The Past Speaks

2014 CHORD conference and call for papers

‘Retail Work – Historical Perspectives’

11 September 2014

University of Wolverhampton, UK

The Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD) invites proposals for papers that explore the work of retailing and /or distribution. All forms of work (paid and unpaid) in the retailing and distributive trades are of interest, from small shopkeepers, shop assistants, pedlers and market sellers, to large-scale entrepreneurs, wholesalers and distributors. We welcome all disciplinary perspectives and there are no limitations in terms of the historical period or geographical area covered.

Possible topics might include but are not limited to:

§ Workplace strife and strikes

§ Retail management, entrepreneurship and business practices

§ Workplace rituals and traditions

§ Marketing and salesmanship

§ Trade unions, trade associations and associational life

§ Representations of retail work and work-based identities

§ Training, skill, apprenticeships and guilds

§ Gender divisions of labour, respectability and status

§ Technologies, innovations and spatial strategies

To submit a proposal, please send title and abstract of c.300 to 400 words to Karin Dannehl at k.dannehl@wlv.ac.uk by 9 May 2014.

We welcome proposals for individual papers and for sessions (normally three papers: please include the title of the session with the abstracts).

The conference will be held at the University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton Campus.

For further information, please e-mail: Dr Karin Dannehl at k.dannehl@wlv.ac.uk or Dr Laura Ugolini at l.ugolini@wlv.ac.uk

Or see the conference web-page.

The Management History Research Group (MHRG) annual meeting for 2014 will be held at ifs University College campus of the Institute of Financial Services, Peninsular House, London on Tuesday 22 and Wednesday 23 July 2014.

The MHRG is an annual, friendly and informal gathering concerning management history (broadly defined), including ideas affecting the management history community of researchers. Fees and registration for the event and seminar dinner will be £100. Given the variety of accommodation, both quality and price, in London it is suggested that delegates make their own arrangements.

Keynote speakers will include: Professor Karel Williams, University of Manchester

Further Keynotes will be announced in the coming few days.

A full programme for the event will be posted following the initial call for papers:

Call for Papers:

This conference invites papers from all areas of management and business history, in universities and outside, targeting research at any stage of development.
Within the general seminar which events papers on any topic; a specific theme for one session will be broadly on the theme of Banking and Commerce, reflecting the location of this years event, but as always, papers are welcome concerning any time periods or countries, and early results, new approaches to management history and new researchers are encouraged.

Abstracts should be submitted to one of:

Roy Edwards
R.A.Edwards@soton.ac.uk

Simon Mollan
Simon.mollan@york.ac.uk

Kevin Tennent
Kevin.tennent@york.ac.uk

For more information, see here.

That’s the title of a great  post on Simon Wren-Lewis’s “Mainly Macro” blog. Wren-Lewis is suggesting that the floods may be the tipping point where the British public comes to realise that David Cameron’s privatisation/austerity/cutback mode of government has reduced the ability of the state to provide public goods such as flood protection. (Readers will recall the George Bush’s lacklustre response to Hurricane Katrina convinced many middle-of-the-road Americans that the Republicans had taken the ideology of laissez-faire too far).

So far, I’m struck by how unwilling Labour is to take advantage of this issue and connect the flooding to the recent reductions in spending on flood reduction. Maybe they are trying to take the political high ground here, but their silence on this issue is mystifying.

AS:  Consumption and Experiential Marketing Knowledge Platform Seminar here at the University of Liverpool Management School will be hosting an interesting presentation on Wednesday. 

Marketing Generations: Oral Histories of UK Consumer Culture

Dr. Andrea Davies and Prof. James Fitchett, University of Leicester School of Management

Wednesday 19th February 2014, 3-5pm
Cypress Teaching Room 410

All welcome

Theories of mass consumer culture emphasize transition, describing how social changes since the 1950s have had a profound and structural impact on the relationship between individuals, the market and commodities. These transitions can be represented and illustrated in many varied ways such as through an understanding of technology and technological change, through a theory of shifting social and cultural values, or through a model of evolving identities (Slater 1999). It can be difficult to avoid adopting an episodic and relatively linear approach to these analyses. This research project approaches the evolution of marketing and consumer culture using an oral history methodology in attempt to overcome some of the problems with simplified episodic accounts (Davies 2011; Witkowski 1999). The data is drawn from 87 individual in-depth interviews with UK women in 23 family groups. Most of the family groupings comprise three generations (grandmother-mother-daughter) although some of the data is from two generations in the same family (mother-daughter). It captures the reflections that respondent’s story about their pasts framed from an interpretation of their own present. The oral history approach adopted in this research does not seek to uncover a literal description of the past but rather is focused on memory; individual, public, community and generational. It is in generational memory that family signatures or ideologies, reveal similarities across generations but also how each generation is positioned differently as a consequence of the small shifts in discourse over time (Alexander 2009, Kelova 2009). It is in public and community memory that the oral history approach makes visible the artifacts of discourse as they are storied in the everyday of people’s lives (Passerini 2003, Portelli 1997 & 2003, Thompson 2006). This unique data set offers fascinating insights into the emergence of consumer culture in the UK, and the changing values associated with shopping, buying and consuming. The data illustrates the evolution of many different aspects of marketing practice, such as the emergence of supermarkets and self-service and promotion, the development of discourses of choice and the self, as well as ideologies of modernity, progress and consumption (Hilton 2003).

References

Alexander, S. (2009) ‘Do grandmothers have husbands? Generational Memory and Twentieth-Century Women’s Lives’, Oral History Review 36(2) ,159-176.

Davies, A. (2011) ‘Voices passed’, Journal of Historical Research In marketing 3(4), 469-485.
Hilton, M. (2003) Consumerism in 20th Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.

Koleva, D. (2009) ‘Daughters’ Stories: Family Memory and Generational Amnesia’, The Oral History Review, 36(2), 188–206.

Passerini, L. (2003) ‘Memories between silence and oblivion’, in K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds.), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, London: Routledge, pp.238-253.

Portelli, A. (1991) The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press.

Portelli, A. (1997) The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Slater, D. (1999) Consumer Culture and Modernity, London: Polity Press.

Thomson, P. (2006) ‘Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History’, The Oral History Review, 34(1), 49–70.

Witkowski, T.H. (1999), The early development of purchasing roles in the American household, 1750 to 1840, Journal of Macromarketing 19(2), 104-114.

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Brad DeLong has written an interesting blog post on the relationship between the commercial revolution and the rise of representative government. The post, which is on the blog of a progressive think-tank called the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, begins:

I have been thinking about Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth’s Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes, and Default in the Age of Philip II. And I just finished ranting about all this over breakfast at Rick and Ann’s to the patient, good-humored, and extremely intelligent Joachim Voth. So it is only fair that I inflict on the rest of the world what I inflicted on him…

DeLong’s post is mainly about the problems he sees in a paper by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson that argues that the wave of wealth from post-Columbian trans-oceanic commerce influenced the political institutions of the seafaring Western European states in different ways.

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. 2005. “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth”. American Economic Review.95, no. 3: 546-579.

According to this influential article, both England and Spain acquired some wealth due to their overseas expansion. However, the political impact of these infusions of wealth, was according to Acemoglu, Johnson, and  Robinson rather different  because the pre-existing balance of power between monarchs and parliaments varied in these two countries. These authors suggest that on the eve of the age of exploration, English parliaments already had more power within their political systems than the equivalent bodies in Spain. As as result, “Iberia ended up poor and absolutist while Britain ended up rich and constitutional–even though as of 1500 the differences had been small, and constitutional government had been on the ropes in both.”

DeLong disputes this interpretation. He says that it s factually incorrect to say that British parliamentary institutions in 1500 were stronger than those of Iberia. He says that “if there was a difference at all, it went the other way: Iberia had weaker crowns and stronger representative and intermediary institutions than Britain. The traditions of representative government and limited royal power in Aragon were very, very strong.”

DeLong’s post is very interesting and deals with an important issue, but I think that he is missing an important institutional difference between these two economies: there was free trade within England and, after 1707, between Scotland and Ireland. There wasn’t a customs frontier at the border between say, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. That wasn’t the case in Spain, where interprovincial trade barriers remained high.

I was actually talking about the importance of eliminating internal trade barriers to my students today. My lecture drew a bit on the research of Robert C. Allen,  who is one of the great economic historians of our generation.

Allen has developed a model of how the second wave of industrial nations (Germany, USA, France, Japan) developed in the 19th century. They did more than copy the technologies of the first industrial nation, the UK. They also adopted a Standard Development model that was, in essence, very similar to the economic development program outlined by Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s. The four main components of the standard model were:

1)internal free trade within the nation

2)an external protective tariff to nurture infant industries

3) English-style banking and monetary institutions

4) state support for infrastructure development

All of the second wave of industrial countries scrapped internal tariff barriers as they began the process of catching up with England. The US did so when it ratified its federal constitution.  France did so in 1789, when it got rid of the internal divisions shown on the map below. Germany did so with its Zollverein. Japan did so after the Meiji Restoration. But England had had free trade between counties since the Middle Ages.  That’s missing from DeLong’s picture.  

A.S. The Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will be taking place in Toronto, April 10-12, 2014. The Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, will be opening the conference with a speech. The conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. Speakers include Larry Summers, Koichi Hamada, Adair Lord Turner, Rodgin Cohen, Andy Haldane, Gary Gensler, Peter Thiel, Jim Balsillie, John Ralston Saul, and Michael Sandel, as well as Nobel Prize Winners Michael Spence, James Heckman, and Joseph Stiglitz. 

The conference programme is dominated, as one would expect, by scholars based in economics departments, particularly by those who want to challenge the dominance of neoclassical orthodoxy. However, there is a panel that contains three academics who teach in history departments.

Angus Burgin, Assistant Professor, Department of History, The Johns Hopkins University

Jonathan Levy, Professor, Department of History, Princeton University

Jamie Pietruska, Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey

Eric Weinstein, Managing Director, Thiel Capital / Visiting Research Fellow, Oxford University

Moderator: Emma Rothschild, Professor and Director, Center of History and Economics,  Harvard University

The theme of the panel is the “economics of radical uncertainty”. It appears that the participants will be talking about the history of forecasting and risk management. They will doubtless be interested in Walter Friedman’s new book  Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters.

We all know that the cost of providing university education has risen far faster than the rate of inflation. Among academics, the most commonly accepted explanation for this phenomenon is that the number of administrators has grown at a cancerous rate. Professor Tim Burke, an academic in the US, has written a blog post that shows that this complaint isn’t entirely valid. He doesn’t deny that lots of administrators have been hired, but he says that they have been hired mainly because academics have sought to outsource admin tasks to professionals so they could focus on teaching and research.

How did the growth of administration happen? It started happening sixty or so years ago because faculty stopped being able to and willing to do many of the major administrative jobs in colleges and universities as the numbers of students grew dramatically and the nature of academic life changed. When academia stopped looking to faculty to handle admissions and residential life and budgets, it started looking to professionals who had done somewhat similar work in other institutions. And those people professionalized the same way that faculty had professionalized a few decades earlier, the same way that faculty were undergoing intensification of professionalization as their ranks grew and grew in the 1950s and 1960s. The administrators didn’t professionalize because that was part of the Master Plan to Destroy the Faculty, but because that’s what was happening across the whole of the economy and society.

When the growth of admin costs is seen in such terms, it actually appears to be a good thing since it is advancing the division of labour. In other words, Adam Smith would have approved. 

Hat tip to Megan McArdle.