Category: General

Paper Development Workshop Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research

Steph

Reblogged from The Past Speaks:

andrewdsmith's avatarThe Past Speaks

AS: I’m looking forward to a paper development workshop that will be taking place the day before the Business History Conference in Portland.  I’ll be presenting a paper co-authored with Kevin Tennent. Our paper seeks to combine the Judgment-Based View of Entrepreneurship with the Past Futures methodology developed by the historian Ged Martin.

Paper Development Workshop
Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research

Embassy Suites
319 SW Pine Street
Portland, OR 97204

March 31, 2016
9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

9:00 – 9:15 a.m.                    Welcome

9:15 – 10:15 a.m.          Turning Points and Financial Innovation

Commentator: David Kirsch (University of Maryland, College Park)

“Creative Construction: The Importance of Fraud and Froth in Emerging Technologies,” Jonathan Coopersmith (Texas A&M University)

“Entrepreneurship, Financial Systems and Economic Development,” Steven Toms, Nick Wilson and Mike Wright (University of Leeds Business School and Imperial College London)

10:15 – 11:15 a.m.        Entrepreneurial Uses of History

Commentator: Roy Suddaby…

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New article: Reassembling the Economic

Steph

A new article discussing new avenues in business and economic history has been published in the influential American Historical Review. The abstract follows below.

Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism

by Kenneth Lipartito

Abstract

Recent writing in economic and business history is reexamining major transformations in world history—industrialization, capitalism, the global economy. This new literature avoids the structural determinism of old with much greater sensitivity to politics, culture, and social institutions. To a lesser degree it bridges the gap between social science–type history, often written by those trained in economics departments, and the more narrative styles of those trained in history departments. Taken as a whole, the recent scholarship offers a substantial rethinking of how we should engage material life, including the natural world, and a challenge to cultural historians who focus exclusively on language and representation. Woven through the various works is a possible new ontology that grants agency to things as well as people without the traditional tension between the power of external structures and the autonomy of human consciousness. This new materialism offers a way for historians to bring markets, finance, capital, technology, corporations, and other economic features of the past back into the historical narrative.

The American Historical Review(2016) 121 (1): 101-139.doi: 10.1093/ahr/121.1.101

Our Paper at the Connecting Eastern & Western Perspectives on Management Conference

Steph

Reblogged from The Past Speaks:

andrewdsmith's avatarThe Past Speaks

Next month, I’ll be presenting a co-authored paper at at the Connecting Eastern & Western Perspectives on Management, Warwick Business School. The conference, which has been organized by the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies, takes place 21st-23rd March 2016. The keynote speakers for this year’s conference are confirmed as Professor Paul Beamish (Ivey Business School) and Professor Yadong Luo (University of Miami). The central theme of the conference is “The exchange of academic knowledge increasingly flows in both directions, from West to East and East to West. This conference seeks to help establish a foundation for further development of this fertile exchange of ideas between East and West. We hope also to develop not only how the East may form boundary conditions to the established theories in the West, but also help to lay the foundation for indigenous theory building from the East.” For more details…

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Video Games & Historians

Steph2 Comments

I cannot say that I am a big gamer (or a gamer, full stop…), but even I have heard of “Sons of Rome” and other video games that are built around a historical epoch. But as this is increasingly falling into the remit of what is now known as Public History, it is perhaps not surprising that historians and “Assassin’s Creed” are now mentioned in one headline. Though having done my PhD in a department of history, I am still quietly amazed by this article:

Bob Whitaker, a historian of modern Britain at Louisiana Tech and the host of the YouTube series History Respawned, recommends Assassin’s CreedSyndicate, the entertaining new Ubisoft game set in Victorian London. He likes the way it successfully captures the feel of the British capital in the 19th century, and he particularly likes the way the game depicts the Thames River as crowded with industrial traffic. But he still has some nits to pick.

Whitaker fact-checked the game from a historian’s perspective during an interview I conducted for my podcast, Shall We Play a Game?. You can listen to the podcast here. The excerpts below have been condensed and edited.

Minor spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate follow here.

Book reviews in organizational history

Steph

The NEP-HIS blog features a number of interesting book reviews in the area of business and organizational history, which might be of interest, for example:

How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network by Shane Greenstein (2015, Princeton University Press) Marc Levinson for The Wall Street Journal (November 23, 2015).
Carmen Nobel for Forbes (November 2, 2015).
for Kirkus (November 1, 2015).
Tyler Cowen for Marginal Revolution (October 23, 2015).
(Circulated 2016-06-01)
Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine by Jonathan Coopersmith (2015, John Hopkins University Press) Conor Farrington for Times Literary Supplement(September 18, 2015).
Carla Nappi for New Books in History (podcast, 60 min) (July 17, 2015).
[with thanks to Jonathan Coopersmith]
(Circulated 2015-11-18)
Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong by Morten Jerven (2015, Zed) Laura Seay and Kim Ye Dionne for The Washington Post(September 11, 2015).
Katrina Manson for Financial Times (September 6, 2015).
for The Economist (July 25, 2015).
Alex de Waal for African Arguments (June 24, 2015).
(Circulated 2015-09-17)
Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism by Bartow Elmore (2014, W. W. Norton) Marc Lenvinson in The Wall Street Journal (November 21, 2014).
Beth Macy in The New York Times (January 2, 2015).
(Circulated 2015-01-22)

For more information visit: https://nephist.wordpress.com/book-reviews/

 

Thoughts About Yesterday’s Seminar at Alliance Manchester Business School

Steph

Andrew Smith of The Past Speaks was so kind to write a blog over yesterday’s ESRC seminar at Alliance Manchester Business School, a very successful event that discussed ethnography in conjunction with organizational history. You can read the full blog post below:

andrewdsmith's avatarThe Past Speaks

Yesterday, I was privileged to attend an ESRC-funded seminar at Alliance Manchester Business School on the theme of historicising the theory and practice of organizational analysis. The particular focus on yesterday’s event was on ethnographic and phenomenological approaches. I gained a great deal from this event which saw the exchange of views by org studies scholars,  business historians, and people from the discipline of archival science. I was introduced to ethnographic research methods and the associated theoretical debates, which is simply something I didn’t know that much about before. I also learned a great deal from the papers that are closer to my own home research tradition of business history. I would say that I got the most from Stephanie Decker‘s excellent paper on archival ethnography.

Listening to Stephanie discuss her paper made me realize the usefulness to my own research of Stoler (2009)’s concept of “history in the subjunctive,” the use of…

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Important New Article

Steph

Cross-posted from The Past Speaks …

andrewdsmith's avatarThe Past Speaks

I thought I would draw your attention to an important new business-historical article “Strategic Planners in More Turbulent Times: The Changing Job Characteristics of Strategy Professionals, 1960–2003” by Richard Whittington, Basak Yakis-Douglas, Kwangwon Ahn, and Ludovic Cailluet.

Abstract:

This paper investigates the changing job characteristics of strategic planners in the face of long-run increases in environmental turbulence since the 1960s. We build on contingency theory to examine how growing turbulence may have impacted three aspects of strategic planner jobs: temporal range, processes, and organizational location. Drawing upon job advertisement data between 1960 and 2003, we compare strategic planner jobs over time and relative to a similar managerial function, marketing. We find that the secular increase in environmental turbulence is negatively associated with forecasting (temporal range), economics and analysis (processes) and centralization (organizational location), especially when compared with marketing. These findings broadly support contingency theory…

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Debating the history of capitalism & slavery

Steph

History of Capitalism has been an influential take on  analyzing the history of business and society in the USA in recent years. However, it has also been criticized as an approach for its failure to clearly define its key concept, capitalism. Recently, the issue of slavery and capitalism has been discussed again as an important issue in order to understand the nature of capitalism (and management, an argument made by Prof Bill Cooke of the University of York).

The following blog by Tom Cutterham picks up these debates in this blog post:

It’s been two and a half years since the new history of capitalism marked its arrival with the full red carpet treatment in the New York Times. So it’s about time we saw some serious and constructive critiques of the project. Robin Blackburn’s lengthy review of Empire of Cotton goes some way to bringing that Bancroft-winner back down to earth, particularly by scrutinising the concept of “war capitalism.” But what I particularly want to share with Junto readers today is an article by the NYU sociologist John Clegg recently published in the Chicago-based journal, Critical Historical Studies.

Anyone who has read Beckert, Baptist, and Johnson, or is eagerly awaiting the forthcoming volume on Slavery’s Capitalism, ought to read what Clegg has to say. In earlier posts at The Junto, I’ve pointed out the way new historians of capitalism have made a feature out of their resistance to defining the primary term. Clegg puts that resistance at the centre of his critique. “None of them,” he writes, “seem interested in asking what capitalism is” (281). As a result, he argues, “these authors fail to explain how the various features of the antebellum economy that they identify form part of a coherent capitalist system” (284). That makes it very difficult for them to “engage scholars in other fields and contribute to contemporary political and economic debates” (282).

To read the full blog, follow this link: https://earlyamericanists.com/2015/10/27/continuing-the-debate-on-slavery-and-capitalism/

 

New Paper Alert: Using history in the creation of organizational identity”

Steph

Cross-posted from The Past Speaks…

andrewdsmith's avatarThe Past Speaks

AS: I would like to draw your attention to an important new paper in the forthcoming Special Issue: Re-visiting the Historic Turn 10 years later: Current Debates in Management and Organizational History

Mike Zundel (University of Liverpool Management School), Robin Holt (Copenhagen Business School) & Andrew Popp (University of Liverpool Management School), “Using history in the creation of organizational identity.”

Abstract: Organizations frequently draw on history as a resource, for instance when attempting to establish or maintain identity claims. However, little has been done to review the advantages and problems of such use of history and it is not clear how using history impacts on the appreciation of history itself and, ultimately, on the insights that may be gained when engaging with the past. To begin to address these questions we distinguish two related uses of history as a resource for organizational identity: as a means of committing external audiences and, as…

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