Steph

Online Seminar: African American Management History

August 14, 2020August 2, 2020 Steph

Insights from African American Management History

By Leon C Prieto & Simone TA Phipps

Part of the Online Seminars in Business History Series run by Gesellschaft fuer Unternehmensgeschichte

ABSTRACT:

Black entrepreneurs, managers, and management thought leaders are generally conspicuously absent from the field of Management History, omitted, not because they did not contribute, but because they and their contributions have been ignored or overlooked. This session explores Management History by presenting two of the many Black management thought leaders and practitioners, as well as highlighting some of their contributions. Charles Clinton Spaulding (President of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company) and Maggie Lena Walker (President of St. Luke Penny Savings Bank) will be discussed.

BIOGRAPHIES:

Dr. Leon C. Prieto is an Associate Professor of Management in Clayton State University’s College of Business. He earned his BS in Business Administration from Claflin University, his MBA from Georgia Southern University and his Ph.D. in Human Resource & Leadership Development from Louisiana State University.

Dr. Simone T. A. Phipps is an Associate Professor of Management in the School of Business at Middle Georgia State University. She earned her BS in Management Information Science from Claflin University, her MBA from Ohio University and her Ph.D. in Human Resource and Leadership Development from Louisiana State University.

New Digital Humanities journal

August 7, 2020July 22, 2020 Steph

As part of our little series of resources in digital history, I wanted to make you aware of a new journal: Digital Humanities in the BeNeLux, which is open access here. The first issue has an interesting introduction on “Integrating Digital Humanities”, but many of the examples are obviously not in our area of expertise. Nevertheless, the introduction by Julie Birkholz and Gerben Zaagsma, is useful in outlining important features of the field that are not necessarily obvious to anyone not engaged directly with these questions:

“Much ink has been spent, and occasionally spilled, trying to define the Digital Humanities and its place among the academic disciplines. Yet whether it is seen as a field of its own, a sub- or inter-discipline, or a set of practices, most proponents agree on some basic characteristics, with interdisciplinarity probably topping the list. As early as two decades ago, Willard McCarty was among the first to assert that DH constituted an interdiscipline, due to its “common ground of method [which] makes it possible to teach applied computing to a class of humanists from widely varying disciplines” (McCarty 1999). At the same time, DH challenges existing and ingrained research practices (perhaps sometimes more imagined than real), according to which humanities research questions must always derive from domain knowledge, by proposing new data- and method-driven approaches to research in the humanities. [my emphasis]

In practice, Digital Humanities projects typically involve, and bring together, a variety of practitioners from different backgrounds: academics from various fields and disciplines, librarians, archivists and museum experts. [my emphasis] All of this could easily be construed as providing evidence of the existence of some sort of shared field; yet the influence of the digital on the various phases of our research practice (whether information gathering, processing, analysis and dissemination) comes in many forms: sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it is tacit and implicit, and sometimes aspirational. …”

For organizational history, this raises a number of questions, for example, what new data- and method-driven approaches could be relevant for us, and how we could collaborate more with organizational archivists going forward. So far these debates are very much in their infancy in our field, but are likely to become more important in the years to come.

Coleman Prize presentations

July 31, 2020July 23, 2020 Steph1 Comment

Unfortunately this year’s Association of Business Historians (ABH) conference in Nottingham did not take place due to the ongoing pandemic. One session that was launched virtually was the Coleman Prize session, via Zoom. It was a strong year with three excellent presentations, which all three candidates on the shortlist agreed to share (see below).

First up, the Coleman Prize winner, Dr Akram Benjamin (University of Reading), who talked about his fascinating research on business networks and the financing of cotton in Egypt.

This was followed by a presentation on organizational corruption at Enron in the California Energy Crisis, by Dr Adam Nix (Aston University, now at De Montfort University).

Finally, the talk by David Paulson (University of Cambridge, now Queens University Belfast) compares SMEs in Britain and West Germany in 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, on the basis of painstaking work in multiple archives.

Virtual AOM symposium: Temporality of entrepreneurial opportunities

July 24, 2020July 22, 2020 Steph

Entrepreneurial opportunities—as situations (e.g., Shane & Venkataraman, 2000), social constructs (e.g., Alvarez & Barney, 2007) and/or objects of entrepreneurial discourse (e.g., Cornelissen and Clarke, 2010)—may have something to do with a contrast between the status quo (i.e. the past) and the imagined future which may be realized through action in the present. But we’ve noticed that the entrepreneurship literature rarely deals explicitly or directly with the relationship between entrepreneurial opportunities and the passage of time.

Join us on July 24, 2020 at 8 AM Pacific Time for a panel discussion and dialogue on the question—how does an explicit focus on time, temporality or history shape the way you conceptualize and study entrepreneurial opportunity?

Panelists include Dimo Dimov, David Kirsch, Jacqueline Kirtley, Tanja Leppäaho, Rob Mitchell, Dan Raff, Andrew Smith, Dan Wadhwani and Matt Wood.

Here the link to participate in the session. The meeting ID is 986 4484 7268. The password for the meeting will be ENT&Time. Upon joining the meeting, you will be prompted to provide your consent to participating in a recorded meeting. We will be posting a video recording of this meeting for further discussion and engagement as an asynchronous event of the Academy of Management annual meeting co-hosted by the entrepreneurship and management history divisions.Best regards,Trevor

CfP in JWB “Time Matters”

July 17, 2020July 6, 2020 Steph

“Time Matters: Rethinking the Role of Time in International Business Research”

Submissions open August 15, 2020; Submissions due August 30, 2020

Guest Editors:

Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki, University of Leeds, UK
Eriikka Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, University of Turku, Finland
Melanie E. Hassett, University of Sheffield, UK
Elizabeth L. Rose, University of Leeds, UK
Peter W. Liesch, The University of Queensland, Australia

Supervising Editor:

Ulf Anderson, Mälardalen University, Sweden

Special Issue Overview

This special issue intends to stimulate thinking on the role and impact of time in International Business (IB) theory and practice. We seek conceptual, theoretical and empirical – both qualitative and quantitative – papers that advance our understanding of temporal issues as they pertain to IB phenomena.

The current global environment is changing rapidly. Climate change, migration, trade wars, political volatility, technological disruptions (e.g., artificial intelligence) and the depletion of natural resources create grand challenges for firms. Such rapid changes pose challenges to the applicability of traditional theories. While scholars are calling for grand theories to address grand challenges (e.g., Buckley, Doh & Benischke, 2017), firms are struggling with the timing of their international activities in an increasingly uncertain, disruptive and complex environment (Doh, 2015).

Time is central to IB theory and practice, relevant to both stability and change in internationalization and cross-border operations. It has a crucially important role in the three domains – the philosophical, conceptual, and the methodological (George & Jones, 2000). The literature reflects a strong interest in processes, particularly with respect to internationalization (Knight & Liesch, 2016; Odlin, 2019; Welch, Nummela, Liesch, 2016; Welch & Paavilainen-Mäntymäki 2014). However, much IB research seeks to advance our understanding of internationalization processes by focusing on antecedents and consequences of specific events, rather than on the events’ temporal emergence and their associated dynamic mechanisms (Jones & Coviello, 2005; for similar arguments see Pettigrew, 2012; Van de Ven 1992). For example, the focus is often on explaining firms’ attaining specific internationalization-related goals rather than explaining the temporally-embedded processes of how they reach the goals (Welch & Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, 2014). Researchers are more likely to study initial foreign entry with less consideration given to subsequent post-entry strategies and their evolution (Chen, Sousa, & He, 2019; Fuad & Gaur, 2019).

While one of the first principles of process research is the study of events over time, several scholars (e.g., Hurmerinta, Paavilainen-Mäntymäki & Hassett, 2016; Jones & Coviello, 2005) have expressed concern in current and unfolding phenomena, such as Brexit and the trade wars between the US and China, highlight how political uncertainty can affect the timing of events in domestic and international business.

In addition, while IB research has long emphasized the importance of context (Delios, 2017; Teagarden, Von Glinow & Mellahi, 2018), we advocate explicit attention to time in our consideration of context to offer more deeply-contextualized explanations of IB phenomena (Welch, Piekkari, Plakoyiannaki, & Paavilainen, 2011). Accomplishing this will require the use of different methodological approaches, including the addition of deep historical accounts (e.g., Jones & Khanna 2006) and the application of novel tools such as interactive visualization (Schotter, Buchel, Vashchilko, 2018).

Few studies fully adopt a “temporal paradigm” (Pauwels & Matthyssens, 1999) vis-à-vis fieldwork, data sources (e.g. real time; longitudinal, retrospective) and focal phenomena (e.g. dynamic, discontinuous, historical). Time is often neglected despite its inherent presence in research design. Analytical approaches seldom allow for a processual contribution, rather relying on the prevailing variance-oriented approaches that disconnect processes through categorizations and coding (Welch & Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, 2014).

The IB field will benefit from making effective use of processual analytical methods aimed at uncovering dynamics and the relationships between constructs, rather than focusing on their similarities and differences or their antecedents and consequences (Maxwell & Miller, 2008). Bringing business history perspectives and the analogous futures research methods to the IB toolkit will help IB scholars make stronger theoretical contributions. Methodological advances are needed.

In qualitative research, the methodological approaches used in IB for analyzing temporal and processrelated phenomena remain underdeveloped (Plakoyiannaki, Wei, & Prashantham, 2019). Process and temporal research is currently subject to limitations associated with narratives that may be considered as chronologies of anecdotes that can be potentially flawed due to memory bias, hindsight-based conclusions and subjective choices regarding what is included in retrospective studies. Observational, visual and multimodal research are scarce in IB despite their potential to represent, contextualize and theorize temporal phenomena. There are also concerns about the feasibility of contemporaneous research, given time and financial constraints, and the challenges associated with analyzing longitudinal or processual data.

For quantitative research, there are well-established statistical approaches for analyzing time-series data. However, effective estimation of these time-series models (e.g., ARIMA) requires access to a long history of data (see, e.g., Rose, 1993). This is problematic in IB, as the assumption of consistent underlying mechanisms across long periods of time (e.g., a minimum of 100 years if the data are annual) is highly questionable. Therefore, we need to develop different approaches for accounting for time, without resorting to assumptions that relationships are consistent across different eras.

Objectives of this Special Issue

To understand how assumptions about time shape theorizing in IB
To incorporate the role of time in the conceptualization of IB phenomena
To account for time more explicitly in IB research
To develop more effective ways to include time empirically in qualitative and quantitative IB research

Illustrative Topics

We encourage conceptual, methodological and empirical contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Philosophical domain: Theorizing about time in IB

How do different conceptions of time (e.g., subjective; organic; cyclical) advance knowledge of IB phenomena?
How do different philosophical traditions (e.g., interpretivism, phenomenology, critical realism, positivism) define the study of time in IB scholarship?

Conceptual domain: The role of time in the conceptualization of IB phenomena

How can we define time in IB research?
What is the role of time in theorizing in IB?
How can process and variance-oriented research complement one another in providing IB with stronger theoretical bases?
How is time conceptualized in IB research?
How can time-related concepts be defined in IB research?
How do IB researchers take advantage of dynamic theories?

Methodological domain: Accounting for time in research design

How do we define and distinguish between dynamic and static theories in IB?
How can we incorporate time into the assembly of qualitative and quantitative data in IB research?
How can we analyse longitudinal or process data – qualitatively and quantitatively?
How can we incorporate practices and methods from business history research into IB?
How can we make strong theoretical contributions using temporal, processual and longitudinal research?

We look forward to your submissions that address the important issue of advancing our understanding of time in the context of IB.

Submission Process

Between August 15 and August 31, 2020, authors should submit their manuscripts online via the Journal of World Business submission system. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for consideration for this Special Issue, it is important that authors select ‘VSI: Time Matters’ when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process. Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the Journal of World Business Guide for Authors available at http://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-world-business/1090-9516/guide-for-authors . All submitted manuscripts will be subject to the Journal of World Business’s double-blind review process.

Manuscript Development Workshops

The editors of the Special Issue anticipate holding information sessions and development workshop at different conferences. Participation in these events does not guarantee acceptance of the paper for publication in JWB, and attendance is not prerequisite for publication in the special issue. The first event is a panel titled “When Time Matters: Rethinking the Role of Time in IB Theory and Practice” organized at the 45th EIBA Annual Conference in Leeds in December 2019. We will announce details of these events through different channels.

For more information, please contact the guest editors

Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki, e.plakoyiannaki@leeds.ac.uk

Eriikka Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, eriikka.paavilainen-mantymaki@utu.fi

Melanie E. Hassett, melanie.hassett@sheffield.ac.uk

Elizabeth L. Rose, e.rose@leeds.ac.uk

Peter Liesch, p.liesch@business.uq.edu.au

CfP in JHRM: Past Practices as Prologema

July 10, 2020July 6, 2020 Steph

Journal of Historical Research in Marketing

Call for Papers

Special Issue on ‘Past Practices as Prologema: Marketing Before, During and After COVID-19’

The Journal of Historical Research in Marketing invites submissions for a special issue focused on ‘Past Practices as Prologema: Marketing Before, During and After COVID-19.’ The global reaction to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic is having a significant impact on people and organizations around the globe. Whether it is loss of revenue due to closures of retail and service workplaces as mandated by public health organizations; disruptions to manufacturing of goods and product distribution due to the interruption of previously synchronized cross-border flows in supply chains; the almost complete cessation of demand for international travel, tourism and hospitality; or the uncertainties reverberating through commodity and futures markets; few, if any, sectors remain untouched. Despite a long history of pandemics, COVID-19 is the first in modern times that has both been global in nature – and has been seen to be global in nature. Pandemics are treated as unusual events because of the gaps in time between them; or as disasters/crises that overwhelm our ability to respond. Consequently, their apparent rarity has meant little engagement with pandemics from a marketing perspective. What little research there is, focuses on the AIDS pandemic or can be found in the tourism and destination marketing literatures. Paradoxically, while marketing academics have paid little if any attention to past pandemics and their effects on the practices of marketing, the current COVID-19 crisis has spurred the American Marketing Association to provide education and issue guidance to its membership – a sign of the looming importance of understanding the relationship between pandemics, their effects and impacts, and the general practice of marketing. The intent of the special issue is to seek ‘lessons’ from the past that will help inform practitioners and researchers in the present/future. We are soliciting submissions that explore the general themes of marketing activities during pandemics and of marketing’s contribution to the creation of post-pandemic ‘normalities.’ Papers may investigate these from either positive (e.g., retooling on a voluntary basis to produce needed medical protective equipment) or negative perspectives (e.g., the sale of ‘miracle’ cures).

For this special issue of JHRM, specific themes and topics might include, but are not limited to:

Advertising and Communications
- Social Marketing/Public Relations (in)effective enterprise or organizational response to stakeholder communications during a pandemic
- How do organizations orient themselves as actors in relation to their stakeholders (with regard to pricing, public relations, etc.)
Products
- Repositioning/rebranding of products/services to meet pandemic needs
- New product/service development
- Repurposing or alternative uses of existing product offerings
Marketing Ethics in a Pandemic
- Anti-Marketing or Propaganda
- Marketing/Selling of miracle cures
- Price gouging
Changes in Marketing Practices
- Changes to distribution/value proposition
- Marketing changes introduced during crisis that have persisted
- Demarketing
Tourism and Event Marketing
- Destination Marketing in Pandemics
- Sports and Event Marketing in Pandemics
Pandemic Marketing in Other Organizations
- Higher Education Marketing
- Public Health Marketing

The submission window for this special issue is May 1, 2021 to June 30, 2021 with an expected publication date in Volume 14, 2022. If you are unsure of the suitability of your topic, or have questions regarding a submission, please contact the special issue guest editors Donna Sears, Associate Professor of Marketing, F.C. Manning School of Business, Acadia University, at donna.sears@acadiau.ca or Terrance Weatherbee, Professor of Management, F.C. Manning School of Business, Acadia University, at terrance.weatherbee@acadiau.ca.

How to submit to the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing

Submissions for this special issue of JHRM should be made using ScholarOne Manuscripts, the online submission and peer review system. Registration and access is available on the journal’s ScholarOne site: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jhrm. Full information and guidance on using ScholarOne Manuscripts is available at the Emerald ScholarOne Manuscripts Support Centre: http://msc.emeraldinsight.com/.

Crowdsourcing digitisation in archives

July 3, 2020May 23, 2020 Steph

In another instalment of our digital history series, I wanted to highlight that there is increasingly work being done involving crowdsourcing. Many of you may have read the media reports that during the lock down, a crowdsourcing project to digitise rainfall records has barrelled ahead as people enthusiastically engaged. The project is now complete. Does make you wonder what other archival resources may benefit from such an approach.

The National Archives UK has been exploring this recently as well and the potential for expanding this is really not something that was on my radar at all until recently. An interesting insight into what is happening is provided by a chapter by Alexandra Everleigh, ‘Crowding out the Archivist?’ in an edited volume on Crowdsourcing our Heritage. I am not aware that there are any organization or business-focused crowdsourcing projects underway, but may just be my ignorance. Do let us know if this is something that is being explored or ongoing in an archive near you!

Coleman Prize session is going digital this year

June 22, 2020June 19, 2020 Steph

Unfortunately, the ABH conference is not taking place due to COVID-19, but the Coleman Prize session will now be held virtually on Thursday, 25 June, 14:00-15:00 (UK time).

What is the Coleman Prize

Named in honour of the British Business Historian Donald Coleman, this prize is awarded annually by the Association of Business Historians to recognise excellence in new research in Britain. It is open to PhD dissertations in Business History either having a British subject or completed at a British University. All dissertations completed in the previous two calendar years to that of their submission are eligible (with the exception of previous submissions). It is a condition of eligibility for the Prize that shortlisted finalists will present their findings at the Association’s annual conference.

Online seminars in Business History

June 18, 2020 Steph

In a mix up of our normal publishing schedule, I am running our weekly blog tonight to make you all aware of the start of a great initiative tomorrow afternoon: A new series of online seminars in Business History, facilitated by the GUG.

The aims of this series of online seminars is to help ECRs/PHDs to disseminate work in the absence of physical conferences. You can find the current schedule of events here: https://unternehmensgeschichte.de/Online-Seminare

If you have any questions about the event, please get in touch with Nicholas Wong (nicholas.d.wong@northumbria.ac.uk), who has disseminated the event on behalf of a group colleagues, who put this great initiative together.