the Senegalese soldiers who fought for the French.  Olusoga shows how the complex racial ideologies of the era influenced the military strategies and tactics used. (French generals favoured the use of Black troops on the dubious grounds that Africans’ had less developed nervous systems and were thus less able to feel pain). The British rulers of India had their own pseudo-scientific ideas about ethnic groups and castes made for good soldiers (the so-called martial races). The documentary shows Olusoga sitting in libraries such as the British Library and reading racialist texts from that era.

Olusoga is a journalist not an academic. However, his documentary draws on the considerable volume of academic literature the straddles the boundaries between the history of racism and military history. I hope that his excellent documentary is shown in all nations for the former British Empire and that a sub-titled version is shown in Francophonie countries.

As a business historian, I’m left wondering whether we could produce a similar documentary that talks about how the racial ideologies of that era influenced commerce between countries that were considered to be of different “races”. I think that the number of scholarly secondary sources we could draw on would be much smaller, unfortunately. It seems to be that David Olusoga has created a challenge for us business historians. 

 

 


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Klein on Central Banking: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

6 08 2014

Peter Klein has chapter in a new book edited by David Howden and Joseph Salerno, The Fed at One Hundred: A Critical View on the Federal Reserve System (New York: Springer, 2014). The title is “Information, Incentives, and Organization: The Microeconomics of Central Banking.” You can read a version of the paper here.

Here is the abstract:

Both the Fed’s defenders and critics focus on macroeconomic questions. What is the correct monetary policy? Does the economy need an “activist” Fed? Should the central bank intervene to reduce unemployment, or focus on keeping prices stable? Should the Fed target interest rates or nominal GDP? Has the Fed done a good job? These are critically important questions. Ultimately, however, the Fed’s behavior derives from the way it is organized, managed, and governed. In other words, the macroeconomic problem is built upon a more fundamental, underlying microeconomic problem: How is the Fed’s behavior enabled, shaped, and constrained by its mandate, its legal authority, and its organizational design? For a fuller understanding of the Fed, and central banking more generally, we should turn not only to macroeconomics, but also to microeconomics, specifically at the economic theory of organizations — their nature, emergence, boundaries, internal structure, and governance. This chapter evaluates the Federal Reserve System, and the institution of central banking more generally, from the perspective of organizational economics, and concludes that independent, unaccountable central banks are inefficient, inherently politicized, and incapable of performing the functions assigned to them.

 

Klein is saying that we need to take a hard look at the incentives of the individuals who run monetary policy. That’s very plausible indeed. In the post-mortem that followed the Financial Crisis, a great of attention was paid to how the employees of banks are compensated (see here). The thinking was that the compensation mix used (a blend of salary plus big bonuses) encouraged bankers to take risks that ultimately took down their employers—and much of the economy. More recently, there have been proposals to legislate deferred payments to traders in financial institutions—part of their bonuses would be put into escrow for a few years and they would only get the money if it turned out that the investments they made on behalf of the bank were good ones. This makes sense. Consider an employee of Lehman Brothers who bet his employer’s money on MBS in say, 2005. The investment performed well in 2006, so he got a big bonus in that year. In 2008, when this investment went sour, neither Lehman Brothers nor its creditors were able to reclaim to bonus.  The prevailing thinking today is that a new compensation system would encourage bank employees to be long-term greedy and avoid the sort of risky, short-term greedy behaviour that contributed to the crisis.  In the UK, Mark Carney Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has called for this system to be part of all new employment contracts in banking.

 

The thing is, while a great deal has been said about way bankers’ compensation is structured, there is very little popular or scholarly discussion of how central bankers (e.g., Mr Carney) are compensated and how that compensation structure might influence their decisions about monetary policy!

I’ve read Klein’s paper with interest. (I read it because I’m doing some research right now on a British banker who simultaneously managed a large international bank and sat on the board of the Bank of England). Klein makes a very strong a priori case. However, I think that he has run up against a brick wall related to the availability of primary sources. The Fed and other central banks are reluctant to release information about the employment contracts, compensation packages, and so forth of their current and past employees. All they publish are the headline salaries. If we want to examine how the incentive structure for central bankers has evolved over the last 100 years, we would need access to the appropriate archival materials, which would involve looking at both the personal papers of the central bankers, the papers of their family firms, as well as the archives of the central banks.For a start, we would need to compare the terms of the employment contracts given to successive central bankers.  Speaking as a business historian, I think it may be difficult to get access to all of these materials.

Here is a question that can start this research: when were the salaries of central bankers first indexed to inflation? When were automatic COLA adjustments inserted into their employment contracts? It seems to me that a central banker would have less of an incentive to fight inflation if they knew that their real income was going to be unaffected by rising price levels. Which country was the first to inflation-index the pay of the people who set monetary policy? How did its subsequent inflation rate compare to those of the countries that didn’t index their pay?


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5 Foreign Policy Lessons from World War I What we can learn from the Great War on its centennial.

6 08 2014

That’s the title of a great little article that appeared online yesterday.


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Davis Interviews McCloskey

5 08 2014

AS: One of my favourite journalists is Evan Davis. I love his reports on business and economic news. His degree was in economic history and that really shows up in the probing questions he asks his guests on the Today Programme.His radio show, the Bottom Line, is a must-listen to programme for anyone interested in business. (The recent episode on BitCoin was very good).

Anyway, I was very pleased to discover the Evan Davis has interviewed economic historian Deirdre McCloskey about her new book. Here is a description of the podcast:

She argues that poverty matters more than inequality. She describes how at the beginning of the 19th century most people who had ever lived had survived on $3 a day. Today, on average, people in Western Europe and North America live on over $100 a day. Although Professor McCloskey is an economic historian, she says we can’t explain this ‘Great Enrichment’ using economics alone. She also argues that capitalism is an inherently ethical system, and that it would be a mistake to prioritise equality over innovation. Prof McCloskey talks about the role of ideas and attitudes in creating modern prosperity and discusses what her study of history tells us about where our priorities should lie today.

You can listen to the interview here.

Every historian ought to listen to this.


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“‘The One-Company Approach’: Transnationalism in an Israeli-Palestinian Subsidiary of an MNC.”

5 08 2014

Many readers have been following the tragic events currently taking place in various countries in the Middle East. In this context, it is worthwhile thinking about what role business can play in promoting peace.

Galit Ailon (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel) and Gideon Kunda (Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel). 2009. “‘The One-Company Approach’: Transnationalism in an Israeli-Palestinian Subsidiary of an MNC.” Organization Studies, 30(7): 693-712.

Abstract: This paper presents an ethnographic study of the Israeli—Palestinian subsidiary of a multinational hi-tech corporation. Critiquing the tendency of globalization theorists to conceptualize multinational corporations (MNCs) solely in terms of their impact on their external environment, this paper looks inward and examines the ideological and practical constituents of the transnational regime of consciousness as expressed through what management titles `the one-company approach’. We argue that this regime lays foundations for a transnational `imagined community’ which does not rival the national one, but internalizes it, creating an arena of discretionary power for managers: deciding when to activate and when to suppress nationality in the global organizational universe. This study analyzes the relationship between transnationalism and nationalism inside the organization, and its implications for understanding MNCs’ role in globalization.

 

*This paper won the EGOS (European Group for Organization Studies) Roland Calori Prize for the best paper published in Organization Studies between 2009-2010.


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Capitalism, Peace, and the First World War

4 08 2014

 

Today marks the centenary of Britain’s decision to enter the First World War. For historians of international business, this milestone offers us a chance to pause and reflect on both the origins of this particular conflict and the role of different forms of capitalism in generating peace and war.

The role of business in the origins of the First World War has been debated since, well, 1914. During the conflict, Marxists such as Lenin published books arguing that business or rather homogenous “capitalist classes” in each of the Great Powers were behind the conflict.  Such a view was, of course, laughably simplistic, since lumped all business interests into the same category, which effectively  equated steelmakers like Krupp, which did stand to profit from a (short) war from, say, perfume companies, who did not.  Writing in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Schumpeter adapted class analysis to explain the interest-group politics that had led to the outbreak of the war. Schumpeter identified two branches of the bourgeoisie. One element was cosmopolitan and largely pacific in its outlook. Schumpeter associated this sub-class with the ideology of classical liberalism. The other element of the bourgeoisie, according to Schumpeter, were the business interests associated with militarism, economic nationalism, and imperialism. Schumpeter argues that the acquisition of political power by the wrong element of the bourgeoisie, which included armament makers, endangers peace and therefore the interests of the ordinary bourgeoisie.[1]

 

In the United States, many isolationists came to blame the decisions that brought the US into the conflict not on the business class as a whole but on a few bad apples on Wall Street (e.g., anglophile bankers like Jack Morgan) and, of course, the “merchants of death” who made a killing from, er, the business of killing. The term merchant of death came into common currency in the middle of the 1930s thanks to a Republican Congressman.

In recent years, the role of business interests in political life has been debated extensively in many democratic countries.  In the United States, this debate has centred on the Supreme Court’s 2010 controversial ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In this case, the US Supreme Court ruled that laws restricting the rights of companies to try to influence elections were unconstitutional as they violated the First Amendment. In the minds of many, particularly but not exclusively those on the left, this ruling has opened the floodgates and has made it even easier for business interests to use lobbying to subvert the democratic will.

On the 100th anniversary of the decision of great trading nation (Britain) to plunge into the vortex of European militarism , it is worthwhile considering whether greater business influence over politics can sometimes be a good thing. One of the striking things about the decision-making processes that led to the First World War is that the crucial decisions were made by a handful of individuals.  Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers, which is an excellent work of diplomatic history, makes it clear that the key decisions were made by about 20 individuals.  Another striking thing about the crucial days between the assassination in Sarajevo and the outbreak of the war is that the business communities in the major European countries were relatively quiet, even though the vast majority of businessmen, particularly bankers, dreaded the prospect of war. These business groups failed to mobilize for peace.  Yes, it is true that German banker Max Warburg pleaded with the Kaiser to de-escalate the situation and work for peace. It’s also true that the Rothschilds, an international banking family, resisted, at first, the financial mobilization that made the mobilization of actual troops possible. But for a variety of reasons, business leaders did not undertake serious resistance to the war in the form of tax strikes or other robust mechanisms of displaying discontent. I  recently stumbled upon an article that appeared in in the South China Morning Post in the middle of August 1914 that reported that hundreds of thousands of German businessmen were resisting the war and were calling on the Kaiser to declare a unilateral ceasefire.  The article was based on an erroneous rumour,  but it raises the interesting hypothetical question of what would have happened had businessmen been more robust in expressing their preference for peace. Of course, this is a pretty difficult hypothetical to think about, given the nature of the political cultures of most European countries as this time, which expected businessmen to be somewhat deferential to monarchs and other social superiors. (Obviously the cultures of the Western democracies are today very different and encourage all social groups, including businessmen, to be much more outspoken in voicing their opinions).

I understand that many Americans are upset about the Citizens United decision. I know that some British people are annoyed that the City of London has been able to use its influence over David Cameron to water down the sanctions on Russian business imposed after the downing of the Malaysian airliner.  However, I would urge these people to consider whether the events of the summer of 1914 prove that increasing the role of business in shaping public policy can sometimes be a positive force in society.

I have one closing thought about the First World War I would like to share. International trade and globalization cannot guarantee world peace, but they can reduce the frequency, intensity, and duration of war.  It is true that the outbreak of the First World War disproves the crude version of the trade=peace theory that is sometimes articulated by journalists such as Tom Friedman of the New York Times.[2]  Friedman famously argues that since no two countries with McDonald’s restaurants have ever gone to war with each other, capitalism produces peace. The simple rejoinder to this idea is that Germany was Britain’s number one trading partner in 1914 and vice versa, and that this didn’t prevent a drift to war.   However, this is some evidence to suggest that the theory of the commercial peace has some validity, or at least enough validity to guide our thinking about public policy. Since the 1990s, many scholars of International Relations have been persuaded that the mutual economic interdependence characteristic of global capitalism reduces the likelihood of war.[3] This is a theory that can be traced back to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments or even Montesquieu, actually. Although this theory is still controversial in IR departments, it has been bolstered by impressive empirical research and has diffused into other academic disciplines. For instance, the psychologist Steve Pinker incorporates this insight into his well-respected book on why the world has become less, rather than more, violent, over time. Countering the conventional wisdom, Pinker shows that rates of violent death have been falling for centuries, that the 20th century was actually a pretty peaceful century by some metrics, and that things are getting better. He then searches for explanations for why people are becoming less violent. Capitalism and international trade are part of his explanation.[4]

 

I’m not a big fan of the inefficient little regulations the European Union imposes on firms and consumers in its member states. There are lot of problems with the EU as it is currently constituted. On balance, however, the EU is damn good thing, since it had helped to integrate the economies of nations in Europe that were once enemies, making warfare within the EU virtually unthinkable. Despite its recent problems, the European Union has been a very successful post-conflict initiative. [5] That’s why I’m proud to be a citizen of the EU. I’m also proud to put the flag of the European Union on this blog post.

In the post-1945 period, European economic integration was promoted by a former businessman Jean Monnet, who wanted to make war between Germany and France as unthinkable as warfare within North America. Monnet had travelled to North America before the First World War, when he had been a cognac merchant, and was impressed by the ways in which economic interconnected promoted peace there.[6]

The Western world is now at peace with itself, thanks, in part, to commerce. I would say that Japan is also part of this moral universe of capitalist peace: war between Japan and the US is now unthinkable, which will doubtless assure Toyota owners everywhere.  I suppose that we now face the challenge of building a global economy that fosters peace between countries from very different civilizations and religious traditions (think Gaza, think India-Pakistan, think China-Japan).  How we go about doing that is, of course, a question well above my pay grade.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Joseph A. Schumpeter, The sociology of imperialism (New York: Meridian Books, 1951).

[2] Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999), 249-276.

[3] John R. Oneal and Bruce M. Russet, “The Classical Liberals Were Right: Democracy, Interdependence, and Conflict, 1950-1985” International Studies Quarterly 41 (1997): 267-95; Patrick J. McDonald, The Invisible Hand of Peace: Capitalism, the War Machine, and International Relations Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Erik Gartzke and J. Joseph Hewitt, “International Crises and the Capitalist Peace,” International Interactions 36, no. 2 (2010): 115-145.

[4] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).

[5] Brigid Laffan, “The European Union: a Distinctive Model of Internationalization,” Journal of European Public Policy 5, no. 2 (1998): 235-253.

[6] Trygve Ugland, Jean Monnet and Canada: Early Travels and the Idea of European Unity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).


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Process-based Studies in Qualitative Management Research – From Research Design to Publication

2 08 2014

Dr Stephanie Decker, Dr Carola Wolf
Prerequisites:

This course is targeting PhD students and academics with an interest in qualitative approaches to management and organization studies. We will discuss different traditions and templates for designing qualitative research, data collection and analytical strategies, and publishing results in management journals. The course requires all participants to have a basic understanding of qualitative research methodologies including basic research designs, data collection strategies and analytical techniques (e.g. Flick, 2009; Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Course

Description:

This course will discuss different traditions and templates for designing qualitative research, data collection and analysis strategies, and publishing results in management journals, with a special focus on process‐based studies (Langley & Abdallah, 2011). Qualitative research is now regularly published in top management journals, including those where qualitative studies used to be less common. Alongside this trend there has been an ongoing formalization of qualitative methodologies to fulfil the requirement to show that a consistent and rigorous methodology was applied, in line with the underlying epistemological assumptions such as positivist, interpretive and critical perspectives (Gephart, 2004). We will discuss different methodological approaches and templates for collecting and analysing qualitative data, and for effectively communicating research results. Selected approaches include grounded theory and the Gioia methodology (Gioia et al., 2013), strategies for making sense of process data identified by Langley (1999), comparative case analysis as introduced by Eisenhardt (e.g. Eisenhardt, 1989; Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007), historical analysis and documentary analysis (Rowlinson, 2004; Rowlinson et al., 2014), and extended case method (Wadham and Warren, 2014). In the mornings we will briefly introduce and evaluate different approaches, and discuss published paper exemplars applying a particular perspective, while the afternoon will focus on applying methodologies, evaluating strengths and weaknesses from the individual researchers’ points of view, and identifying publication options.
Length:

2 days

Day 1:

Morning: Introduction to specific methodologies and analytical techniques for process data; Afternoon: workshop in which participants will discuss application of methodologies and analyse the use of different analytical strategies in published paper exemplars .

Day 2:

Morning: Introduction to different approaches and templates for communicating results of process‐based studies; Afternoon: workshop in which participants will discuss application of methodologies and possible publication strategies; discussion of published paper exemplars in terms of templates (“boilerplates”) for publication as well as identifying the right journal or special issue, how to use referencing to guide editors towards “friendly” reviewers.

For more details, see here.


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The Dominion of Nature: Environmental Histories of the Confederation Era

31 07 2014

 

 

 

AS: In a few minutes, I’ll be presenting a paper to “The Dominion of Nature” workshop in Charlottetown (PEI), to discuss environmental histories of the Confederation era. The organizers are Profs. Alan MacEachern (Western) and Edward MacDonald (UPEI). My paper, which is about fisheries regulation, applies concepts taken from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

You can follow the workshop on Twitter using the hashtags #DoN2014  #envhist and #PEI2014.

 

 

 

Preamble

How did nature figure into Canadian Confederation? From its creation in 1867 through a series of subsequent expansions, Canada swiftly became one of the largest nations in the world. Ideas about scale, resources, property, mobility, and environment certainly figured into the nation’s consolidation and articulation, yet rarely do such topics appear in histories of the Confederation era. And conversely, “Confederation” does not appear in the index of three recently-published Canadian environmental history surveys. Bringing the methods, practices, and sources of environmental history to bear on the standard Canadian history narrative may well enrich not only that narrative but also the emerging national environmental history one.

In time for the sesquicentennial of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference that was a first step to Confederation, NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment / Nouvelle initiative canadienne en histoire de l’environnement and the University of Prince Edward Island are hosting “The Dominion of Nature: Environmental Histories of the Confederation Era,” a workshop to be held in Charlottetown, PEI on 31 July and 1 August 2014. Participants will workshop pre-circulated essays, moving toward the publication of an edited collection by 2016.

For more of the inspirations and motivations behind this workshop see this Otter post by Alan MacEachern.

 

Programme:

 

Thursday, 31 July
UPEI McDougall Hall room 243
9:00 Introduction: Alan MacEachern & Ed MacDonald
9:20 Wendy Cameron,“Nature Ignored: Promoting
Agricultural Settlement in the Ottawa Huron Tract of Canada
West/Ontario”
10:00 Darcy Ingram,“No Country for Animals?
National Aspirations and Governance Networks in Canada’s
Animal Welfare Movement”
10:40 break
11:00 Andrew Smith,“A Bloomington School
Perspective on the Dominion Fisheries Act of 1868”
11:40 William Knight“Administering Fish”
12:20 lunch
1:30 Brian J Payne, “The Best Fishing Station: Prince Edward
Island and the Gulf of St. Lawrence Mackerel Fishery in the Era
of Reciprocal Trade and Confederation Politics, 1854-1873”
2:20 Dawn Hoegeveen, “Gold, Nature, and Confederation:
Mining Laws in British Columbia in the wake of 1858”
3:30 Taxis to downtown. “Charlottetown 1864” walking tour,
Ed MacDonald.
6:00 Lobster on the Wharf

 

Friday, 1 August
UPEI McDougall Hall room 243
9:00 Randy Boswell,“The ‘Sawdust Question’ and the River
Doctor: Battling Pollution and Cholera in Canada’s New Capital
on the Cusp of Confederation”
9:45 Josh MacFadyen,“A Cold Confederation: Urban Energy
Linkages in Canada”
10:30 break
10:50 Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere,“Viewing Canada: The
Cultural Implications of Topographic Photographs in
Confederation Era Canada”
11:30 Gabrielle Zezulka, “Confederating Alberta’s Resources:
Survey, Catalogue, Control”
12:10 lunch
1:15 JI Little,“Picturing a National Landscape: Images of
Nature in Picturesque Canada”
2:00 Moving forward
2:30 on your own
7:00 McDougall Hall room 243
Guest speaker for The Dominion of Nature & the Northeast &
Atlantic Canada Environmental History Forum (NACEHF):
John R. Gillis, “Islands as Waterlands”
Saturday, 2 August
All are invited to stay on for NACEHF – see nacehf.

 

 


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