Author: Steph

I am a professor at the University of Birmingham Business School specializing in organizational history and international strategy.

Moving the OHN blog to Substack

Steph

Hello everyone!

Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic on Unsplash

Don’t be scared! We are moving to Substack on Monday 30 November 2023

After many years at WordPress, I decided to move this blog / newsletter to Substack. It’s not an easy decision to move platforms, but WordPress is becoming increasingly expensive, and without any grant to cover the expense and reduced institutional research support, it seems a strange thing to pay money for a newsletter that can be hosted for free elsewhere. After some explorations, I decided to make that elsewhere Substack, as it is not just free, but easy to use. I will send direct invitations from Substack to everyone subscribed directly to WordPress via an account and email – if you don’t want to move along, just ignore it. And sorry to see you go!

If you already want to have a look (I am still working on it, but I moved the archives over), here is the link. We will start posting at the Organizational History Network on Substack from Monday 30 November 2023 – see you there!

The Business History of Barbie

Steph

The success of the Barbie movie, grossing over a billion dollars globally, can be in part attributed to the innovative and unexpected portrayal of the iconic doll. It is not only the symbol of unachievable beauty standards, but also a tale of emancipation and feminist resistance in a patriarchal society. Our article, published online the 1st of June 2023 in Business History(https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2023.2215193) explores these themes by focusing on the entrepreneurial journey of the creator of Barbie and founder of the company Mattel, one of the most influential firms in the global toy industry since the 1950s, Ruth Handler. Known as one of the greatest examples of female entrepreneurship in the United States, surely the Barbie movie has reinforced this image and idea about the business woman.

The authors, Valeria Giacomin and Christina Lubinski, summarise their article in a blog post here.

In the article “Entrepreneurship as emancipation: Ruth Handler and the entrepreneurial process ‘in time’ and ‘over time’, 1930s–1980s,” co-authored with Christina Lubinski, we draw from a diverse set of historical sources – including personal archives, oral histories, primary and secondary sources on American female entrepreneurs – to retrace Ruth Handler’s fifty-year entrepreneurial career. Our research avoids the narrative of the heroic entrepreneur and seeks to provide a balanced reconstruction of her business activity. In part, this allowed to investigate the concept of “entrepreneuring” as emancipation theorized in management studies by Violina Rindova and colleagues looking at entrepreneurship as a means of liberation, challenging the status quo to pursue freedom and autonomy.

The image of Ruth Handler that emerges from our analysis is one of controversy and reinvention. The historical perspective helped us uncover Handler’s entrepreneurial process through time and identity. We reconstructed how Handler managed to introduce her unique female perspective in a male-dominated industry, not only through the introduction of Barbie, but also through innovations in marketing and sales that revolutionized the toy industry since the beginnings of Mattel in the late 1940s.

Handler fought to validate her ideas over and over among (primarily) male customers, wholesalers, engineers and even with her husband and business partner Elliot Handler. After the global success of Barbie and the internationalization of Mattel in the 1960s, Handler had to face several controversies. Mattel was criticized for advertising directly to kids through television ads such as the ones of toy guns and rifles. Barbie ads were criticized for promoting unrealistic beauty standards to young girls. While battling against breast cancer in the 1970s, Ruth also faced an indictment and prosecution for fraud and tax evasion at Mattel, which resulted in her permanent departure from the company.

Despite these challenges, Handler spent the last fifteen years of her active business life in rebuilding her image and she did that once again through entrepreneurship. She founded NearlyMe, a company specializing in breast prostheses and lingerie for women who had undergone mastectomies. The analysis shows how Handler applied several innovations leveraging on her experience at Mattel. She also employed cancer survivors as sales agents throughout the US to promote her product. Albeit never particularly profitable, this social enterprise helped Handler to mend her tarnished reputation. Eventually she returned to Mattel’s Barbie collectors’ events as guest of honor in the 1990s.
Ruth Handler story of entrepreneurial emancipation challenges conventional narratives on female entrepreneurship by offering fresh insights on strategies and disruptive forces employed by women in male-dominated environments.

CfP: Legacy & Change

Steph

Edited volume in the book series:

De Gruyter Studies in Organizational and Management History

Preliminary Title:

Legacy and Change: Perspectives from Organizational History

  • Co-editors: Andrea Casey, Sonia Coman, and Hamid Foroughi
  • Chapters to be submitted by February 1, 2024
  • Chapter length: 7,000-8,000 words

Scope of the book

With this volume, we will explore how past legacies both enable and restrict opportunities for organizational renewal, social change, and the emergence of new forms of organizing. On the one hand, collective memories can be a source of authentication, legitimation, and strategy restoration (Miller et al., 2019; Basque & Langley, 2018; Jaskiewicz et al., 2017; Lubinski & Gartner, 2023; Ravasi et al., 2019; Sasaki et al., 2020); on the other hand, past legacies could restrict our imagination by enforcing path dependency. A particular form of this path dependency is known as the ‘founder shadow’ in family businesses when the next generations of leaders are not able to change organizational course despite changing conditions (Peter & Harveston, 1999; Suddaby, et al, 2023).

Managing legacy can be a challenge for both old and new organizations. Organizations with a long or significant history often find that their legacy is at odds with the realities of the present or the directions they envision for the future (Hatch & Schultz, 2017; Kroeze & Keulen, 2013). In contrast, newly formed organizations often feel they have a deficit in legacy compared with long-established organizations and seek to boost credibility by engaging in activities that can be retrospectively claimed as their legacy as they tell their story internally and in the public forums.

In either case, when aspects of the purpose of an organization, understood as its raison d’être, change or the emphasis shifts from one aspect to another, the organizational identity is threatened, and legacy becomes an obstacle to overcome to effect change. We do not know yet what factors make this tension more difficult to resolve or whether this tension is stronger in some sectors, for instance, in purpose- driven organizations, given members’ emotional attachment to old memories and identities (Foroughi, 2020). We propose that the difference lies with the way the past is remembered. Central to understanding the relationship between legacies and imagined future is the recognition that what we understand as our legacy is socially and politically construed (Foroughi, Coraiola, Rintamäki, Mena & Foster, 2020) and is shaped by the agentic work of actors who can be termed ‘agents of memory’ (Schwartz, 1991) or ‘identity custodians” (Dacin et al, 2019). While this custodianship is important in maintaining and restoring past legacies, at the same time, it often implies silencing certain histories that

are deemed incompatible (Anteby & Molnar, 2012). This volume aims to contribute a deeper understanding of legacies and imagined futures as they pertain to organizational identity and change.

We enthusiastically invite chapters encompassing both theoretical and empirical contributions that delve into the intricate interplay between legacy and change, examining this dynamic from a diverse array of theoretical vantage points. Our call extends a special invitation to submissions that not only usher in fresh concepts to enrich the existing literature but also embark on the task of critically examining and redefining established theories. We welcome a wide spectrum of inquiries, which may include, but are not confined to, the following questions:

  • How do we theorize legacy and change in relation to organizational identity?
  • How does the intersection of legacy and change emerge in different types of organizations?
  • How has legacy been successfully leveraged for organizational change that contributed to societal well-being? Under what conditions does legacy promote change/rigidity?
  • What factors influence how the tension between legacy and change is experienced in an organization?
  • Why is the tension between legacy and change stronger in some sectors, such as purpose-driven organizations?
  • How can critical historical work help recover forgotten histories of alternative forms of organization?
  • How can we envision alternative forms of organizing by critically examining past legacies?

References:

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

Basque, J., & Langley, A. (2018). Invoking Alphonse: The founder figure as a historical resource for organizational identity work. Organization Studies, 39(12), 1685-1708.

Brunninge, O. (2009). Using history in organizations: How managers make purposeful reference to history in strategy processes. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 22: 8–26.

Bucheli, M., Wadhwani, R. D. eds. (2014). The Future of the Past in Management and Organization Studies. Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press.

Casey, A. J., Olivera, F. (2011). Reflections on organizational memory and forgetting. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20: 305–310.

Coman, S. & Casey, A. (2020). The enduring presence of the founder in collection museums: A historical and interdisciplinary perspective. Historical Organization Studies: Theory and Applications, edited by Maclean, M., Clegg, S. R., Suddaby, R., & Harvey, C. Routledge.

Coman, S. & Casey, A. (2021). Metahistories of Microhistories: How organizations narrate their origin story at different points in their history. EGOS Symposium, Subtheme 33: Historical Organization Studies in Action: Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation. July 8 & 9, 2021.

Coraiola, D. M., Foster, W. M., Suddaby, R. (2015). “Varieties of history in organization studies.” In McLaren, P. G., Mills, A. J., Weatherbee, T. G. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Management and Organizational History: 363–372. New York: Routledge.

Dacin, M. T., Dacin, P. A., & Kent, D. (2019). Tradition in organizations: A custodianship framework.

Academy of Management Annals, 13(1), 342-373.

Davis, P. S., & P.D. Harveston. (1999). “In the founder’s shadow: Conflict in the family firm.” Family Business Review 12.4: 311-323.

Davis-Marks, I. (2020). Why the Houston Museum of African American Culture Is Displaying a Confederate Statue. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why- houston-museum-african-american-culture-displaying-confederate-statue-180975742/.

Foroughi, H. (2020). Collective memories as a vehicle of fantasy and identification: founding stories retold. Organization Studies, 41(10), 1347-1367.

Foroughi, H., Coraiola, D. M., Rintamäki, J., Mena, S., & Foster, W. M. (2020). Organizational memory studies. Organization Studies, 41(12), 1725-1748.

Hatch, M. J., & Schultz, M. (2017). Toward a Theory of Using History Authentically: Historicizing in the Carlsberg Group. Administrative Science Quarterly, 62(4), 657–697.

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: 1265–1287.

Lubinski, C., & Gartner, W. B. (2023). Talking about (my) generation: The use of generation as rhetorical history in family business. Family Business Review, 36(1), 119-142.

Miller, K. D., Gomes, E., & Lehman, D. W. (2019). Strategy restoration. Long Range Planning, 52(5), 101855.

Ravasi, D., Rindova, V., & Stigliani, I. (2019). The stuff of legend: History, memory, and the temporality of organizational identity construction. Academy of Management Journal, 62(5), 1523-1555.

Rodgers, D. M., Petersen, J., & Sanderson, J. (2016). Commemorating alternative organizations and marginalized spaces: The case of forgotten Finntowns. Organization, 23(1), 90-113.

Sasaki, I., Kotlar, J., Ravasi, D., & Vaara, E. (2020). Dealing with revered past: Historical identity statements and strategic change in Japanese family firms. Strategic Management Journal, 41(3), 590- 623.

Schwartz, B. (1991). Iconography and collective memory: Lincoln’s image in the American mind. The Sociological Quarterly, 32(3), 301-319.

Suddaby, R., Silverman, B. S., Jaskiewicz, P., De Massis, A., & Micelotta, E. R. (2023). History-Informed Family Business Research: An Editorial on the Promise of History and Memory Work. Family Business Review, 36(1), 4-16.)

CfP: EURAM “Historical Research in Management Studies”

Steph

SIG 12 – RM&RP – Research Methods and Research Practice 

We invite you to submit your research to explore the theme of 

FOSTERING INNOVATION TO ADDRESS GRAND CHALLENGES 

for the EURAM 24th Conference. 

We look forward to receiving your submissions. 

T12_04 – Historical Research in Management Studies 

Proponents: 

Matteo Cristofaro, University of Rome Tor Vergata; Kevin Tennent, University of York; Massimo Sargiacomo, University of Pescara; Michael Weatherburn, Imperial College London; James Fowler, University of Essex; Adoración Álvaro-Moya, CUNEF (Colegio Universitario de Estudios Financieros); David Boughey, University of Exeter Business School; Sébastien Damart, Paris Dauphine-PSL University 

Short description: 

The track “Historical Research in Management Studies” addresses the historical development of management and related areas (e.g., entrepreneurship, international business, marketing, retailing, strategy, accounting, auditing, management tools, etc.), concepts, theories, and practices as well as the application and evolution of historical research methods. We aim to encourage theoretically orientated social science history, and its methods, with a clear relationship to present-day debates and practices in the management discipline; from that, the types of contributions that are looked for fall into the following two categories. First, historical analyses of management concepts, theories, and practices. Second, contributions regarding revisitation or new directions in management historical research. 

Long description: 

The track “Historical Research in Management Studies” addresses the historical development of management and related areas (e.g., entrepreneurship, international business, marketing, retailing, strategy, accounting, auditing, management tools, etc.) concepts, theories, and practices as well as the application and evolution of historical research methods. The types of contributions that are looked for fall into two categories. 

First, works that make historical assessments of the social consequences of management, reexaminations of established historical concepts, the historical development of management of present-day companies, and topics that draw on historical data/firmly rooted in a historical perspective. In fact, the historical analysis of management concepts and theories helps to EURAM 2024 

AUTHORS GUIDELINES https://conferences.euram.academy/2024conference/authors-guidelines-for-full-papers/ 

understand how scholars accepted or rejected them. According to a practical point of view, historical research constitutes the starting point for analyzing and interpreting the mechanisms that interact with the life of companies. The observation, analysis, and comparison of past experiences can constitute the “lifeblood” for the development of new and more advanced management and governance models, to guide companies beyond the current uncertain times. For example, the historical study of the crisis and their external shocks – e.g., wars, plagues, natural disasters, and social problems – is a stream of investigation that is still largely to be explored and that can develop insights into why some external factors are influential according to the peculiarities of the territory in which they develop. Some other, but not exclusively, interesting management topics to be historically studied may be the management of education institutions, the realization of artistic pieces and their activities, sporting organisations, accounting tools and financial statements – these latter are considered as expressions of the intuitions and ideas of the organizational members and related actions. 

Being based on archival evidence, historical methods feature named organisations within their contexts, making it easier for scholars and learners to relate to and emphasise with them. Second, this track invites contributions able to discuss the ways of using historical materials, new directions in management historical research and oral history, and the importance of a historical perspective in management. Historic-based business studies have the advantage of being teachable and we believe that the historical methods – thanks to their unique understandings of historical context, chronology, continuity, and change – create a sort of narrative that aids the sensemaking of management concepts, theories, and practices. Case studies, longitudinal analysis, micro-history approach, ANTI-history approach, history as rhetoric, and genealogical pragmatic analysis constitute only examples of the welcomed submissions. 

Keywords: 

  • Management history 
  • Business history 
  • Accounting history 
  • Historical Methods 

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG): 

Goal 4: Quality education,Goal 8: Decent work and economic growth,Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure,Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities,Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions,Goal 17: Partnerships for the goals 

Publication Outlet: 

  • Fast-track process for the Journal of Management History at the end of each EURAM Conference 
  • Edited Book will be launched for each edition of the EURAM Conference. The publisher can be Information Age Publishing. A book series in Management History is present and the past editors are passing to Matteo Cristofaro Editorial duties. https://www.info 

For more information contact: 

Matteo Cristofaro, University of Rome Tor Vergata – matteo.cristofaro@uniroma2.it 

Research Seminar on “Everyday Aesthetics”

Steph

RESEARCH SEMINAR: AI HISANO

“EVERYDAY AESTHETICS: INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AND THE SENSES IN THE UNITED STATES FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1950S”

Virtual Event
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Time:   9:00 a.m. EST (Please note time change for this seminar!)

“Our basic appreciation of design is ultimately dependent upon what we sense through vision, taste, hearing, smelling and feeling,” argued the industrial designer J. Gordon Lippincott in his 1947 book. By focusing on the expansion of industrial design in the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s, this paper explores how industrial designers helped construct people’s sensory experience in buying and using products. Industrial designers served as agents of what I call “aesthetic capitalism”—a mode of capitalism that rested on, and was fueled by, creating and appealing to sensory and emotional experience. In making this argument I draw on Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of aesthetics as the sensory awareness of the world through which people understand themselves and their relationships with others. In the era of mass consumption, industrial designers helped consumers interact with, understand, and eventually naturalize technological artifacts, social norms, and more generally the era’s atmospheres on a sensorial and emotional level. Rather than simply being the outer look of consumer products, industrial design constituted and forged the everyday, serving as a mediator between people and products.

Ai Hisano is associate professor of history at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. Her recent publications include Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat (Harvard University Press, 2019), which won the Hagley Prize in Business History (Business History Conference) and the Shimizu Hiroshi Book Award (Japanese Association for American Studies).

David Howes of Concordia University will provide the comment.

Attendees are encouraged to read Hisano’s paper, “Everyday Aesthetics: Industrial Design and the Sense in the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s” which may be obtained by contacting Carol Lockman at clockman@hagley.org.   Please note the time for this seminar is 9:00 a.m. EST.

Registration for this event is via Eventbrite.

Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship Program

Steph

The Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship Program supports research by emerging scholars in financial history, broadly conceived. Fellowships include monetary awards as well as support from the BHC community of scholars, which for decades has prioritized engagement with graduate students and early career researchers. The program is endowed by a generous gift from renowned economist Dr. Henry Kaufman (Henry & Elaine Kaufman Foundation, Inc).   The first round of Research and Post-Doctoral Fellowships is November 1, 2023.  Here is the direct link for info and to apply:  https://thebhc.org/henry-kaufman-financial-history-fellowship-program-0.

The program offers three kinds of awards: Research fellowships, Dissertation fellowships, and Post-Doctoral fellowships.  To be eligible, applicants must be enrolled in or graduates of an accredited doctoral program.

The program is administered by a program coordinator and overseen by the Kaufman Fellowship Committee. 

BHR new issue alert

Steph

We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of BHR (Volume 97, Issue 2) is now available online. This special issue, guest-edited by Marlous van Waijenburg and Anne Ruderman, explores themes related to the history of business, capitalism, and slavery. All articles and the research note are available free online for a limited time.

The Table of Contents and links to the issue are included below. You can also find everything here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-history-review/latest-issue.

Subscribe to receive automatic alerts by using the “Add Alert” button at the following link (Cambridge Core account required): https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content-alerts/add/journal/BHR.

20th World Economic History Congress

Steph

Call for sessions

The 20th World Economic History Congress will convene from 28 July–1 August 2025 in Lund, Sweden. The theme for the Congress is Equality and Sustainability Challenges, which highlights some of the central issues facing humanity today and also connects to a broad and diverse range of historical problems. To address both the challenges and to find insights from the historical record for that endeavour, a range of perspectives will be necessary.

The IEHA has a particularly strong desire to attract sessions related to this theme. However, submissions are welcome on the economic and social histories of all places and periods, and on the exploration of varied sources and methods, and on the theory and uses of economic history itself. We also invite members to employ and analyse diverse strategies for representing the past.

Sessions may be proposed by any member of the international economic history community, whatever their institutional affiliation or status, as well as by scholars in related disciplines. Given the diversity of our membership, we will consider any submission that advances the study, teaching and public presentation of economic history. We welcome panel proposals that highlight scholarship emerging from economic history, business history, financial history, demographic history, environmental history, global and world history, social history, urban and agrarian history, gender studies, material culture, methodological approaches to historical research, history of economics and economic thought, science and technology studies, and other related fields.

The programme of the Lund Congress will be organised on the same principles as previous Congresses. The 5-day Congress will have approximately 180 sessions, with each day divided into time blocks of 90 minutes each (two before lunch and two after lunch). As in the past, it will be possible to combine two sessions into larger coherent units.

The session proposals should contain:

  • Name, title, affiliation, and contact information of the session organiser
  • Possible co-organisers (optional)
  • Title of the session
  • Description of the session’s aim, contribution, and relevance (max 5,000 characters with blanks)
  • Researchers invited to participate in the session, or those already confirmed, and their affiliations

The call for sessions will close on January 31, 2024. Sessions should be submitted via the portal at at this link. Please note that unlike in past years, there will be ONLY ONE call for sessions. Decisions will be finalised in June 2024.

New edition of “The Evolution of Management Thought”

Steph


Dear Organizational History Network Colleagues

It is our pleasure to announce that digital evaluation copies of the newly released ninth edition of The Evolution of Management Thought are now available. Designed for upper-level and graduate courses, this new edition further cements The Evolution of Management Thought’s place, over the past half-century, as the field of management history’s leading text.

A book cover showing a forest

Far more than a chronicle of the historical development of modern management’s many roots, The Evolution of Management Thought is a fascinating telling of how ideas about the nature of work, the nature of human beings, and the nature of organizations have changed throughout history.

The Evolution of Management Thought’s methodology is analytic, synthetic, and interdisciplinary. It is analytic, in that it examines the backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs of people who made significant contributions to management thinking. It is synthetic, in that it weaves developmental trends, social movements, and environmental forces into a conceptual framework for understanding how management thinking has evolved within and across generations. It is interdisciplinary, in that it draws insights from economics, history, political science, psychology, and sociology to explain why management thinking has developed as it has. 

This new edition traces the intellectual history of modern management thought as an activity and as an academic discipline in a way that makes reading The Evolution of Management Thought a thoroughly enjoyable encounter.

Request a digital evaluation copy by pasting the following URL into your browser: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Evolution+of+Management+Thought%2C+9th+Edition-p-9781394202294

We remain grateful for the suggestions and encouragement of the many people who have used previous editions of The Evolution of Management Thought in the classroom and in their own research. For more information, or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely,

Daniel A. Wren and Arthur G. Bedeian – abede@lsu.edu

Accounting History International Conference

Steph

The 12th Accounting History International Conference will be held September 4-6 2024 in Siena, Italy. The conference theme is “Accounting for arts, culture and heritage in historical perspectives”. Papers on this topic are encouraged, but any accounting history paper will be considered for presentation at the 12AHIC. Paper submission is by 31 March 2024.

The website for the conference is now live –  http://www.congressi.unisi.it/12ahic/