New! CFP for Special Issue in Business History

In the Absence of Archives: Lessons from Less Developed Countries

Guest Editors: Adam Frost, Marcelo Bucheli, & Grietjie Verhoef

Business history is expanding to encompass a wider array of business forms and a greater plurality of contexts. In the past decade, scholars have begun to frame and synthesize growing bodies of research on the business histories of India (Tumbe 2019), Latin America (Dávila 2013; Barbero & Lluch 2014), China (Zelin 2013; Frost 2021), Eastern Europe (Pikos & Olejniczak 2017), Africa (Verhoef 2017), and the Middle East (Godley & Relli 2008; Pereira et. al, Forthcoming). In addition to illustrating the rich variety of business activities across difficult societal contexts, this research has begun to open exciting areas of inquiry, such as the histories of informal businesses, entrepreneurial diaspora networks, diversified business groups, and collective organizations, that have long been identified as “future agendas” of the discipline (Friedman and Jones 2010; Scranton and Fridenson 2013; Barbero and Puig 2015). However, this scholarship has also called attention to persistent methodological challenges of applying disciplinary tools and frameworks derived primarily from the study of North America, Western Europe, and Japan to the analysis of business in less developed countries (LDCs). The standard toolkit of business history— namely, the inductive analysis of corporate and state archives— is often inadequate to the task of making sense of how business emerged, operated, and evolved in LDCs over time. Further engagement thus requires embracing new modes of inquiry and methods of research.

Scholars have argued that the business history of LDCs (or “emerging markets”) ought to be conceptualized as an “alternative business history,” as shared contextual challenges— e.g., foreign domination, extensive state intervention, social unrest, and institutional inefficiencies— evoked entirely different sets of business responses than those in more developed market contexts (Austin, Dávila and Jones 2017: 537). Equally important though is the impact that these contextual challenges have on the production of historical knowledge. The consolidation of history as a discipline in Western Europe was closely linked with the use of archival sources to understand the past as “it actually happened.” In one of the first handbooks on historical methods published in France in 1898, Leopold Ranke bluntly stated that “history is done with documents … no documents, no history” (Eskildsen, 2008: 451).  While historical research has become increasingly open to different means of interrogating the past, written documents, created at the time when events unfolded, continue to be regarded as the highest standard of evidence. This presents obstacles for those studying societies with limited archival sources and perpetuates the misperception that most of the world lacks history.

Here, we highlight four key challenges:

Absences. So little of the past is recorded in archival records, and that small portion that does is always constructed, partial, and filled with absences (Coats & Dippold 2020). The “survival bias” is more extreme in LDCs, where acute resource constraints on the production and preservation of archival records exist or governments or private institutions lack incentives to take care of old documents. Indeed, many societies lack a tradition of producing corporate archives altogether. Often the only available archives are those of powerful multinational enterprises, which tend to exaggerate the agency of Western actors while downplaying the contributions of indigenous people. State archives are more widely available and sometimes cast light on areas left in the dark by corporate archives. But these too suffer their own absences because of political ideologies, resource constraints, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and institutional biases (Agmon 2021). It is critical, therefore, to “surface” these absences (Johnson 2020: 135) by drawing attention to that which went unrecorded and to read sources “along the grain” (Stoler 2009) to reveal the social epistemologies that guided and biased archival production.

Ruptures. The histories of emerging markets are often punctuated by episodes of foreign domination, political revolution, civil unrest, natural disasters, and other serial ruptures. These periods of turbulence not only disrupt ordinary business activities, but also lead to the dissolution of businesses, the dislocation of populations, and the fragmentation of archives.  While ruptures are not unique to less developed countries (as anyone familiar with European history knows), they are often more acute in societies governed by younger or weaker states. The resulting gaps pose a serious challenge to constructing coherent historical narratives and retracing the evolution of business activities and organizations over time; as a result, discontinuities are too often taken for granted while continuities are left underexplored (Kirby 1990). Ruptures also create conceptual rifts that shape historical memory and are reproduced in periodizations of the past (Cohen 2003). Almost by default, the temporal boundaries of emerging market business histories thus become delineated by wars, revolutions, and regime change, even in cases where businesses successfully navigated and survived these events.

Silences. In many authoritarian and colonial contexts, archives were explicitly designed as instruments of control (Cohn and Dirks 1988; Dirks 2002) that silenced as much as they documented and preserved. Take, for example, the case of Guatemala, where, during the nation’s bloody civil war (1960–1996), the military used archives as a weapon of surveillance, social control, and ideological management against insurgent communist forces (Weld 2014). Through such processes, archives can perpetuate powerful silences that shape historical memory and conceal the experiences of the disempowered (Schwarzkopf 2012; Decker 2013; Thomas, Fowler, & Johnson 2017). The histories of racial, cultural, religious, and gender minorities tend to get omitted (or are systematically excluded) from the archival record. So too do the activities of a broad host of actors operating in the informal economy who actively cloak themselves from the gaze of the state to avoid becoming targets of persecution. In societies where the informal sector constitutes the largest part the economy (making up as much as 60% of economic activity in India or 80% in Bangladesh), to focus only on formal businesses is to neglect the preponderance of economic life. Working with corporate and state archives in these contexts thus becomes a process of “mastering the institutional matrix in which documents are embedded, and also finding ways of going around or exceeding any limitations that the matrix imposes” (Lipartito, 2014: 293). It also necessitates reading sources “against the grain,” i.e. against the intentions of the people who produced them, to exhume “resistant” readings that draw attention to gaps, silences, and contradictions in the written accounts.

Secrets. In many LDCs, powerful actors assert autocratic control over access to historical records and the production of historical knowledge. For example, in China, after a long trend of increasing archival openness, state archivists have recently begun resecretizing previously accessible collections (Lu 2021) and imposing new barriers to historical research (Greitens & Truex 2020). In countries such as Turkey, corporate archives are controlled by large business groups that have kept most documents confidential (Colpan and Jones 2016). The decision-making processes that determine which archives are to be preserved, which are to be destroyed, which are to be opened, and which are to remain secret (or be resecritized) are often entirely opaque, resulting in a research environment of many unknown unknowns. At the same time, the arbitrary exercise of rules leads to inequalities in access. In some contexts, female scholars or scholars belonging to minority groups may face additional barriers to access. In others, only politically embedded researchers are granted access to records that may concern politically sensitive subjects. Doing business history research in LDCs thus entails navigating a terrain of sensitive and secretized information.

By engaging with these contextual challenges, rendering them explicit, and highlighting strategies to overcome them, this SI attempts to shed new light on the business history of LDC contexts and illuminate new paths forward. Specifically, the SI will explore how scholars of LDCs are drawing on unconventional sources, adapting methods from adjacent disciplines, developing new conceptual tools, and approaching business history from new directions. As we hope to show, the novel methods and frameworks deployed at what is, at present, the geographical and intellectual periphery of our discipline, can be productively integrated into “core” business history research to unlock new possibilities and opportunities.

At the same time, this work serves as a mirror that enables us to critically reflect on the dominant paradigms of the discipline and their corresponding limitations. Through these studies, we might ask, what constraints and path dependencies has the overreliance on corporate archives imposed on business history research? What blind spots have emerged? What actors and organizations have been ignored? Relatedly, who gets to participate in the production of business history? Whose voices are absent? In posing and seeking answers to such questions, we build upon previous calls to counteract biases implicit within the methods of business history research (Scranton and Fridenson 2013: 8), embrace a greater diversity of methodological approaches and research topics (Jones and Zeitlin 2008; Decker, Kipping, & Wadhwani 2015; Wilson et. al. 2022), and explore a larger variety of organizational forms (Amatori & Jones 2003; Wilkins et.al. 2010; Mackenzie et.al 2021).

In line with Business History’s commitment to “widen and deepen its international scope by promoting research on under-researched regions, periods and topics,” we seek to publish methodologically and conceptually bold studies of business in LDCs. Here, we have an explicit bias towards action-oriented research that not only explicates the challenges of doing business history within specific contexts but offers a creative solution to overcoming them. Submissions from scholars based in regions traditionally underrepresented in the discipline are especially welcome.

We ask that those interested produce an extended proposal 5-10 pages (double-spaced) that contains the following:

  1. A brief abstract (~150 words)
  2. A clear description of the research question and rationale for why i t is important
  3. A description of the data collection process, data analysis strategy, and key findings
  4. A summary paragraph

Abstracts should be emailed to Adam Frost (af.bhl@cbs.dk).

The guest editors will manage the editorial and review process. Authors who submit a proposal will be invited to a virtual paper development workshop to receive constructive feedback before submitting full papers via Manuscript Central. All papers will be subject to the standard, double-blind review process of Business History. Authors of successful papers will be invited to a final (non-mandatory) in-person paper development workshop that is planned to be held in conjunction with the 2025 annual meeting of the Business History Conference. Papers will undergo a final review by the Editorial Board after conditional acceptance by the guest editors.

KEY DATES:

• March 2024: Submission of extended proposal

• April 2024: Paper development workshop with manuscript proposals (virtual)

• August– October 2024: Full paper submissions

• March 2025: Paper development workshop with R&R manuscripts at the BHC

References

Agmon, Danna. 2021. “Historical Gaps and Non-Existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French India.” Comparative Studies in society and history 63, no. 4: 979–1006.

Amatori, Franco., and Geoffrey Jones. 2003. Business History Around the World. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Austin, Gareth, Carlos Dávila, and Geoffrey Jones. 2017. “The Alternative Business History: Business in Emerging Markets.” Business History Review 91 (3): 537–69. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680517001052.

Barbero, María Inés, and Andrea Lluch. 2014. “Essays in Latin American Business and Economic History: Introduction.” Australian Economic History Review 54 (2): 93–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.12039.

Barbero, María Inés, and Nuria Puig. 2016. “Business Groups Around the World: An Introduction.” Business History 58 (1): 6–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2015.1051530.

Coats, Lauren, and Steffi Dippold. 2020. “Beyond Recovery: Introduction.” Early American literature 55, no. 2: 297–320.

Cohen, Paul. 2003. Reflections on a watershed date: the 1949 divide in Chinese history. In Twentieth Century China: new approaches. (pp. 43–52). Edited by Jeffrey Wasserstrom. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203455531

Cohn, Bernard. 1997. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton University Press.

Dirks, Nicholas. 2020. Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History. In From the Margins (pp. 47–65). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822383345-003

Colpan, Asli M., and Geoffrey Jones. 2016. “Business Groups, Entrepreneurship and the Growth of the Koç Group in Turkey.” Business History 58, no. 1: 69–88.

Dávila, Carlos. 2013. “The Current State of Business History in Latin America.” Australian Economic History Review 53 (2): 109–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.12006.

Dávila, Carlos, and Rory Miller. 1999. Business History in Latin America. Business History in Latin America. 1st ed. Vol. 1. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Decker, Stephanie, Matthias Kipping, and R. Daniel Wadhwani. 2015. “New Business Histories! Plurality in Business History Research Methods.” Business History 57 (1): 30–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2014.977870.

Eskildsen, K. R. 2008. Leopold Ranke’s archival turn: location and evidence in modern historiography. Modern Intellectual History, 5(3): 425-453.

Friedman, Walter A, and Geoffrey Jones. 2011. “Business History: Time for Debate.” Business History Review 85 (1): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680511000201.

Frost, Adam K. 2021. “Reframing Chinese Business History.” Business History Review, 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680521000477.

Godley, Andrew, and Relli Shechter. 2008. “Editors’ Introduction: Business History and the Middle East: Local Contexts, Multinational Responses-A Special Section of Enterprise & Society.” Enterprise & Society 9 (4): 631–36. https://doi.org/10.1093/es/khn077.

Greitens, Sheena Chestnut, and Rory Truex. 2020. “Repressive Experiences Among China Scholars: New Evidence from Survey Data.” The China quarterly (London) 242: 349–375.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. 2020. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jones, Geoffrey, and Rachael Comunale. 2019. “Oral History and the Business History of Emerging Markets.” Enterprise & Society 20 (1): 19–32. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2018.109.

—, and Jonathan Zeitlin. 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Business History. UK: Oxford University Press.

Kipping, Matthias,  Kurosawa Takafumi and R. Daniel Wadhwani. 2017. “A Revisionist Historiography of Business History: A Richer Past for a Richer Future,” in The Routledge Companion to Business History, ed. John F. Wilson, Steven Toms, Abe de Jong, and Emily Buchnea, 19–35.

Kirby, William. 1990. “Continuity and Change in Modern China: Economic Planning on the Mainland and on Taiwan, 1943–1958,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 24: 121–41.

Klein, Lauren. 2013. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85 (4): 661–688. doi:10.1215/00029831-2367310.

Lipartito, Kenneth. 2013. Historical sources and data. In Bucheli, M., Wadhwani, D. R. (Eds.), Organizations in time: History, theory, method (pp. 284–303). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lu, Yi. 2021. The dustbin of history: Making archives in modern China (No. 28497758). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

MacKenzie, Niall G., Andrew Perchard, Christopher Miller and Neil Forbes. 2021. ”Business-government relations and national economic models: A review and future research directions in varieties of capitalism and beyond”, Business History 63 (8): 1239-1252, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1924687

Pikos, Anna, and Tomasz Olejniczak. 2017. “Business History in Poland: Current State and Future Potential.” Journal of Management and Business Administration Central Europe 25 (3): 55–77. https://doi.org/10.7206/jmba.ce.2450-7814.199.

Schwarzkopf, S. 2012. What is an archive – and where is it? Why business historians need a constructive theory of the archive. Business Archives, 105, 1–9.

Scranton, Philip and Patrick Fridenson. 2013. Reimagining Business History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sela, Rona. 2018. “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives.” Social Semiotics 28 (2): 201–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1291140.

Stoler, A. L. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press.

Thomas, David, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson. 2017. The Silence of the Archive. London: Facet Publishing.

Tumbe, Chinmay. 2019. “Recent Trends in the Business History of India” Business History Review 93 (1): 153–59.

Verhoef, G. (2017). The History of Business in Africa. Complex discontinuity to emerging markets. Cham: Springer.

Wadhwani, R. Daniel, and Christina Lubinski. 2017. “Reinventing Entrepreneurial History.” Business History Review 91 (4): 767–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680517001374.

—, Roy Suddaby, Mads Mordhorst, and Andrew Popp. 2018. “History as Organizing: Uses of the Past in Organization Studies Introduction.” Organization studies 39, no. 12: 1663–1683.

Weld, Kirsten. 2014. Paper Cadavers. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376583.

Wilkins, M., Thelen, K., Whitley, R., Miller, R., Martin, C., Berghahn, V., Zeitlin, J. 2010. “Varieties of Capitalism” Roundtable. Business History Review, 84(4), 637-674. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680500001975

Wilson, John F, Ian G Jones, Steven Toms, Anna Tilba, Emily Buchnea, and Nicholas Wong. 2022. Business History. Milton: Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429449536.

Zelin, Madeleine. 2013. “Chinese Business Practice in the Late Imperial Period.” Enterprise & Society 14 (4): 769–93. https://doi.org/10.1093/es/kht087

Moving the OHN blog to Substack

Hello everyone!

Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic on Unsplash

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

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

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

Business History Vol 65 No. 7 is out now!

Special Issue: Socialist Entrepreneurs? Business Histories of the GDR and Yugoslavia; Guest Editors: Vladimir Unkovski-Korica and Saša Vejzagić

TOC Business History 65 7 2023

Augustine, Dolores L. “Management of Technological Innovation: High Tech R&D in the GDR.” Business History 65, no. 7 (October 3, 2023): 1177–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1848489.

Bartha, Eszter. “Workers against Technocrats: The Failed Economic Reform and the Rise of Consumer Socialism in the German Democratic Republic.” Business History 65, no. 7 (October 3, 2023): 1194–1208. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2022.2157403.

Calori, Anna. “Losing the Global: (Re)Building a Bosnian Enterprise across Transition.” Business History 65, no. 7 (October 3, 2023): 1226–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1819242.

Dale, Gareth, and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica. “Varieties of Capitalism or Variegated State Capitalism? East Germany and Yugoslavia in Comparative Perspective.” Business History 65, no. 7 (October 3, 2023): 1242–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2022.2134348.

Trecker, Max. “Entrepreneurs as Saviours of Socialism? The Complicated Relationship between East German State Socialism and Entrepreneurship.” Business History 65, no. 7 (October 3, 2023): 1209–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1781818.

Troch, Pieter. “Tensions between Plan and Market in a Political Factory in Socialist Kosovo.” Business History 65, no. 7 (October 3, 2023): 1158–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1733981.

Unkovski-Korica, Vladimir, and Saša Vejzagić. “Business History Goes East: An Introduction.” Business History 65, no. 7 (October 3, 2023): 1119–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2023.2234827.

Vejzagić, Saša. “Persistent Centralisation of Decision-Making in the Age of Industrial Atomisation and Self-Management on the Case of Construction Company Industrogradnja Zagreb (1966–1980).” Business History 65, no. 7 (October 3, 2023): 1137–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2023.2185225.

The Business History of Barbie

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Issue of Enterprise & Society

The latest issue of Enterprise & Society just came out! The TOC of Volume 25 No. 3, with a total of eleven research articles, is available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society, or listen to editor Andrew Popp’s audio announcement below.

Audio announcement via The Business History Conference

Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship Program

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

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

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

Management & Business History at British Academy of Management

If you are a member of the MBH SIG at BAM, or if you are thinking of becoming one, please remember that elections are coming up. The below if

The following roles are open for election for this SIG, and we are now calling for candidates in the SIG leadership (Chair, Treasurer, Secretary). Only BAM and SIG members can either self-nominate or nominate another academic (with their prior agreement, of course) for election to one or more of these roles. The SIG and BAM are open to new members (https://www.bam.ac.uk/membership/create-an-account.html), and under the current leadership the SIG has gone from strength to strength. Elected candidates will serve for a 3-year term of office, and nominations need to be submitted before 28th September (Smart Survey Link HERE ).

You may contact the SIG Chair by email for an informal discussion of what the role entails.

The Elections will be held online in October – don’t forget to vote!

Annotated Business History 65-3 TOC

Volume 65 3, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fbsh20/65/3

James Derbyshire’s article “Cross-Fertilising Scenario Planning and Business History by Process-Tracing Historical Developments: Aiding Counterfactual Reasoning and Uncovering History to Come,” shows how the intersection of historical analysis and scenario planning offers valuable insights for work in strategic management. Read it in Business History 65, no. 3 (April 3, 2023): 479–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1844667.

Studying reinsurance, in “An Integrative Approach to Investigating Longstanding Organisational Phenomena; Opportunities for Practice Theorists and Historians,” Paula Jarzabkowskia, Rebecca Bednarek, Wendy Kilminster, and Paul Spee emphasize the importance of historical reflexivity and advocate for the integration of historical methods with organization theory and practice theory. Available in Business History 65, no. 3 (April 3, 2023): 414–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1906227.

In the article “Entrepreneurial Relationship Marketing in 19th Century India – The Case of Railway Contractor Joseph Stephens,” Stefan Lagrosen and Achinto Roy highlight the uniqueness of railway contractor Joseph Stephens’ diaries in thinking about historical and modern entrepreneurial practices. Read Business History 65, no. 3, https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1821659.

Kiyotaka Maeda, in “Market-Based Financing for Small Corporations during Early Industrialisation: The Case of Salt Corporations in Japan, 1880s–1910s,” delves into the role and relevance of small corporations in Japanese industrialization. The research is available in Business History 65, no. 3 (April 3, 2023): 502–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1825689.

What are the main networks and pillars of those who insure the insurers? Robin Pearson studies the role of trust and personal relationships in the history of the reinsurance industry. The article “Normative Practices, Narrative Fallacies? International Reinsurance and Its History” is available in Business History 65, no. 3 (April 3, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1808885.

In “Infant Company Protection in the German Semi-Synthetic Fibre Industry: Market Power, Technology, the Nazi Government and the Post-1945 World Market” Jonas Scherner and Mark Spoerer study how government intervention shaped the development and evolution of the man-made fiber industry in Germany from the 19th century to the post World War II period. Read it in Business History 65, no. 3 (April 3, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1900118.

Cemil Ozan Soydemir and Mehmet Erçek, in “State and Transforming Institutional Logics: The Emergence and Demise of Ottoman Cooperatives as Hybrid Organizational Forms, 1861–1888,” provides the latest research on cooperatives in a setting, the 19th century Ottoman Empire, largely unexplored by business and economic historians. Read it in Business History 65, no. 3 (April 3, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1802429.

In “Entrepreneurial Strategies in a Family Business: Growth and Capital Conversions in Historical Perspective,” Nicholas D. Wong and Tom McGovern delve into William Rushworth II’ strategies in transforming Rushworths Music House through the lens and theoretical framework of Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Read Business History 65, no. 3 (April 3, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1807952.

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Special Issue Commodity Traders and the First Global Economy, now in print

Guess editors: Marten Boon, Espen Storli

Issue 65 – 5, 202

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Aldous, Michael. “From Traders to Planters: The Evolving Role and Importance of Trading Companies in the 19th Century Anglo-Indian Indigo Trade.” Business History 65, no. 5 (July 4, 2023): 803–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1623787.

Boon, Marten, and Espen Storli. “Creating Global Capitalism: An Introduction to Commodity Trading Companies and the First Global Economy.” Business History 65, no. 5 (July 4, 2023): 787–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2023.2172163.

Declercq, Robrecht. “Natural Born Merchants. The Hudson Bay Company, Science and Canada’s Final Fur Frontiers (1925–1931).” Business History 65, no. 5 (July 4, 2023): 920–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1625331.

DuBois, Thomas David. “Branding and Retail Strategy in the Condensed Milk Trade: Borden and Nestlé in East Asia, 1870–1929.” Business History 65, no. 5 (July 4, 2023): 902–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1688302.

Linneweh, Bastian. “Global Trading Companies in the Commodity Chain of Rubber between 1890 and the 1920s.” Business History 65, no. 5 (July 4, 2023): 863–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1693544.

Mizuno, Hiromi, and Ines Prodöhl. “Mitsui Bussan and the Manchurian Soybean Trade: Geopolitics and Economic Strategies in China’s Northeast, ca. 1870s–1920s.” Business History 65, no. 5 (July 4, 2023): 880–901. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1687688.

Papadopoulou, Alexandra. “Foreign Merchant Businesses and the Integration of the Black and Azov Seas of the Russian Empire into the First Global Economy.” Business History 65, no. 5 (July 4, 2023): 821–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1676232.

Stambach, Amy. “Sourcing and Shipping Museum Objects from East Africa to the Smithsonian, 1887–1891.” Business History 65, no. 5 (July 4, 2023): 848–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1687687.

Business History Issue 65-4 is out now

TOC of Business History Issue 65-4 https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fbsh20/65/4?nav=tocList

Issue 65 – 4 2023

Berbenni, Enrico. “The Pitfalls of Multinational Banking: The Case of Italian Banks in Egypt before WWII.” Business History 65, no. 4 (May 19, 2023): 719–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1918675.

Díaz-Morlán, Pablo, and Miguel Á. Sáez-García. “The Paradox of Scrap and the European Steel Industry’s Loss of Leadership (1950–1970).” Business History 65, no. 4 (May 19, 2023): 740–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1820988.

Hussain, Simon. “The Development of the Chartered Financial Analyst in the United States during the Twentieth Century.” Business History 65, no. 4 (May 19, 2023): 606–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1830063.

Keneley, Monica J. “The Shifting Corporate Culture in the Financial Services Industry: Explaining the Emergence of the ‘Culture of Greed’ in an Australian Financial Services Company.” Business History 65, no. 4 (May 19, 2023): 583–605. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1821660.

Lu, Qing, Steven Toms, and Yingqi Wei. “From Light Touch to Top Management Control: HSBC’s Integration of Its First Two Acquired Subsidiaries 1960-1980.” Business History 65, no. 4 (May 19, 2023): 656–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1883000.

Meeks, G., and G. Whittington. “Death on the Stock Exchange: The Fate of the 1948 Population of Large UK Quoted Companies, 1948–2018.” Business History 65, no. 4 (May 19, 2023): 679–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1893696.

Mourlon-Druol, Emmanuel. “Banking on Détente: Barclays, Paribas, and Société Générale in Poland, 1950s-1980s.” Business History 65, no. 4 (May 19, 2023): 699–718. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1907347.

Quinn, William, and John D. Turner. “Bubbles in History.” Business History 65, no. 4 (May 19, 2023): 636–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1844668.

San Román, Elena, Nuria Puig, and Águeda Gil-López. “German Capital and the Development of the Spanish Hotel Industry (1950s-1990s): A Tale of Two Strategic Alliances.” Business History 65, no. 4 (May 19, 2023): 762–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1821658.