Category: Call for Papers

PDW on business education at BHC 2023

Steph

Educating for business – and the business of education

Historical Perspectives and developments

CBS Paper Development Workshop

Business History Conference, Detroit, March 16-18, 2023

The past years have seen an increasing scholarly interest in the historicity of management
learning and education. Studies on historical interrelations between business and education
have appeared as journal contributions and special issues across diverse fields such as
business history, management- and entrepreneurship studies, and didactical research (Bok,
2009; Bridgman et al. 2016; Clinebell, & Clinebell 2009; Khurana 2007; Spender, 2016;
Wadhwani & Viebig 2021), as business schools and educational programs in management
are increasingly seen as having a transformational potential to address present-day global
challenges. Instead of merely educating for business, business school curricula and didactics
are now focused on educating for sustainable solutions and addressing grand challenges
(Gatzweiler et al. 2022).

In the PDW we focus on historicity of business education and, and we would like to explore
recent developments as well as theories and methods that might shed new light on the
historical development of business education.

The workshop offers an opportunity to get feedback and generate ideas of how to develop
concrete paper drafts that deal, one way or the other, with historical aspects of business
education. In addition, the PDW will serve as a forum where we can discuss future directions
and opportunities for historical studies within the area. What questions and research that are
yet to be explored? And what are the role for historians in shaping agendas and research
questions?

Themes to be explored in the papers could include, amongst others:

  • The role and development of entrepreneurship education
  • The historicity of business- and management education
  • Historical responses to grand societal challenges
  • Future directions of business education
  • Business school pedagogy and didactics in historical perspective
  • The historical development of business education curricula
  • Theoretical and methodological perspectives connected to business education

Submitted texts could take form as extended abstracts or full paper drafts. The important
thing is that readers can identify the key arguments, theories, and empirical material, for them
to provide useful feedback, suggestions, and comments.
The PDW is developed in the context of a special issues call on entrepreneurship education
in Management & Organizational History. Potential authors for the special issue are encouraged
to participate in the workshop, but the PDW is not limited to contributions for this
publication.

Participants are expected to read all circulated papers. Please submit a paper draft or extended
abstract before January 10, 2023 to the workshop organizers.

  • Christoph Viebig, CBS Centre for Business History: cvi.mpp@cbs.dk
  • Anders Ravn Sørensen, CBS Centre for Business History: ars.mpp@cbs.dk

References

Bok, D. (2003). Universities in the marketplace: The commercialization of higher education.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Bridgman, T., Cummings, S., & McLaughlin, C. 2016. “Restating the case: How
revisiting the development of the case method can help us think differently about
the future of the business school”. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 15(4):
724-741.

Clinebell, S. K., & Clinebell, J. M. (2009). The tension in business education between
academic rigor and real-world relevance: The role of executive professors. Academy
of Management Learning & Education, 7(1), 99-107.

Khurana, R. (2007). From higher aims to hired hands: The social transformation of American
business schools and the unfulfilled promise of management as a profession. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.

Khurana & Spender, J. C. 2012 “Herbert A. Simon on What Ails Business Schools:
More than ‘A Problem in Organizational Design’. Journal of Management Studies,
49: 619–639.

Wadhwani & Viebig (2021) “Social Imaginaries of Entrepreneurship Education: The
United States and Germany, 1800–2020“ Academy of Management Learning & Education
20(3).

Gatzweiler et al. (2022) “Grand Challenges and Business Education: Dealing with
Barriers to Learning and Uncomfortable Knowledge”, in Research in the Sociology of
Organizations, Vol. 79, pp. 221-237.

CfP Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop in Business History

Steph

Newcastle Business School
Northumbria University
29 June 2023

The ABH will hold its tenth annual Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop on 29 June 2023. This event immediately precedes the 2023 ABH Annual Conference at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. Participants in the Workshop are encouraged to attend the main ABH Annual Conference following the Workshop. They will also have an opportunity to participate in the Poster Competition (explained in the main call for papers). The Workshop is an excellent opportunity for doctoral students to discuss their work with other research students and established academics in business history in an informal and supportive environment. It is important to note that this will not be a hybrid event and all participants need to attend the workshop in person. Students at any stage of their doctoral studies, whether in their first year or very close to submitting, are urged to apply. In addition to providing new researchers with an opportunity to discuss their work with experienced researchers in the discipline, the Workshop will also include at least one skill-related session. The Workshop interprets the term ‘business history’ broadly, and it is intended that students in areas such as (but not confined to) the history of management and organizations, international trade and investment, financial or economic history, agricultural history, the history of not-for- profit organisations, government-industry relations, accounting history, social studies of technology, and historians or management or labour will find it useful. Students undertaking topics with a significant business history element but in disciplines other than economic or business history are also welcome. We embrace students researching any era or region of history. Skills sessions are typically led by regular ABH members; in the past these have included ‘getting published’, ‘using historical sources’, and ‘preparing for your viva examination’ sessions. There will be ample time for discussion of each student’s work and the opportunity to gain feedback from active researchers in the field.

How to Apply for the Tony Slaven Workshop

Your application should be no more than 4 pages sent together in a single computer file: 1) a one-page CV; 2) one page stating the name(s) of the student’s supervisor(s), the title of the theses (a proposed title is fine), the university and department where the student is registered and the date of commencement of thesis registration; 3) an abstract of the work to be presented.

If selected for the workshop, you will be asked to prepare a 15-minute presentation that is either a summary of your PhD project (giving an overview of the overarching themes, research questions, and methodologies) or a chapter/paper.

You may apply via email to Dr Michael Aldous at m.aldous[at]qub.ac.uk. Please use the subject line “Tony Slaven Workshop” and submit by 24 March 2023.

ABH2023 “Pushing the Boundaries”

Steph
ABH Logo Description automatically generated

Pushing the Boundaries: Business History beyond the Discipline.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Andrew Popp (Copenhagen Business School)

29 June – 1 July 2023
Newcastle Business School
Northumbria University Newcastle
https://www.theabh.org/conferences

In the 2020s, business history remains ‘in an inventive mood, bursting with multiple futures and paths forward’ (Kipping et al., 2016; 19). Having moved on from the 20th century preoccupation with large corporations, business historians now engage with a multiplicity of themes and topics. While the discipline has yet to make a significant impact on the curricula of most business schools, and few schools of history teach the subject, judged from the perspective of the high ranking of its major journals business history has established a highly credible position across the social sciences and humanities. On the other hand, many have questioned whether the discipline has adapted sufficiently to what remains a highly challenging environment for business historians (Scranton and Fridenson, 2013; Wilson et al., 2022). Are we merely preaching to ourselves? Have we engaged with society’s biggest issues, and thereby limited the opportunities of influencing practice in an effective way? Is the preoccupation with the USA, Europe and Japan restricting our understanding of the many paths taken by business in other socio-cultural and political contexts?

In searching for answers to these questions, the conference will assess the extent to which the discipline ought to be more ambitious in developing its research agendas. This builds effectively on the themes of last year’s ABH conference at Strathclyde, when we debated the theme of ‘Turning points and persistent problems’. Crucially, we need to change the attitudes of senior university managers to the subject by demonstrating its considerable relevance to students’ intellectual development, as well as influencing the worlds of practice that rarely consider historical perspectives. Although this will provide business historians with major challenges, achieving these aims will generate much greater credibility and offer rich opportunities for the discipline. Above all, we want the discipline to have a wider impact, whether this be on other disciplines or the various worlds of practice, thereby extending the barriers that have limited business history’s potential to influence the world around us.

What are the areas into which business historians might delve?

– The Worlds of Practice: In recognition of the ways in which ‘uses of the past’ have infiltrated disciplines such as strategy, corporate identity and human resource management, we need to investigate how business historians can work more extensively with practitioners, whether they be policy-makers, corporate executives or archivists. As impact is such an important issue, especially in the UK, business history must respond to the challenge.

– Emerging Markets: we agree with Friedman and Jones (2017; p. 455), who strongly encourage business historians to engage in research projects that encompass economies outside the United States, Western Europe and Japan; ‘the future of business history rests in part on recognizing the centrality of this alternative business history, rather than treating the business history of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as tangential to the central themes of the discipline’. Scranton (2019, 2020) has already made this move, putting into practice what he and Fridenson (2013) noted in Reimagining Business History.

– Sustainability: while Jones and Lubinski (2014; p. 18) made a strenuous appeal for business historians to analyse ‘why some firms become “greener” than others’, apart from the work of Bergquist (2017) and of Jones (2022), relatively little effort has been made to develop this theme and assess the wide sustainability agenda and corporate responses. The forthcoming book by Jones (2022) will no doubt stimulate much wider interest in the role business has played in accommodating the environmental agenda into corporate strategy and performance, focusing especially on the term ‘deep responsibility’.

– Corporate Ethics and Corporate Governance: while there has been extensive work done in these fields, given the extent of corporate misbehaviour and violations of corporate codes it is vital that business historians participate in these debates. For example, the British Academy’s Future of the Corporation project (2021) would benefit from greater historical insights into context and behaviour.

– Gender and Race: again, while the literature on women and racial issues in business have expanded over the course of the last thirty years, these remain significant areas for investigation because of the way they open up our understanding of how business and society interact. This would also link with the decolonization agenda that is now sweeping the world. One might also add that masculinity is another neglected area of study; even though sociologists have written extensively about ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell & Wood, 2005), the business history literature has failed to assess how this influenced the achievement and execution of power.

– Social Science Theory: Following the ‘historic turn’ in organization studies (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004) and the recent surge in interest amongst strategy and international business scholars in the incorporation of historical analysis into research agendas (Perchard et al., 2017), a substantial debate has been occupying a lot of space in prominent journals. Although the methodological issues arising from this work have yet to be resolved, it is essential to assess how business historians can engage with theoretical concepts when conducting research.

Needless to say, there could well be other agendas that need to be incorporated into the ambit of business history, an issue that will no doubt be raised at the conference. The key issue here is finding a place for business history in debating the ‘Big Issues’ that face society, applying our skills and knowledge to finding solutions that are both effective and sustainable. By pursuing this strategy, we might better engage with both the worlds of practice and senior university managers, demonstrating our credibility and relevance to the major debates of our time.

Sources:

British Academy (2021), Future of the Corporation, British Academy.

Clark, P., & Rowlinson, M. (2004). The treatment of history in organization studies: Towards an ‘historic turn’? Business History, 46(3), 331–352.

Connell, R.W., & Wood, J. (2005). Globalization and business masculinities. Men and Masculinities, 7(4), 347–364.

Friedman, W.A. and Jones, G. (2017). Time for debate. Business History Review, 85 (Spring), pp.1-8.

Jones, G. (2022). The Search for the Deep Responsibility of Business. Boston, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Jones, G. & Lubinski, C. (2014). Making ‘Green Giants’: Environment sustainability in the German chemical industry, 1950s–1980s, Business History, 56(4), pp.1-14.

Kipping, M., Kurosawa, T., & Wadhwani, R. D. (2016). A revisionist historiography of business history: a richer past for a richer future. In J.F. Wilson, S. Toms, A. de Jong, & E. Buchnea (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Business History (pp. 19–35). Routledge.

Perchard, A., MacKenzie, N.G., Decker, S., & Favero, G. (2017). Clio in the business school: Historical approaches in strategy, international business and entrepreneurship. Business History, 59(6), 904–927.

Scranton, P., & Fridenson, P. (2013). Reimagining Business History. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Scranton, P. (2019). Fixing holes in the plan: Maintenance and repair in Poland, 1945–1970. Enterprise et Histoire. 103, pp.54-72.

Scranton, P. (2020). Collaboration, coordination, cooperation and subversive entrepreneurship in Socialist Hungary’, paper given to the Business History Conference.

Wilson, John F. Ian G. Jones, Steven Toms, Anna Tilba, Emily Buchnea and Nicholas Wong (2022), Business History. A Research Overview, Routledge, pp.148.

How to submit a paper or session proposal

The programme committee will consider both individual papers and entire panels. We are keen to encourage both developmental and mature papers. Individual paper proposals should include a one-page (up to 300-word) abstract and brief biographical note. Panel proposals should include a cover letter stating the rationale for the panel and the name of its contact person; one-page (300-word) abstract and author’s CV for each paper; and a list of preferred panel chairs and commentators with contact information. The deadline for submissions is 27 January 2023. Please use the conference e-mail address (below) to submit proposals.

Poster submissions

The ABH also welcomes poster proposals from graduate students on all aspects of business history covering a wide range of periods and countries.

Poster presenters will normally be in either the First or Second Year of their PhD.  We also strongly encourage those who have previously presented a poster will submit a paper proposal to the main conference in a subsequent year.

Those wishing to be considered for inclusion in the programme must submit an application by 27 January 2023.  This should provide:

  • Title of your PhD project.
  • An abstract (300 words).*
  • A current CV.

*The abstract should explain the background to the poster; the questions addressed; the sources and methods employed; and likely conclusions.

Approved posters must be submitted by 1 June 2023.

If you have any questions, please contact the Conference Organisers via:

bl.abh.conference@northumbria.ac.uk

EBHA 2023 “The Relevance of Business History”

Steph

Annual conference

Oslo, Norway, June 22-24, 2023
 

Business history is a thriving field of research. As was noted already by Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin in their introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Business History, published back in 2007, the field of business history is “wide-ranging, dynamic and has generated compelling empirical data which sometimes confirms and sometime contests widely held views in management and the social sciences.” This is no less true today. Business historians hold important seats at prestigious universities and business school across the globe. Business history research is probably broader in scope than ever before and has also gained ground in the social sciences. Several large companies in many countries have found value and relevance in hiring professional business historians to write their history, trusting them both with a unique access to archives and the freedom to do independent research in line with basic principles for the writing of academic history.

The many strengths of business history as a field of research should no doubt be saluted. But there are also challenges looming in the near future. The organisers of the 2023 EBHA congress invites you to reflect on these challenges. It particularly invites critical reflection on business history’s relevance in relation to the broader field of history, to other academic disciplines, to business and society, and to students.

Business history seems to play a less important role in many history departments compared to most other subfields of history. One way to look at this challenge is to humbly ask other historians to better integrate business in the broader field of history. Another way is perhaps to integrate broader strains of history within business history, to assume a more ambitious role.

Business history has in recent years been increasingly more integrated into other academic disciplines, such as organisation and management studies, strategy, international business, and entrepreneurship studies. However, this integration has not been unproblematic. One question for further exploration is how these disciplines have understood and integrated methods and conceptual frameworks from business history. Another challenge is to make sure that business history not simply becomes a support discipline for various strands of the social sciences.

A third challenge relates to the fact that many business historians work in business schools and must teach traditional business school subjects such as management or strategy. How can the value and usefulness of teaching proper business history to business school students, be more efficiently and successfully communicated?

Becoming accepted as a valuable academic discipline might come at the expense of another important challenge faced by business historians; namely the need to increase the relevance of the field in society. This raises the question: how do business historians frame and convey their findings to convince business practitioners and society at large about their practical relevance?

On this basis, the organizers of the European Business History Association’s 2023 congress challenge you to reflect on how the future relevance of business history can and should be developed. We encourage papers, panels sessions and roundtable discussions dealing with the challenges facing the field of business history in terms of its academic, societal, and educational relevance.

Papers with other foci will of course be considered as well. Topics such as responsible business, sustainability, risk, innovation, entrepreneurship, economic growth, taxation, and similar ideas are more than welcome. In addition to proposals for individual papers, scholars can send full panel sessions, which will create more coherence within the conference program. For panels, we strongly recommend integrating a variety of comparative national, regional, or sectoral differences.

EBHA awards a prize for the best paper on European business history presented at its annual congress. The prize consists of a certificate and a cash prize of €250.00. The winner will be announced, and the prize presented at the congress dinner. More details will be specified at the congress website.

Online submission will open November 1, 2022, through January 30, 2023. Please see below the requirements for paper and panel proposals.

We also invite other formats such as workshops, debates, discussions, and poster presentations. Journals can also propose fast-track session. Please send your proposals directly to the organizers (ebha2023@bi.no.)

We are very much looking forward to meeting you in Oslo, Norway, at the EBHA 2023 Congress.

The EBHA 2023 Congress Organizing Committee

For information on how to submit see: https://www.bi.edu/about-bi/events/2023/june/ebha2023/call-for-papers/

Call for Proposals – the Hagley Seminar on Business, Culture, and Politics

Steph

Building on the 30-year legacy of the Hagley Research seminar, The Hagley Seminar on Business and Culture will feature innovative work in progress essays that expand the boundaries of studies using business history sources. The seminar seeks unpublished papers that place commercial activity, and the institutions that generate and regulate such, within the dynamics of the cultures in which they are embedded. 

Papers should be empirically rich, conceptually framed, and offer an original argument or set of insights. Ideally papers will be at a point of development that the author will be able to change the text in response to seminary comments. Papers eithers accepted or under consideration for publication are not eligible. While we look forward to sharing work that makes use of Hagley’s research collections, papers need not do so to be considered for inclusion in the seminar series. 

The papers will be pre-circulated to seminar participants and commentators. It will meet virtually, facilitating the participation of scholars outside of the immediate neighborhood of Hagley’s Wilmington, Delaware campus. It will meet from noon until 1:30 EST to facilitate participation of scholars from a range of time zones. 

To propose a paper, please submit a draft of between 4,000 and 14,000 words (including notes); if you plan to expand the text for the seminar, also include information on your plans to do so. Please also include a 150 word abstract, brief summary of sources used, and a cv of no more than 2 pages. These materials should go to Carol Lockman, clockman@Hagley.org. Suggestions for commentators on the paper are welcome. Currently we are scheduling papers for our spring 2023 series, but proposals will be considered on a rolling basis and the author is encouraged to suggest a good month for them to present. 

CfP for JIBS SI on Historical Approaches in IB

Featured Steph1 Comment

Great news! A new call for papers for a history-oriented special issue in the Journal of International Business Studies.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Issue of the Journal of International Business Studies

INTEGRATING HISTORICAL APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS: MOVING BEYOND “HISTORY MATTERS”

Special Issue Editors:

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2023

Introduction

International business in all its forms, whether cross-border activities by multinational companies or non-equity forms of investment, and the international environment it operates in is shaped by the historical legacies of countries and their international relations. The analysis of historical data played an important role in early stages of the development of international business (IB) as a field of research (Dunning 1958; Vernon, 1971). Yet, in recent years historical research on international phenomena that engage with business and management theories is more commonly published outside of IB journals (Gao, Zuzul, Jones, & Khanna, 2017; Lubinski, 2018). Once IB became academically established, interest in historical research waned, despite occasional calls for its revival (e.g., Jones & Khanna, 2006). Even rarer are historical studies in IB that are directly based on archival sources (Bucheli, Salvaj, & Kim, 2019; Minefee & Bucheli, 2021). This special issue seeks to bring together IB scholars interested in exploring how historical approaches can enrich and expand theory development on international business phenomena.

In recent years, IB journals have not seen the same development of historically-informed theorizing as related fields (Decker, Hassard, & Rowlinson, 2021; Maclean, Harvey, & Clegg, 2016; Rowlinson, Hassard, & Decker, 2014). For example, the editors of the Academy of Management Journal have, in an editorial, remarked upon “the value of these analyses in making us see the social, cultural, and institutional construction of organizational and managerial phenomena in historical context” (Bansal, Smith, & Vaara, 2018, p. 4). This appreciation is reflected in the substantial number of special issues over the last few years that have integrated historical approaches into key debates in strategy (Argyres, De Massis, Foss, Frattini, Jones, & Silverman, 2020), entrepreneurship (Wadhwani, Kirsch, Welter, Gartner, & Jones, 2020), organization studies (Wadhwani, Suddaby, Mordhorst, & Popp, 2018), and management theory (Godfrey, Hassard, O’Connor, Rowlinson, & Ruef, 2016), and further special issues currently in progress in family business (Suddaby, Silverman, Massis, Jaskiewicz, & Micelotta, 2021), the history of business schools (McLaren et al., 2021) and occupations and professions (Coraiola, Maclean, Suddaby, & Muzio, 2022). This special issue seeks to open up a similar dialogue between IB scholars and historical researchers.

How history matters for IB research

At its inception, the field of IB paid close attention to the evolution of firms’ international activities in their historical context (Vernon, 1971; Wilkins, 1974). Subsequently, however, IB and international business history have often addressed different questions and employed different methods: archival, mostly qualitative, research in the case of business historians, and a variety of mostly quantitative, though increasingly also qualitative, methodological approaches in IB in their historical context. This distinction is increasingly challenged (Buckley, 2016; Burgelman, 2011), but history also matters beyond its potential methodological contribution to IB. Greater attention to history would enable IB scholars to ask questions about change over time and develop theories addressing how and why some of these patterns have become dominant at certain points of time, and why they might be changing. Such theories may include, but are not limited to, institutional theory, organizational learning, knowledge-based view, organizational memory and forgetting, power, and dynamic capabilities.

Engagement with history and historical methods can help IB scholars respond to recent calls for more process-based approaches, qualitative research and an engagement with scholarly work beyond IB (Buckley, 2009; Nielsen et al., 2020; Shenkar, 2004; Welch & Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, 2014). It would also help develop scholarship towards a deeper understanding of phenomena (Doh, 2015) and their context (Meyer, 2015; Tsui, 2004). For example, in their decade award-winning article in this journal, Welch et al. (2011) promoted more contextualized approaches to IB research through a focus on the case method, and in their recent retrospective (Welch et al., 2021) they explicitly highlight historical research as one of four approaches that engage context in their research design.

Aims and scope of the special issue

In the light of these developments in our field and beyond, the time has come to take stock and move beyond affirmations that “history matters” and flesh out the ways in which historical approaches matter to IB research in terms of theory, method, and novel perspectives. Here, we seek contributions that go beyond just analyzing data collected over time (such as survey data collection repeated after a certain number of years) in favour of studies that include the rich historical context into their analysis and theorizing. Historical approaches have the potential to offer new perspectives on the complex, multi-level, and contextually specific nature of multinational activities and the evolution of the global economy. We are particularly interested in contributions that can connect historical approaches with IB debates, and which draw on ongoing conversations in other disciplines and fields. We are interested in both quantitative and qualitative approaches, as well as methodological and conceptual/theoretical contributions. IB scholars who use historical approaches, as well as business and management historians who engage deeply with IB theories, are welcome to submit to the special issue.

Possible examples of research topics that would be suitable for inclusion in this Special Issue include (but are not limited to):

  1. Plurality of historical approaches. Other management disciplines such as Organization Studies, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship have expanded their use of historical research, as seen in a series of special issues and other contributions. The key theoretical contributions have outlined a spectrum of approaches from more social science-oriented contributions to more historically oriented narratives (Rowlinson et al., 2014; Maclean et al., 2016; Decker et al., 2021). Such work demonstrates that history provides new perspectives on advancing theory or challenging concepts and constructs and poses questions that are under-represented in IB research, such as how processes evolve over time (Gao et al, 2017). Historical approaches enable IB researchers to consider the past as an empirical setting to explore theoretical concerns, which are difficult to adequately study in the present, or which require a long-term perspective, such as global challenges or internationalisation. How can historical approaches benefit process and longitudinal research on IB topics? How can a dialogue between process researchers and historians form the basis for advances in IB theory?
  • Historical theories of IB.In recent years, historical research has become more theoretically oriented, driven by key contributions in organization theory, strategy (Argyres et al., 2020), and entrepreneurship (Wadhwani, Kirsch, Welter, Gartner, & Jones, 2020). Increasingly, such contributions are being extended to IB theory (da Silva Lopes, Casson, & Jones, 2019; Minefee & Bucheli, 2021) and this special issue seeks to expand on this interdisciplinary repertoire.
  • Long Run Change Processes. IB scholars have investigated environmental change mainly by exploring business responses to clearly identifiable disruptions. Yet, we know comparatively little of the historically embedded, contextually specific co-evolution of multinational organizations and their local, national, regional, and international environment. Emerging economies, in particular, have brought to the fore the importance of understanding the political, social, cultural and economic contexts of business activities (Meyer, 2015; Tsui, 2004). Multinationals often resolve key tensions by shifting the focus of their activities over time to stay aligned with the different trends and concerns in host and home societies. How do international actors and the global economy co-evolve? What factors influence such processes? What is the role of disruptive events (such as disasters, pandemics or wars) vs. slower, more long-term processes in changing international business strategies and practices?
  • Historical processes in IB and the role of time. Many key theories in IB, such as internationalisation theory, implicitly or explicitly theorise the passage of time as part of a process that becomes cumulative, experiential and changes organizations both in their structure, strategies and their practices (Verbeke & Kano, 2015; Welch & Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, 2014). How does the historical evolution of organizations shape their operations, structure, and practises? How do international organizations deal with historical legacies, such as colonialism, past wrongdoing, war and conflict, and ideological disagreements?
  • History as a method for IB researchers. Historical research routinely covers long time periods in rich and detailed narratives based on archival records that can have a fly-on-the-wall immediacy unmatched by other types of public documents. These “eventful” accounts (Decker, 2022) offer new insights particularly for qualitative longitudinal research to scale up in terms of time periods covered. Frynas et al. (2017, p. 568) highlighted the potential contribution from historical evidence in studying the “long-term cooperative interactions and reciprocity by the actors involved.” Welch (2000, p. 198) considers archival data as an opportunity to add “empirical depth” and explain “processes of change and evolution”. Buckley (2016, 2020) has also explored the potential for historical methods to expand the types of questions IB researchers can ask. What methodological innovations are required to embed historical approaches into qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method IB scholarship?
  • Historical perspectives on the construction of national and cultural boundaries. A nation, in IB’s usual meaning, consists of a group of people living within a geographic area who are sovereignly governed by explicit laws and institutions which apply within a national government’s boundaries. Governments historically negotiated these boundaries with governments representing other similarly governed and bounded groups through warfare and treaties. IB scholars, however, are sometimes encouraged to take on the challenge of considering alternative societal boundaries besides nations (Hutzschenreuter, Matt, & Kleindienst, 2020; Peterson, Søndergaard, & Kara, 2018; Tung, 2008). Accepting that challenge suggests the importance of historical analysis for understanding how specific countries came to be legitimated, how countries continue to compete with sub-country and trans-country groups of people having shared political interests, and how alternative groupings support different business practices and transactions across not only country but other boundaries. This special issue supports analyses that make systematic use of a broad range of influential historical perspectives that have been taken to the geographic area they consider and to the construction of national, sub-national and trans-national groupings (Reckendrees, Gehlen, & Marx, 2022). Such submissions would need to show how these groupings, and the contests between them, have continuing implications for cross-border business.
  • Institutions in IB. IB scholars often turn to institutions to capture aspects of the external environment affecting businesses. Yet, their treatment of institutions has been criticised for being “hobbled by a thin account of institutions and their effect on business performance” (Doh, Lawton, & Rajwani, 2012, p. 27). Institutions are inherently historical in nature, as acknowledged for example in studies on IB in transition economies that emphasize the temporal nature of the institutional environment (Meyer & Peng, 2016). Nevertheless, institutional theory in its variants popular in management research favours ahistorical measurements and tends to ignore their historical evolution. More research is needed, not just on the interaction of different dimensions of institutions, but also on how they affect strategy both in terms of the firm’s home and host economies. How do institutions affecting IB change over time, and how do people and organizations purposefully or coincidentally change them? What new theoretical insights into IB topics can be gained from historical institutionalism, which to date has been little used by IB scholars?

Submission Process and Deadlines

Manuscripts must be submitted through http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jibs between July 18, 2023, and August 1, 2023. All submissions will go through the JIBS regular double-blind review process and follow standard norms and processes. For more information about this call for papers, please contact the Special Issue Editors or the JIBS Managing Editor (managing-editor@jibs.net ).

Workshop and Symposium

We plan to organize a webinar early 2023 for authors interested in submitting to the special issue, which we will advertise widely on scholarly social media and on AIB-L. To help authors who receive an invitation to revise their submission further develop their papers, we intend to organize a paper development workshop in late 2023. We encourage multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural co-author teams.

REFERENCES

Argyres, N. S., De Massis, A., Foss, N. J., Frattini, F., Jones, G., & Silverman, B. S. 2020. History-informed strategy research: The promise of history and historical research methods in advancing strategy scholarship. Strategic Management Journal, 41(3), 343–368.

Bansal, P., Smith, W. K., & Vaara, E. 2018. From the Editors: New Ways of Seeing through Qualitative Research. Academy of Management Journal, 61(4), 1–7.

Bucheli, M., Salvaj, E., & Kim, M. 2019. Better together: How multinationals come together with business groups in times of economic and political transitions. Global Strategy Journal, 9(2), 176–207.

Buckley, P. J. 2009. Business history and international business. Business History, 51(3), 307–333.

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About the Guest Editors

Stephanie Decker is Professor of Strategy at Birmingham Business School and Visiting Professor in African Business History at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work focuses on historical approaches in Organisation Studies and Strategy, and she has published in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Organization, Business History Review, and Business History. She is co-editor-in-chief of Business History, on the editorial board of Organization Studies and Accounting History, and Co-Vice Chair for Research & Publications at the British Academy of Management.

Geoffrey Jones is Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard BusinessSchool in the United States. He researches the history, impact and ecological and social responsibility of business. He is a Fellow of Academy of International Business (AIB), a Fellow of the Japan Academy of International Business Studies, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Multinational and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First Century (OUP 2005), Profits and Sustainability: A History of Green Entrepreneurship (OUP 2017) and Deeply Responsible Business. A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership (Harvard University Press, 2023). He has published in Journal of International Business Studies and Strategic Management Journal.

Klaus Meyer is a Professor of International Business and William G. Davis Chair in International Trade at Ivey Business School, London, Ontario, Canada.  He is a leading scholar in international business, focusing on the strategies and operations of multinational enterprises in and from emerging economies. His research emphasizes the role of context on many aspects of management, and the contextual boundaries of theories of management. He is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business (AIB), and in 2015 he received the Decade award of the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). He has served as Vice President of the AIB, and as an area editor of JIBS and is currently serving on the Executive Committee of the International Management Division of the Academy of Management. He has published over 90 articles in leading scholarly journals such as Journal of International Business Studies, Strategic Management Journal and Journal of Management Studies, and he published nine books.

Catherine Welch is Chair of Strategic Management at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Aalto University, Finland. Her research has concentrated on two areas: qualitative research methodology and process approaches to studying firm internationalization. Her work has appeared in leading journals in international business and management. She was the first author on a paper which won the 2021 Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) Decade Award. Catherine is the current Book Review Editor of JIBS and a member of the journal’s Research Methods Advisory Committee. She is an Associate Editor of Organizational Research Methods. She is a Vice-President and co-founder of the Academy of International Business (AIB) Research Methods Shared Interest Group (RM-SIG). She currently serves on the AIB’s board as Vice President Programs.

Rebecca Piekkari is Marcus Wallenberg Chair of International Business at Aalto University School of Business, Finland. She is an incoming Associate Editor of the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) and sits on several editorial boards of IB and management journals. Rebecca’s recent research interests focus on translation as a perspective on IB phenomena, the shifting meaning of location for cross-border activities, as well as questions of social sustainability, diversity and inclusion in multinational corporations. She is known for her expertise in qualitative research methods and language-sensitive research in IB. Together with her co-authors she won the 2021 JIBS Decade award on theorizing from case studies. Rebecca has also co-edited several handbooks and book chapters on these topics. She is Fellow of the Academy of International Business and the European International Business Academy.

CfP JMH SI: Latin America and the Caribbean Management History

Steph

Latin America and the Caribbean Management History

The evolution of management thought in Europe has its roots in the books of classic economists like Smith, Jevons, Marshall, Mills, Say, and Babbage (George & Álvarez, 2005). In the United States, the mainstream ideas that appeared at the beginning of managerial thought belong to mechanical engineering, especially in the books of Metcalfe, Towne, Taylor, Emerson, Gantt, Moller, and Gilbreth (Wren & Bedeian, 2018).

In Latin America and the Caribbean – LAC, the origin was different. The law and political sciences were the cornerstones of developing managerial ideas (Dávila, 1991a; Wahrlich, 1978). While Simón Bolívar was fighting for liberty, the general Francisco de Paula Santander considered that administration was part of the knowledge that the new nation needed to create itself. Santander, governing Great Colombia (today Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama), signed the Decree of March 18, 1826, to include ‘administrative sciences’ in the lawyer’s curriculum in Caracas, Quito, and Bogota (Orozco, 2015).

To further support the formation of a federal state, Florentino González went beyond the ideas about public administration available at that time: the Prussian concept of Policey Wissenschaft and the proposal of Charles-Jean Bonnin in the Principes d’Administration Publique to create an original proposal called ‘Elementos de Ciencia Administrativa’ in 1840 (Guerrero, 1997; Orozco, 2015). In the prologue González (1840, p. 1) pointed out that it is “a book that deals with an unknown science in the Americas, a science that we need to foster if we want to be happy some day” (Guerrero, 1997, p. 52, free translation from the guest editors).

The commerce schools appeared in México and Colombia to teach grammatical, accounting, law, languages, geography, and commercial techniques. The first one was the Escuela Superior de Comercio y Administración in Mexico in 1845, followed by the School of Commerce of Barranquilla in 1881 (Orozco, 2015). In Medellín, the National School of Mining was founded in 1886, seeking to create a new entrepreneurial elite in Colombia, led by Alejandro López (Orozco & Anzola, 2018).

In Argentina, the Universidad de Buenos Aires began to teach issues in management in 1913 under the influence of the railroad and British economists (Fernández & Gantman, 2011). Finally, the Jesuits established the first schools of administration at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1924 and Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul in Brasil, in 1931 (Orozco, 2015).

The development of management thinking in LAC has been neglected in the annals of management history. Well-known books that are part of normal science, like Wren and Bedeian, George, or Witzel, lack chapters or presentations about LAC management thinking. The process, cultural and cognitive contexts, the tensions between the political and industrial organization, the relationships between schools, practitioners, and entrepreneurs, and the public and private forms of managing business are some of the knowledge gaps about LAC that we currently have. This special issue tries to begin filling this gap and proposes a landscape to include LAC in management history.

List of topic areas

  • Regional contributions to administrative and organizational theory,
  • specificities in management and business development in LAC,
  • epistemologies and ontologies in management thinking and research in LAC,
  • the role of the school of management (including globalization and international accreditations, epistemic independence, convergences, and distances between global North and global South)
  • the role (or lack thereof) of gender and multiple / mixed ethnicities in shaping the managerial organization and thinking in LAC countries
  • other forms of organizing present in LAC contexts (e.g., organizaciones otras in Mexico)
  • cultural studies of managerial practices and thinking in LAC, strategy and long-term thinking of nations and large corporations in LAC,
  • impact of the business organization on the communities in LAC, trans-disciplinary phenomena approached by management and social sciences in LAC

Guest Editors

Luis Antonio Orozco | University Externado de Colombia; Colombia

Olga Lucía Anzola Morales | University Externado de Colombia, Colombia

Fredy Vargas Lama | University Externado de Colombia, Colombia

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmh

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/…

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “”Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 2 February 2023

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 30 October 2023

Closing date for abstract submission: 3 February 2023

Email for abstract submissions: luis.orozco@uexternado.edu.co

For the original call see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/calls-for-papers/latin-america-and-caribbean-management-history

2022 BHC Mid-Year Conference (online)

Steph1 Comment

The Business History Conference (BHC) will host a one-day virtual conference on September 30, 2022. The 2022 BHC Mid-Year Conference enables members from around the world to easily and cost-effectively participate in the BHC during a turbulent time and also launches the BHC’s activities for the 2022-2023 academic year. The 2023 BHC Annual meeting will take place in person in Detroit on March 9-11, 2023. 

The theme for the 2022 BHC Mid-Year Conference is “Method and Madness: Reinventing Business History in a New Age of Extremes.” The one-day conference will be organized around three sets of 1.5 hour workshops. The first set of workshops will examine new sources and new uses of old sources in business history research. Sessions will include the uses of visual materials, legal records, account books, and big data, among other sources. The second set of workshops will cover interpretive and analytical techniques, including the interpretation of senses, network analysis, and the rhetorical uses of history. The third set of workshops will cover changes in the representation and dissemination of business history, including both conventional formats (books, scholarly articles) and newer formats (podcasts, social media, etc). 

Given that the conference is organized around short workshops rather than presentations, we will request participants to only fill out a registration form. The registration website will go live August 22 and participants will be notified of their acceptance by September 1. BHC members who are students and emerging scholars can register for free; fees for regular BHC members and nonmembers will be modest. In the meantime, please save the date.

If you have any questions or suggestions please don’t hesitate to reach out to BHC president Dan Wadhwani: dwadhwani@marshall.usc.edu. Interested people may also follow/tag @TheBHCNews, BHC’s Facebook, and BHC’s LinkedIn, and the hashtag #BHCMidYear. 

CfP: Early encounters with coal

Steph

Early encounters with coal: Retrieving views from below

The rise of coal and steam-power in the nineteenth century is now widely recognised as an epochal historical event. It put the world-economy on a path to large-scale, climate-shattering combustion of fossil fuels. While these trajectories have been intensely studied in recent scholarship, we know far less about how coal and steam were perceived from subaltern positions. How did people react to this novel fuel and the technologies it animated when they slammed into their lives? Did they admire or fear them, wish to escape and eliminate them, or rather emulate and acquire their powers? Through what cultural filters were coal and steam viewed when each first began to take hold? While the stories of early coal and steam have been told from the perspective of inventors, manufacturers, merchants, colonial administrators and other agents of their dissemination, the voices from the other side have yet to be heard: colonised people; workers in mines and ports, on fields, boats and railroads; those who were dispossessed and displaced by the onrush of the first fossil economy. Most of these voices will inevitably be lost to the historical record. Some, however, might be retrieved by studying sources spanning a spectrum from oral traditions and folk songs via travelogues and popular science magazines to pamphlets and novels, to mention only some. We need to examine technologies of extraction as well as use, and thus set the histories of mining and supply alongside those of trade and consumption. A more focused effort to reconstruct the variety and tensions of early encounters with coal, especially as seen from below, is, we believe, not only possible but potentially valuable. It might illuminate creatively the power relations of fossil-fuelled development, potentials for resistance, tendencies of accommodation and embrace and many other aspects of the historical process.

For this workshop we invite contributions about encounters with coal anywhere in the world, up until the Second World War. Building on the recent emergence of literatures examining the development of coal technologies in radically different environments and regions – Asia, the Middle East, South America as well as Britain and Europe – we ask how the histories of those who dug, wrought, fired and laboured for coal and steam can be enriched by the perspectives of historical industrial psychology, environmental history, science and technology studies, history of technology and conceptual history of energy, folklore, religious studies, gender and sexuality in industrial history/history of technology, socioeconomic history, labour history, anthropology, ecocriticism, history of urban environment/pollution, colonial/empire history, rural change and industrialization, energy humanities, maritime history, infrastructural history.

We invite proposed contributions for a hybrid workshop to be held in Cambridge and online on 13-14 December, with 300 word abstracts due on 29 August, accepted contributors informed on 12 September and draft papers (up to 8,000 words) to be circulated by Friday 2 December.

Timeline

Proposed abstracts due: Monday 29 August 2022 (sent by email to Richard Staley <raws1@cam.ac.uk>

Programme circulated: Monday 12 September

Draft papers to be circulated: Friday 2 December

Workshop: Tuesday and Wednesday 13 and 14 December (with a meeting held in Cambridge for those able to attend in person and hybrid participation online for those more distant).

Amr Ahmed, Andreas Malm, Simon Schaffer, Richard Staley

SI CFP: Microhistory

Steph

Microhistory in Management History and Organization Theory

Management & Organizational History

Manuscript deadline: 17 February 2023

Special Issue Editors:

Liv Egholm, Copenhagen Business School
le.mpp@cbs.dk

Michael Heller, Brunel Business School
michael.heller@brunel.ac.uk

Michael Rowlinson, University of Exeter Business School
m.c.rowlinson@exeter.ac.uk

There has been a resurgence of interest in microhistory. The classic texts associated with the subject remain immensely popular: The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzburg, 1992[1976]); The Return of Martin Guerre (Zemon Davis, 1983); and The Great Cat Massacre (Darnton, 1984). These provide a reference point, which has provided the basis for increasing reflection on the theoretical significance and methodological distinctiveness of microhistory (Magnússon & Szijártó, 2013), such as the special issue of Past and Present on ‘Global History and Microhistory’ (Ghobrial, 2019). Attention has also been paid to microhistory from management and business history as well as organization studies (Bourguignon & Floquet, 2019; Decker, 2015).

Microhistory offers an opportunity to reconceptualise relationships which lie at the heart of historical research and historiography: the historical nexus between the particular and the general, agency and structure, the micro and the macro. Microhistorians are known for their methodological habit of reading sources forensically in their search for historical clues. It implies reading historical sources ‘against the grain’ (Decker & McKinlay, 2020, pp. 26-27), or as Levi (2019: 41) puts it, ‘beyond the edge of the page’, carefully looking for what Ginzburg refers to as “unintended evidence” (Ginzburg, 2016). The use of microhistory as a magnifying glass can be seen as the equivalent of a detective’s tool. Sherlock Holmes´ working methods are often used as a metaphor for microhistory’s careful readings and detection of clues (Ginzburg, 2013 (1979)), often within “exceptional normal” cases (Grendi, 1977).

For this reason, the trademark of microhistorical methodology is to trace sources and clues throughout and across archives (Ginzburg, 2013). The names of actors, places, concepts, events, or objects are used as concrete entry points to show how previously unrelated spaces, temporalities, and fields are woven together in practice. This mapping demonstrates great potential in revealing unnoticed relations between, for example, family life and entrepreneurship (Popp & Holt, 2013), religious practices and trade (Trivellato, 2019), or philanthropic gift giving and the establishment of the welfare state (Egholm, 2021).

The purpose is not to argue for the universal value of the exceptional; it is to show, rather, how discrete historical events challenge our conceptualisations of the universal, and provide essential clues to what can be considered as normal (Ginzburg, 1979; Peltonen, 2001). Accordingly, the reduction of scale is not the study of the “microness” of a phenomenon (Levi, 2019, p. 38). The reduction of scale, rather, provides the historian with a heuristic tool to craft new theories by distorting or amending metanarratives and reformulating historical concepts and relations. Without explicitly mentioning microhistory, a series of organizational phenomena have been reconceptualized from a close reading of sources, with notable examples being the career (McKinlay, 2002), and entrepreneurship (Popp & Holt, 2013. Thus, microhistory shows how, “history is a discipline of general questions and ‘local’ answers” (Levi, 2019, p. 45).

The historic turn (Rowlinson, Hassard, & Decker, 2014) has pushed for a revised understanding of past context as offering more than simply temporal variables for universal theorising (Van Lent & Durepos, 2019). Historical phenomena often remain, however, reduced to consequences or affectations of particular contexts. In contrast, microhistory calls out for a grounding and explanation of the past through analyses of how actors, places, concepts, events or objects interact and are woven together in contradictory and often different fields and interests. In so doing, microhistory exposes how both individuals and social structures of all kinds are produced simultaneously through relationships and processes.

This special issue’s scope is to explore the methodological, ontological, and empirical strengths of microhistory to advance management history and organization studies. Therefore, we invite both theoretical, and theoretically informed empirical submissions that will further the contribution of microhistory in business history, management, and organizational history, as well as management and organization theory.

Questions and topics of interest for the special issue may include:

  1. How does the use of microhistory question, elaborate, or develop macro theories or broader conceptualisations from within the confines of discrete and particular historical studies
  2. How do microhistorical methodologies of reading “beyond the edges of the paper” contradict and undermine broader historical narratives in business and management and organizational history such as Marxism, functionalism, institutionalism, neo-liberalism, the resource-based view of the firm, and economic path dependency?
  3. What are the advantages and concerns for the use of historical archival research, source criticism, triangulation, and historical interpretivism when innovative microhistorical methodologies work with “dissonant sources” and “unintended evidence”?
  4. What is the impact of microhistory in relation to archival ethnography and the employment of micro historical sources (e.g., letters, diaries, postcards, travel accounts, scrapbooks, and memoirs)?
  5. What is the way in which local knowledge and local environment historically create organizational, business, and entrepreneurial opportunities?
  6. How does a microhistorical approach reconceptualise the relationship between agency and structure in business and management and organizational history?
  7. What is the relationship between the different scales of history? In particular, to what extent do microhistories develop historical accounts that reflect on a granular scale broader organizational and business historical environments and trends?
  8. How can we account for generalisation by using a microhistorical approach? How can local answers reply to general questions by showing complex and often ambiguous connections in historical archives?