My research collaborator Bernardo Batiz-Lazo was recently interviewed on BBC News about whether we are transitioning to being cashless societies. The interview is in the second half of this video clip.
Bernardo is Professor of Business History and Bank Management at Bangor University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. We are working on a paper about the history of computerisation in international banking.
AS: Later this year, University of Toronto Press will be publishing an edited collection on the history of Canadian business in the global economy called Smart Globalization. My co-editor is Dimitry Anastakis of Trent University. I was asked by someone at the publishers to write up a short précis of the book. Here it is.
This book will use the Canadian historical experience to speak to present-day debates about how nations should respond to globalization. Neoliberals believe that if a nation is to prosper in the global economy, it should adopt a policy of complete economic liberalization (i.e., the elimination of all tariffs and other trade barriers). Neo-mercantilists, in contrast, believe in development through the selective embrace of globalization and the intelligent use of industrial policy. Ha-Joon Chang, who recommends a neo-mercantilist strategy for today’s developing nations, has said that the countries which are today wealthy acquired their wealth by adopting protectionist measures, not a policy of laissez-faire. The research presented in this edited collection will use Canadian history to test the claims the neo-mercantilists makes about economic history. Canada is one of the world’s most successful countries in terms of average living standards. The chapters in this collection will show that Canada’s success stemmed from neither complete openness to globalization nor policies of autarky or self-sufficiency. Since the time of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada has developed through a complex policy mix we call “smart globalization,” a term we have borrowed from Dani Rodrik. This book should interest historians, economists, and policymakers in Canada and other countries.
The Dictionary of Canadian Biography recently received an infusion of cash from the Canadian government to allow it to modernize its website. The new website has a feature called biography of the week. A number of the recent biographies have been of businessmen, which is a reminder of what a great resource the DCB is for business historians.
This week’s biography is of James Richardson, a Kingston-born entrepreneur who relocated to Winnipeg and played an important role in the development of several industries. This biography was written by Jamie Benidickson of the University of Ottawa.
I teach a course on the history of globalization. This is the trailer for one of the books I have assigned the students for next year. It’s a new global history of the Volkswagen Beetle from Harvard University Press.
AS: Jim Clifford, one of the founders of the ActiveHistory.ca website, posted a lengthy reply to my recent post about Ian Mosby and the place of historians in the public sphere. I’m posting my reply here.
Hi Jim,
ActiveHistory.ca is a great initiative. I didn’t realise it was inspired by History and Policy. You are right that’s quite different from H&P, which has several FTE employees. That’s not to say it doesn’t make a valuable contribution. I enjoy reading it.
You wrote that “I’m still interested in reviving the public policy goals of ActiveHistory.ca at some point in the future, but I think the History and Policy might take more funding that our site current operates on. History and Policy have staff members that can work to link historians with public policy makers and the media. There are a number of think tanks around Canada that might help us bridge our research with current policy issues, but we’d also need a critical mass of historians interested in this kind of work. Maybe Ian Mosby’s success, along with Sean Kheraj’s work on pipeline oil spills, will inspire others to think about how their research connects with current policy issues.”
You are right that this would take serious money. In translating History and Policy to the Canadian context, you would need to keep several things in mind. Bilingualism is obviously one important difference between Canada and the UK. Federalism is another. History and Policy publishes on a vast range of topics, ranging from maternity care to water conservation to foreign policy. That’s because the UK is a unitary state and the MPs and journalists who have to think about local government one day have to think about Afghanistan the next. In Canada, we have two political classes, one federal, one provincial, that are interested in different sets of issues.
My suggestion is that you need to decide which level of government you are trying to serve or influence. Don’t try to publish papers on topics that are related to both federal (e.g., defence) and provincial jurisdiction (e.g., K-12 education), since people in provincial government won’t be interested in the defence stuff and people in Ottawa won’t care about daycare (Obviously there are some areas, such as agriculture, where jurisdictions overlap).
I would recommend focusing first on federal areas of jurisdiction, as there is likely to be more money for a website that is useful to federal policymakers. Of course, focusing on federal policy areas means that you have to have a symmetrically bilingual website, which will drive up your costs.
In starting out, you should assemble a board of directors that includes some really senior academics whose research interests mirror the main priority areas of the federal government.
One way of determining what these priority areas are is to do a word count of recent Throne Speeches. Canadian Throne Speeches used to be about social policy, healthcare etc. Nowadays, they focus more on the nightwatchman functions of the state. See here. You might also look at a breakdown of what the federal government actually spends money on.
Another difference between Canada and the UK is that the UK is totally dominated by its capital, which the largest city, the base of all of the newspapers and TV stations, and the home of the stock exchange, etc. Many of the leaders in one field know each other. In Canada, these functions are dispersed among several cities, which makes influencing policy a bit more difficult. History and Policy is based smack in the centre of London and a short bus ride from “the Westminster Village.”
Moreover, the UK is still largely governed by a fraternity of graduates from just two universities (Oxford and Cambridge) where people form lifelong friendships and alliances. That means there are lots of pre-existing linkages between academe, the civil service, the political class, the press, and so forth we [thankfully] don’t have in Canada, where leaders in these fields come a wider number of universities. Canada’s more democratic social structure would make it harder for an organization like History and Policy to influence policy there. You can have a look at short bios of all of the History and Policy staffers here.
Above all, ensure there is ideological and partisan balance in your board of directors. That way your budget will be stable regardless of which political party is in office. I also suggest that you have a mixture of academic historians and non-academics who are sympathetic to the application of history to public policy. The latter might include Hugh Segal, a Tory Senator, Sean Conway (an Ontario Liberal), Bill Graham (federal Liberal), and Chris Champion (Conservative, former Reformer). You should also ensure that the academic historians include a mixture of Canadianists and non-Canadianists.
If you want to contact me by email I can give some more specific advice and tell you a bit more about my abortive project.
Your wrote: “One more note, Histoire sociale/Social History has only committed to keeping Ian’s article open for 2 weeks from the date it was opened up. I sympathize with the serious fiscal constrains of academic publishing in Canada, but I really hope they decide to leave this article open permanently.”
Two whole weeks? Wow… /sarc.
In the last few days, the Canadian media has been filled with stories about a policy of deliberately starving children in Native residential schools in the 1940s and 1950s. See here, here, and here. [For the benefit of the non-Canadians who now form the majority of people who read this blog, I should explain that the residential schools were boarding schools which Indian children were forced to attend as part of an assimilation policy. Conditions at these underfunded schools were dismal and the Canadian government recently issued a formal apology. There were similar schools in the United States and the other settler societies and similar stories of abuse].
The media coverage of this issue was sparked by an article that appeared in the latest issue of a Canadian academic historical journal, Ian Mosby “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,“ Histoire sociale/Social History.
The media coverage has raised the issue of malnutrition in present day Native communities, which is a real issue in places that are distant from the road network.
I’m glad to see that academic historical research is getting some attention in the media and is informing debate about public policy. That’s great. Ian Mosby is to be congratulated for advancing the public debate in this way, especially since he is an early career researcher. Historians should publish more research that speaks to issues of public concern—I suppose that’s one way of giving back to the taxpayers who fund our research.
The subject of Mosby’s research lies well outside my area of expertise, so I can’t really comment on the validity of his conclusions or methodology beyond noting that his paper was published in a peer reviewed journal. Mosby’s research, however, raises the question of paywalls and academic publishing. Those who follow this blog will know that I have strong views on the UK government’s plans to shift academic publishing in this country to an open access model known as Finch Gold. (For previous posts, see here and here). Under this model, anyone on the internet could read articles in academic journals for free and the costs of publishing the journals would be defrayed by the authors or their employers. As I’ve said before, this particular way of funding Open Access publishing is a terrible idea. However, the basic principle of Open Access is an important one. In a democracy, taxpayers ought to be able to see and use the research they have funded. Transparency and visibility are especially important in the case of academic research that has a bearing on public policy.
Here’s the problem. The journal in which Mosby publishes his research puts its papers behind a paywall, which means that to read them you either need a university library card. If you Google the title of a typical academic article, you will find a stub on a journal website, a short abstract, and then a login that looks like this:
What this means is that members of the public interested in Mosby’s research must rely on either the short summary that appeared in newspaper articles or the somewhat longer abstract on the journal’s website. That’s really unfortunate—we wouldn’t expect people to show up a book club and discuss a novel having only read the first 100 words on Google Books. Moreover, for academics who work in systems in which we are judged on both the quantity and quality of the research we produce and its Impact Factor (e.g., citation stats, references in the media) Closed Access publishing has consequences for compensation and promotion.
I don’t pretend to know that the best model for academic publishing would be. It costs money to run journals. Right now, consumers of knowledge pay many of these costs, which discourages the dissemination of research to the general public. Maybe there could be something similar to the BBC licence fee, although that would be unfair to citizens who aren’t interested in reading academic journal articles (the vast majority of taxpayers). The Finch Gold Open Access model will impose major costs on universities and/or academics. Moreover, any solution to this conundrum needs to be international, given the nature of academic publishing.
What I do know is that the current model keeps citizens from having access to academic knowledge. That’s a bad thing, especially in a country like Canada where the linkages between historians and the public policy community are quite limited. The US has a biennial policy history conference and a quarterly journal called Policy History. Here in the UK, there is an admirable organisation called History and Policy, which aims to connect historians with expertise in particular topics to policymakers and the general public. To see examples of what this clearinghouse for ideas does, see here and here. A historian who has published on an area that is relevant to some sort of pressing policy question (e.g., counter-insurgency and the Afghanistan exit strategy) will be commissioned by History and Policy to write a short summary of his or her research with lessons for today. The piece, which is placed online, contains a bibliography for those who want to know more.
A few years ago, I kicked around the idea of setting up a Canadian version of History and Policy. I spoke to a historian who now works in policy studies institute to see whether we could get it off the ground. Unfortunately, nothing really came of this initiative for a variety of reasons, most of which were my fault. Anyway, perhaps making more academic historical research in Canada Open Access will serve as a sort of second-best substitute for the intellectual clearinghouse I proposed back in 2008: if articles show up in a Google Search and can be read easily, readers will be able to draw their own policy conclusions. The key thing will be to find the funds to make journal Open Access.
Update: I see that the publishers of Mosby’s article have now decided to make the paper available online, free to everyone, for a limited period. See here,
I suspect that this astute move is designed to raise the profile of the journal: make a particularly sensational article free and more people will become familiar with your website. However, this decision to make one particular article free to everyone doesn’t address the more fundamental problem with the pay to read model of academic publishing.
Informal enquiries to: Dr Andrew Perchard, Department of Strategy & Organisation; Applications to: Hilde Quigley, (UK/EU fees covered)
Applications are welcomed from a PhD candidate to join a lively and innovative hub of researchers working in the fields of risk management, strategic decision-making, and business history, across the Departments of Strategy and Organisation, and Management Science, at Strathclyde Business School. The project builds upon previous research undertaken within the Department of Management Science on behalf of NASA, to explore strategic decision-making and risk assessment of large historical exploration expeditions. Drawing on choice theory and ‘bounded rationality’, this project adopts an explicitly historical perspective to examine questions over risk evaluation.
This project will give the student a great opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary team within a vibrant intellectual culture. We would welcome candidates from a range of disciplines but an historical background would be advantageous.
AS: British Telecom, the former monopoly telephone company in the UK, has digitized part of its vast archival holdings and placed it online. The e-archive, which was just launched, will doubtless be useful to business historians. The project was developed with money from the New Connections project, a one million pound collaboration between Coventry University [my employer], BT itself, and the UK’s The National Archives, in order to bring an important part of this unique archive and innovations story to a much wider audience. Note that while I am a business historian at Coventry University, I wasn’t involved in this particular project. My colleague Neil Forbes, who was the driving force behind it, is interviewed here.
Here is their blurb:
BT is the world’s oldest and most established communications company. Its roots extend back to the UK’s Electric Telegraph Company, incorporated in 1846 as the world’s first national provider of telecommunications services. Few companies in the world have a heritage as rich as BT. Its history is a fascinating weave of invention, innovation, and endeavour – both as a public service and as a private enterprise..
BT Archives documents the leading role that the UK and BT and its predecessors have played in communications technology development from its very beginning, rolling out communications services around the country and across the globe, and the profound impact they had on society and in improving people’s lives. The archives are recognised as having international significance by UNESCO and Arts Council England as an important part of the UK’s cultural heritage.
The overall collection includes records, photographs and films of BT itself, records of the Post Office telecommunications function, and of the private telephone and telegraph companies taken over by the Post Office in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They document the development of the UK communications infrastructure and services to overseas from their earliest days, and major milestones such as the development of transatlantic communications from the earliest telegraph service to satellites and fibre optic cables
The project aimed to catalogue, digitise and develop a searchable online resource of almost half a million photographs, images, documents and correspondence, a core part of the overall collection assembled by BT over 165 years, including over:
· 45,000 photographs and pictures, c1865 – 1982
· 190,000 pages from over 13,500 research reports, 1878 – 1981
· 230,000 documents from over 550 policy and operational files, 1851 – 1983
BT’s archive of work undertaken at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, and later at BT’s research laboratories at Martlesham Heath, is acknowledged to be particularly significant as a record of British scientific effort , often overlooked in research into the history of science and technology. For this reason it was established at an early stage that the entire research archive from 1878 to 1981 would be catalogued, digitised and published online as a key part of the BT Digital Archives.
The project has not digitised BT’s complete archive by any means, so extensive research and consultation including user surveys has been undertaken to establish the content, and functionality, that users would require. The records ultimately selected reflect the scope of the topics covered by the overall collection, not just science and technology but also social, economic and even political issues reflecting the vital importance of communications in the history of the nation.
The BT Digital Archives incorporates the public catalogue of the whole collection that is held by BT Archives, and replaces an existing online catalogue first published in 2009. Altogether, the BT Digital Archives website is an introduction to the wider collection occupying over three kilometres of shelving, which is available to researchers for study at the BT Archives searchoom in Holborn, London.
Anyone can view and search the records available on the website. Registered users will be able to download individual images for private non-commercial use. Academic and professional teaching practitioners can register to download higher quality images, and pdfs of whole reports and files, for private study, research and teaching.
AS: I thought I would share this announcement. Funding opportunities for PhD students in the UK are pretty rare, so this is a great opportunity. Moreover, you would be working in a cutting-edge area of history– your research project would lie at the overlap between environmental and business history.
Part of the UK’s National Grid
Application Deadline: 2 August 2013.
Principal Supervisor: Dr Paul Warde
Applications are invited for a fully sponsored AHRC PhD Project Studentship on the environmental history of the National Grid, based in the School of History at the University of East Anglia and running for three years commencing 1st October 2013. The studentship is part of a larger AHRC-funded collaborative project involving the University of Bristol and the University of Nottingham, entitled ‘The Power and the Water: Connecting Pasts and Futures’.
The successful candidate will work as part of a team alongside a post-doctoral research assistant and Dr Paul Warde, examining the environmental history of energy supply and the provision and impact of energy infrastructure. This is Strand 2 of a 3-Strand project. The other two strands on water environments and mining infrastructure and heritage are led by Professor Peter Coates (Bristol) and Professor Georgina Endfield (Nottingham).
Applicants should have at least a 2:1 Honours degree in History or a related field such as Human/Historical Geography. They should also normally hold (or expect to achieve), a Master’s degree or similar postgraduate qualification.
This Studentship will cover tuition fees up to the standard amount and for UK citizens provides an annual maintenance grant of approx. £14,000 for 3 years, starting on 1st October 2013. Due to the nature of funding the studentship is only available to UK/EU citizens and must be pursued on a full-time basis. For student eligibility criteria and further details of AHRC studentships, visit:http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Student-Funding-Guide.pdf
Interviews will be held in at the University of Nottingham, where interviews for project positions based at the University of East Anglia and Nottingham will also be held.
For informal enquiries and further details please contact Dr Paul Warde: (P.Warde@uea.ac.uk) by email.
The Past Speaks 