Author: Steph

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

Business History Collective Spring Webinar series

Steph

We at the Business History Collective (Global) are pleased to announce our program for the spring webinar series, which will take place between March and June.These events are intended primarily as a platform to share and discuss ongoing research, including working papers, dissertation chapters, and manuscripts under review. As such, the series does not follow a particular theme or set of topics; however, we have tried to prioritize proposals of particular novelty, use of qualitative approaches, and historical periods preceding 1800 or subsequent to 1950.For this series, we have decided to include some ‘double features’ in the program. These longer sessions will host presentations from two speakers, allowing us to include as many papers as possible, while maintaining a manageable schedule.All events will be hosted on Zoom and bookable via Eventbrite. Sign-up links will be published on our various social media profiles and sent directly to our mailing list (sign-up here).We look forward to seeing you at our events.Program: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RTSNN8qtUyDWSHDMAZ31BlJjyXOfLnH9/view?usp=sharing

Ashton Merck (Duke University) and Adam Nix (De Montfort University)
Conveners Spring 2021
Business History Collective | Colectivo de Historia Empresarial

Follow us | Siguenos @bizhiscol

BHC Mentoring for Emerging Scholars

Steph

This year, the Business History Conference will be held virtually for the first time.  

This new format presents us with both challenges and opportunities.  The Emerging Scholars Committee usually runs networking events, such as a drinks reception and a breakfast.  While we will miss seeing all of you in person this year, we hope to maintain some of these traditions in the new virtual format and to continue to provide a supportive space to network and meet other scholars.

We are launching a new mentoring scheme, which will provide participants at the virtual BHC with a valuable opportunity to gain advice and insight from more advanced scholars in the field on everything from completing a dissertation to finding research funding, navigating the academic job market to exploring possibilities for business historians beyond the academy. 

If you would like to participate, please contact Victoria Barnes <barnes@rg.mpg.de>

We aim to begin the process of introducing mentors with mentees on the 17th February.

With best wishes,

Grace Ballor, Victoria Barnes, Jessica Burch, Valeria Giacomin, Sven Kube and Andrew McGee

The Emerging Scholar Committee

AOM SIM event on “RACIAL JUSTICE AT THE INTERSECTION OF BUSINESS AND SOCIETY”

Steph

The Social Issues in Management Division at the Academy of Management are running an online event this week, which is part of a series. In one of the next events (26 March) they are specifically considering “Racial Justice, History, and Business Ethics“. Details for these can be found under the Eventbrite booking page.

RACIAL JUSTICE AT THE INTERSECTION OF BUSINESS AND SOCIETY

February 12, 2021, 11:00am-12:30pm EST – Racial Justice and Social Theory

Hosts: Paul T. Harper (Pittsburgh) & Cristina Neesham (Newcastle)

REGISTRATION: www.eventbrite.com/e/…

Rabbi Gideon Pogrund (Univ. of Pretoria)

Smriti Sharma (Newcastle)

Paul T. Harper (Pittsburgh)

Panel will challenge and extend dominant social and political theories operating within business scholarship through a critical engagement with Black studies, post-colonial studies, and global feminism. Diversity professionals will articulate strategies for building communities of trust across identity boundaries.

Event Sponsor: Viragh Institute for Ethics in Business

Upcoming series events:

March 5, 2021, 11:00am-12:30 EST – Racial Justice and Business Technologies

Hosts: Paul T. Harper (Pittsburgh) & Kirsten Martin (Notre Dame)

REGISTRATION: www.eventbrite.com/e/…

March 26, 2021, 11:00am-12:30pm EST – Racial Justice, History, and Business Ethics

Hosts: Paul T. Harper (Pittsburgh) & David Wasieleski (Duquesne)

REGISTRATION: www.eventbrite.com/e/…

May 7, 2021, 11:00am-12:30 EST – Racial Justice and Sustainability

Hosts: Robbin Derry (Lethbridge) & Jeffrey York (Colorado)

REGISTRATION: www.eventbrite.com/e/…

Visit SIM Website for full series details: sim.aom.org/new-item7

JOURNAL OF BUSINESS ETHICS – Special Issue on “Racial Justice and Business Ethics”

Guest Editors: Paul T. Harper (Pittsburgh), Robbin Derry (Lethbridge), and Gregory Fairchild (Virginia)

Submission Deadline: October 1, 2021

Visit JBE website for full details: www.springer.com/journal/10551/updates/18290364

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Vincenzo Vastola
SIM AOM Connect Manager
Montpellier Business School
Montpellier, France
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Biz Hist Coll: “Boatloads of Mexican Silver” – presentation by Manuel Bautista

Steph

Boatloads of Mexican Silver. The Political Economy of Specie Imports in New Orleans, 1839-1861

Date: 16/02/2021 @11.00hrs Colombia, 16.00hrs UK
Presenter: Manuel Bautista (Columbia University)
Chair: TBC

Register here.

This paper reconstructs the monetary geography of antebellum New Orleans from the economic crisis of 1839 to the US. Navy’s blockade of the port in 1861 through a quantitative and geographic examination of specie imports (gold and silver coins) flowing into the port. It also sheds light into the commercial and financial actors, networks, and circuits involved in the intermediation of specie in New Orleans before the U.S. Civil War. Drawing on a novel dataset assembled from the semi-weekly economic newspaper New Orleans Price-Current (the first of its kind in the scholarly literature on specie in the early U.S. economy), the paper explores the amounts, the provenance, the types of vessels for maritime transportation, and the top-tier consignees of specie imports flowing into antebellum New Orleans. Specie (primarily Mexican silver dollars) helped accommodate the Crescent City’s cross-border flows of goods and capital, mirroring its commercial and financial ties with the rest of the world. New Orleans was central for the antebellum U.S. specie market and money supply, as it imported vast specie flows (primarily Mexican silver dollars) from ports such as Brazos Santiago (Texas), Veracruz, Tampico (both in Mexico), and Havana (Cuba). Specie consignees relied on high-powered money flows to fund their business ventures as commission merchants, commodity factors, real estate investors, and agents of European and U.S. Northern merchant banking houses.

Update from the Contextualising Email Archives Research Project

Steph

As part of our AHRC-funded collaborative research project on “Historicising the dot.com boom and contextualising email archives”, we have recorded an introduction to our project and its aims. In case you are interested, you can find the presentation here.

BAM conference 2021 – Management & Business History Track

Steph

BAM2021 Conference in the Cloud, Lancaster University Management School.

31st August – 3rd September 2021

BAM2021 Key Dates and Deadlines

  • Paper submission site opens (15th January)
  • Deadline to submit paper (5th March)
  • Review process starts (12th March)
  • Paper acceptance notification (29th April)
  • Deadline for at least ONE author to register for the Conference (28th May)
  • Final paper upload (18th June)
  • Asynchronous paper presentation deadline (16th July)

Link to Conference and Paper Submission Guidelines: https://www.bam.ac.uk/events-landing/conference.html

Track:Management and Business History

Track Chairs: James Fowler, University of Essex James.Fowler@essex.ac.uk

 Roy Edwards, University of Southampton r.a.edwards@soton.ac.uk

Track description: This track encourages the growing number of management and business historians who work in business schools and social science departments to engage in constructive debate with a wide range of management scholars. The 2021 conference theme, ‘‘Covid Economy Recovery and the Role of Responsible Management’’, is a superb opportunity to explore the value of historical study for current management. This year the conference will remain online, but we are keen to offer the opportunity for all accepted papers to be presented live online and to receive the kind of commentary and feedback that would normally be expected at a face to face conference.

In this track we specialize in chronologically or longitudinally motivated research. Histories of organizations, industries and institutions give us the opportunity to understand how managers have dealt with crises in the past. History is replete with disasters of varying magnitude. We would welcome papers that explore how economies and wider society have responded to extreme circumstances – from war to natural disasters and economic collapse, humanity has been remarkably resilient in dealing with adversity. But how has this happened? What has been the role of the private and public sector in dealing with emergency?

We welcome papers, symposia or workshop proposals either using new and innovative methodologies or applying archival methodology to a new disciplinary context. We are also interested in context specific papers using more traditional historical methodology but which take innovative approaches to relate their findings to wider social science concerns including the diversity of experience in present day businesses, regions and communities. While the main conference theme ought to feature prominently in all submissions, we encourage cross-disciplinary papers and workshop submissions that link different Tracks.

As a group we are inherently multi-disciplinary and believe in the application of theory to historical analysis, and there is no single epistemology for approaching this. We aim to encourage theoretically orientated social science history with a clear relationship to present day debates in the management discipline. Contributions might focus on but are not limited to: the economic or social history of business, historical case studies for theory building, theoretical contributions on the relevance of history to management studies, the uses of history, history as a method for management studies. Please note that while we are open-minded work not featuring a historical dimension, broadly defined, will not be accepted.

This article is a useful initial point of reference:

Tennent, K. (2020). Management and business history – a reflexive research agenda for the 2020s. Journal of Management History. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMH-09-2020-0061.

These articles offer commentary on the ‘dual integrity’ of business history methods as a combination of social science and historical craft:

Decker, S., Usidken, B., Engwall, L. & Rowlinson, M. (2018). Special issue introduction: Historical research on institutional change. Business History, 60(5). pp613-627. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2018.1427736

Maclean, M., Harvey, C. and Clegg, S.R., (2016). Conceptualizing historical organization studies. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), pp.609-632. DOI:
10.5465/amr.2014.0133

Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J. & Decker, S. (2014). Research Strategies for Organisational History: A Dialogue between Historical Theory and Organisation Theory. Academy of Management Review, 39(3), pp250–274. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2012.0203

Bauhaus digital archive

Steph

For those of you interested in archives available online, the Bauhaus Archive has made its digital archive available here: http://open-archive.bauhaus.de/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&moduleFunction=search

There are also a digital history resources available for those interested in the history of the school, which celebrated its centenary in 2019, though the original website has now be changed to https://www.bauhauskooperation.com/ and does not feature quite as much useful historical detail anymore – but hopefully this will come back as they develop the site!

Biz Hist Coll: 26 January 2021

Steph

How to Start an Early Modern Tax Haven: Smuggling, Fraud and Global Business in Eighteenth-century Britain

Date: 26/01/2021 @ 16:00 hrs London

Speaker:  David Chan Smith (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Follow David here: @davidchansmith
Moderator: Nicholas Wong (Nortumbria University, Newcastle)
Register here. Abstract below.

Source: https://theromneymarsh.net/smuggling

Tired of paying high customs duties recently introduced by the government? Looking for a competitive advantage in overseas markets or to access other imperial trading systems? This talk investigates the emergence of early modern tax havens around Britain. Tax havens are often assumed to be a modern phenomenon that responded to the establishment of corporate and income taxes. Yet traders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made creative and routine use of the jurisdictional peculiarities that existed within Europe. Local and national elites who saw these havens as sources of income sponsored these efforts even though they frequently involved fraud and smuggling. This talk will survey the functioning of the early modern tax avoidance system around Britain, explore the development of these havens and the response of central government. To illustrate its arguments, the paper examines a case study of the Isle of Man and its establishment in the 1720s as a tax avoidance hub in the Atlantic slave trade.

Organizational Memory Studies – Perspectives piece & EGOS track

Steph

Posted on behalf of Dr Hamid Foroughi:

Dear colleagues,

I hope you are keeping well in these unsettling times. 
I just thought our recent Organization Studies perspective piece- Organizational Memory Studies– might be of interest to you. In this article, Diego Coraiola, Jukka Rintamaki, Sebastian Mena, Bill Foster and I provide an overview of the developments in the filed in the last decade or so. See the link to the article below.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0170840620974338?journalCode=ossa

Bill Foster, Sebastian Mena and I are also organizing an EGOS sub-theme- to take this conversation further.
Sub-theme 49: Organizational Memory Studies: Toward an Inclusive Research Agenda
We would be of course delighted to see any contribution from yourself or your coauthors to our subtheme.
We appreciate if you also share this to other colleagues of yours who might be interested in this.

An extraordinary story for your Christmas break

Steph

As we are getting very close to a well-deserved winter break, I wanted to share an extraordinary story with you about how historical research uncovered the life and family history of one woman’s immortal cells. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman whose cells reproduced in laboratories when no others would. They have become the basis of many medical innovations, and have also played a role in medical research into the current pandemic.

However, until a few years ago, neither Lacks nor her descendants knew about her crucial role, as her cells were harvested without her consent. Despite her enormous significance for medical research, some members of her family struggled to get health insurance, as one interviewee pointed out. Her family learned about the both sad and significant medical history of their ancestor when a historian researching the history of Lacks’ cells contacted them. The BBC’s short video highlights the aftermath of the discovery of her amazing cells, her untimely death from cancer, her family’s discovery of her long legacy and their current engagement with medical research facilitated by their ancestor. It is an important story well worth watching over the holidays.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/how-one-womans-immortal-cells-changed-the-world/p08wr9gf