Author: Adam Nix

29/06/2021 16.00 UK

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Presenter: Stefan Tetzlaff (Humboldt University)
Chair: Adam Nix (De Montfort University)

This project investigates the interrelationship between West German businesses, state enterprise and the trajectory of development planning in India and Nigeria in two crucial but different double decades of development, i.e. in the 1950s/1960s and in the 1970s/1980s. Analyzing these very different but lavishly funded West German aid projects will not only allow us to define what was specific about the two double decades of development, but also give us a sense of how a wide range of actors from industrialized and developing countries changed course and came to participate in or profit from projects in the public sector.

08/06/2021 16.00 UK

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Presenters: Kate Ekama (Stellenbosch University) and Alexandra Garrett (Iona College)
Chair: Nicholas Wong (Northumbria University)

Profiting from Slavery after Abolition: Emancipation and the Business of Compensation in the Cape Colony

Kate Ekama (Stellenbosch University)

This paper investigates the hitherto unexplored role that agents played in claiming the £1 million the British Government allocated to former slaveholders in the Cape Colony after emancipation of the enslaved in 1834. Close analysis of the accounts of one firm, Thomson, Watson & Co., reveals the importance of London contacts to provide finance to buy claims. Within the Colony the firm, agents themselves, used commission agents to buy claims. By purchasing claims at a discount, the firm profited from slavery after abolition, which profits probably facilitated its continued success in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Virginia State Penitentiary and the Incarcerated Goods Market in Richmond, Virginia (1800-1820)

Alexandra Garrett (Iona College)

This paper uses the Records of the Virginia State Penitentiary (Library of Virginia Manuscripts) and nineteenth century Richmond newspapers to explore the relationships among prisoners, those employed by the state to control them, those who sold prisoners’ wares, those who bought prisoners’ wares, and those business owners who competed with them in the Richmond goods market. I argue that competing forms of unfree labor undergirded the Richmond market and enabled the sale of an increasingly diverse set of manufactured goods to Richmond’s inhabitants. I also suggest that through the Penitentiary, the state weakened white individuals’ attempts at manufacturing in the early Republic, despite promising economic opportunity to ex-convicts and business owners alike.

25/05/2021 16.00 UK

Appreciating the history of business education

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Presenter: JC Spender (Kozminski University)
Chair: Nicholas Wong (Northumbria University)

We claim BSch are ‘professional schools’ – with no demonstrable relationship between management education and managerial competence.  Critics question the entire enterprise.  History can help clarify what is going on.  I hypothesize BSchs should be understood as political entities, democratic capitalism’s madrassas, not its ‘science’ labs.  The students are institutionalized, not trained.  But how and into what?  We can compare the history of management education in the US and the UK, given the different politics, to identify differences that reveal BSchs true nature.

Khurana’s canonical US story has three phases: management as a 19^th century social duty, post-WW2 managerialism, and 1980’s financialization.  Free re-engagement with duty is the proper way forward.  Contrary to BSch as private-sector institutions, the European story goes back to 17^th century state-craft.  Woodrow Wilson argued public-sector Cameralist techniques could be valuable to the US private sector (Wilson 1887).  Edmund James’s 1893 ABA Report on the European schools provided plans for the local BSch that began to flourish around the turn of the century.  Note Wharton was set up as a pro-tariff BSch to counter the free-trade economics being taught.

The UK story is of little until the Franks Report in 1963 and the establishment of LBS and MBS in 1965 (I was an early MBS student).  This was a political initiative, reflecting the elitist orientation evident at the Administrative Staff College and Henley.  Commercial education, urged by Quaker business, certainly existed before WW2 but was non-U.  As UK BSch proliferated post-Franks, the staff college curriculum was displaced by the private-sector US curriculum and A-journal methods.  UK BSch merged into the Pax-Americana post-WW2 political project.  Now, with around 25% of college students doing ‘business studies’ we urgently need clarity on our community’s fundamental questions.

13/04/2021 16.00 UK

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Presenters: Muwei Chen (Beijing Foreign Studies University) and Alka Raman  (London School of Economics)
Chair: Ashton Merck (Duke University)

A Collective Approach to Pollution Treatment of small firms led by Trade Association: the Kyoto black dyeing industry in the 1970s

Muwei Chen (Beijing Foreign Studies University)

The problem of pollution is a typical example of an external diseconomy that takes an important position in the relationship between the environment and private firms. Private firms incline to prioritize economic profit over environmental protection, thus, relying on firms’ initiatives to treat pollution seems impracticable. Especially for small firms, which are financially and technically less capable.

Japan has encouraged small and medium sized firms to deal with pollution collectively since the 1970s, since SMEs had generated a large amount of pollution. However, previous studies have rarely uncovered how the collective approach had been undertaken. What kind of barriers did the small firms meet? How did they solve them? Why did the small firms choose one solution over another?

This study aims to address these gaps by exploring how small firms collectively dealt with pollution under the leadership of trade associations. This study examines the case of a local industry specializing in black dyeing in Kyoto and its surrounding areas. The group of small dyeing firms, mostly with an average of 10 employees, have successfully solved their wastewater pollution in a decade. This is largely attributable to the collective attempts initiated by the Kyoto Kurozome Industrial Cooperative Association.

This case study reflected the situation of small firms in the 1970s when social and governmental pressure on pollution treatment was increasing drastically while legislation and regulations on pollution were still in formation. The misalignment between private and public interests was affected by the change of regulation, recognition, and technological availability. As a result, the small firms were gradually grouped into the leaders of the association, the pioneers, the late movers, and the outsiders. The trade association had to uniform the different interests of the small firms in order to achieve the collective approach to pollution treatment.

On the other hand, this case study also has its specialties that may further our understanding of the possibilities and restrictions of this trade association-led collective approach. These may include the supportive Kyoto prefectural government, the interdependence of stakeholders on the supply chain due to the social division of labor, and the industrial crises emerged since 1976.

The conclusions are as follows. First, the collective attempts compensated for the risk that the relatively loose regulation environment for SMEs could lead to reduced motivation to treat pollution. Second, the association constructed a regulative and normative environment to facilitate peer supervision based on horizontal inter-firm relationship. Third, the negotiation included diverse stakeholders, nevertheless, the failure to adopt the new dyeing method was attributed to the influence from the supply chain that preferred economic profit in the short run.

From imitation to industrialisation: Evolution of cloth quality in the British cotton industry, 1740-1820

Alka Raman (London School of Economics)

The introduction of Indian printed and painted cotton textiles into Britain in the late seventeenth century led to immediate imitations of these goods by British manufacturers. Did the process of imitation of these foreign benchmark products lead to the adoption of a specific trajectory of technological growth within the British cotton industry? This paper contributes to a topic central to interpretations of British industrialisation, pathways to technological change, and eventually innovations, using qualitative empirical material analysis. It highlights material knowledge transfer in the absence of codified means of knowledge exchange and identifies imitation as a key channel for innovation and technological change. Textual evidence from contemporary entrepreneurs, merchants, manufacturers as well as observers of the British cotton industry indicates that manufacturers in the early British cotton industry were concerned about cloth quality vis-à-vis Indian cottons and that there was a shift towards improvements in cloth quality, especially for the making of the cotton warp yarn. These texts suggest the hypothesis that there was a shift towards finer cotton textiles in Britain, via attempts to make the cotton warp yarn match Indian quality. With a novel dataset of surviving British and Indian textiles of the period, the paper puts this hypothesis to test and concludes that between 1746 and 1850, there was an increase in the quality of British cottons leading to a convergence with the quality of handmade Indian cottons. Extant literature mentions learning from pre-existing products but what this learning entailed and whether imitation of benchmark products stimulated technological innovations are questions that have remained unexplored. While British industrialisation has been studied from a variety of viewpoints, the impact of pre-existing goods, whose replication by machinery effectively constitutes the shift towards industrialisation, is a perspective previously ignored. This paper shows how competitive ambition amongst British manufactures to produce goods that rivalled Indian cottons steered the trajectory of mechanical innovations in the British cotton industry. Using empirical microscopic analysis of the historical material textile sources, I demonstrate that technological change in the British cotton industry was guided by the quest to match the cloth quality of handmade Indian cottons.

06/04/2021 16.00 UK

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Presenter: David Singerman (University of Virginia)
Chair: Manuel A. Bautista-González (Columbia University in the City of New York)

In contrast to the centuries-deep agricultural origins of sugarcane, the idea of sugar from beets and other vegetables emerged of German laboratory scientists around 1800. The economic history of sugar in the nineteenth century is generally told as a war between these two industries, culminating in the near-bankruptcy of some European states that subsidized their domestic beet producers. In this chapter, I show that the idea of beet sugar was not a scientific discovery but rather a radical invention. For Enlightenment philosophes, practical chemists, merchants, and producers, sugar was something that came from the cane. Not until the middle of the century did new forces within chemistry itself, allied to certain political and economic agendas, persuade publics that the crystals extracted from beets were not just a substitute for cane sugar but in fact the same substance.

Thursday 11th, March @ 10:00-11:00 (EST)/15:00-16:00 (GMT)

Organizers: 
Prof Stephanie Decker, University Of Bristol
Prof David Kirsch, University Of Maryland
Dr Santhilata Kuppili Venkata, The National Archives
Dr Adam Nix, De Montfort University

Speakers:
Dr Gavin Benke, Boston University
Dr Jessica Ogden, University of Bristol
Dr Tim Hannigan, University of Alberta
Prof Douglas Oard, University of Maryland

BHC’s virtual meeting starts tomorrow and, among the many interesting sessions, the Contextualizing Email Achieves team will be hosting an inter-disciplinary roundtable on digital sources. The session requires no prior experience of digital methods or digital sources and will be of particular interest to anyone researching contemporary historical periods or those keen to know more about working with digital traces of the past.

Here’s the full abstract:

The more business and organisational historians focus on the events of the late twentieth century and beyond, the more they are finding traces of the past that were created digitally. Despite the increasing relevance of emails, webpages and other born-digital material, there has been little reflection on how scholars should deal with them methodologically.

The goal of the roundtable is to explore the challenges that arise at the intersection of different disciplines as they attempt to make sense of digital sources. It brings together scholars from different disciplines who have explored the many ways in which digital sources can be used and are being used. Several are early career researchers (ECRs) themselves (Drs Hannigan, Nix, Ogden) and the topic is of particular relevance to ECRs as they are perhaps more likely to engage with new types of sources and new methods in order to make their mark as scholars.

The underlying rationale is as follows: Sources and methods for business historians have expanded in recent years as more and increasingly heterogeneous artefacts are being generated. On the one hand, these developments have led to a flowering of new types of inputs for historians writing about business such as digitized newspapers and remotely accessible archival collections. Combined with complex search tools that allow scholars to filter ever larger and more diverse sets of historical materials, business historians are now able to make new and different kinds of knowledge claims.

However, taking advantage of these opportunities can require research tools which are outside the skill set of any single researcher, historian or otherwise. Therefore, business historians may need to look outside the boundaries of the field for productive, knowledge-generating partnerships. Hence we have focused on bringing an interdisciplinary group of scholars together, which is of particular relevance to ECRs as research trends and funders increasingly focus on the ability to engage in interdisciplinary conversations.

For more details and to see the rest of BHC’s exciting sessions, view the full programme here.