Marc Levinson tells us the tale of an ironworks that was ahead of its tim.

I’m reblogging this Time article about the Maker Movement by Tim Bajarin. Most of the article is pretty boiler-plate stuff that were hear from supporters of the Maker Movement: it’s going to revitalise the economy, liberate the Little Guy, dethrone Big Business, and allow the US to compete with China. The really interesting part of the article is where Bajarin uses historical analogy to understand the current state of the Maker Movement. He writes:

One of the people who really understands the Maker Movement is Zach Kaplan, the CEO of Inventables, which is an online hardware store for designers in the Maker Movement. I think of his site as a kind of Amazon for Makers.

I met Kaplan at the recent TED conference in Vancouver, where he told me about the history of the Maker Movement and its culture… he likened the Maker Movement at the moment to where we were with the Apple II back in 1979. He said that in those days, the computer clubs and tech meetings fueled interest in tech and got thousands interested in software programming, semiconductor design and creating tech-related products. Of course, this begat the PC industry and the tech world we live in today.

Notice how Bajarin is using history to understand the current state of the Maker Movement and to predict its future.

Wadhwani and Jones (2014) have recently outlined a research agenda of ‘constitutive historicism’ for scholars of business and management.  ‘Constitutive historicism’ involves investigation how economic actors’ perceptions of their own place in historical time shape their strategies. As Wadhwani and Jones note that ‘two entrepreneurs presented with a similar objective situation may interpret them in very different ways based on their historical understanding of the ways events have unfolded and the possible directions they may take in the future.’

Constitutive historicism includes, but is distinct from, the study of corporate social memory. Corporate social memory, which is an emerging area of research, involve the investigation of how social and organizational memory influences how (large) companies operate. Scholars have begun to look at how firms use their histories to defuse potential political threats (Kroeze, 2013), market their products (Foster et al., 2011), and motivate workers (Anteby and Molnár, 2012). Other organizational scholars have examined how the narratives that firms and other organizations create about their histories influence the behaviour of people within those firms (Linde, 2009). Corporate social memory scholars have recognized that history is a key strategic asset for firms.

This paper abstract describes a recent example of some excellent research on corporate social memory (Kroeze and Keulen, 2013)

 This article states that the distinctiveness of business history and its convincingness can be improved by the concept of invented tradition and narrative. After a theoretical overview it suggests that the narrative approach explains the way leaders operate in practice. It argues that with a narrative approach one sees that history is used by business leaders in four different ways: as a source to create traditions and symbols as means of communication, as a way to understand and strengthen the identity of the organisation, as means to create corporate memory and as a tool to connect past, present and future. The examples are taken from a Dutch oral history project on management behaviour at multinationals.

In corporate social memory studies, the firm is the basic unit of analysis.  Scholars of corporate social memory rely on primary sources created by firms such as websites, commissioned corporate historians, employee magazines, company art collections, company archives, interviews, and internal correspondence. The researchers’ reliance on such sources tends to bias corporate social memory studies towards the investigation of firms that are relatively large and well established, since small and new firms typically lack the institutions needed to manage their social memories. 

Unfortunately, a considerable volume of economic activity takes place outside of large firms and historical consciousness influences economic actors that do not happen to be employees of large companies. The corporate social memory approach cannot, therefore, help us to understand the thinking of the owners of small businesses, self-employed individuals, or members of loose networks. However, by changing the unit of analysis from the firm to the industrial cluster, the industry, or the professional community, we can investigate how ideas about history influence the thinking of participants in the economy.    

Constitutive historicism can involve the use of a wide range of primary sources, including published documents (such as books and newspaper articles), unpublished texts (e.g., email exchanges), and interviews.

Anteby, M., & Molnár, V. (2012). Collective memory meets organizational identity: remembering to forget in a firm’s rhetorical history. Academy of Management Journal, 55(3), 515-540.

Foster, W. M., Suddaby, R., Minkus, A., & Wiebe, E. (2011). History as social memory assets: The example of Tim Hortons. Management & Organizational History, 6(1), 101-120.

Kroeze, R. “The sources and narrative structure of organizational history. The corporate historical narrative of HSBC and Deutsche Bank on their websites” Paper Presented at EGOS, Montreal, 2013.

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.

Linde, C. (2009). Working the past: Narrative and institutional memory. Oxford University Press.

If you asked me to identify the most important difference between social-scientific research circa 2004 and 2014, I would be tempted to point to the rise of quantitative discourse analysis. The quantity and quality of text analysis being done by social scientists has increased dramatically in the last decade. What this means is that getting a PhD in a field like history is now rather different than it was in 2000-5, when I did mine.  This video gives a sense of what cutting-edge historical research now looks like.

Now I have very mixed feelings about the rise of digital humanities. Some of the Digital Humanities projects I have seen tell us nothing new despite the use of the sexy new technologies. Such projects are a huge waste of time and money. Then there are the Digital Humanities projects that make a genuine but modest contribution to their fields. Some of the research done using the new techniques,  expands our understanding somewhat, but I don’t think that it will dramatically change our view of the subject.  

Then there is research with really revolutionary potential. Here’s an example of that. In modern societies, people tend to distinguish violent crimes from “mere” property crimes and demand much more severe penalties for the former. In backward societies such as Saudi Arabia, the priorities are reversed and there are severe penalties for the theft of even small amounts, while some forms of severe violence go unpunished. This raises the historical question of when exactly the modern Western distinction between violent and property crimes emerged and became widespread in Western societies. 

A new Digital Humanities project,  The civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey, answer this question.

The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment.

…we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a long-term, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts.

…This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process.

A new PNAS paper by Klingenstein, Hitchcock, and DeDeo.

H/T to Chris Blattman. 

This great video illustrates the nature of crony capitalism and regulatory capture.