Latin America – Organizational History Network

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

Call for Papers-Special Issue, Business History “Business and Finance in Latin America: From the Oil Shock to the Debt Crisis”

March 03, 2021

Call for Papers-Special Issue, Business History “Business and Finance in Latin America: From the Oil Shock to the Debt Crisis”

Since the 2008-9 financial crisis, Latin America has experienced a period of sluggish economic activity and increasing levels of external debt. In a world of low interest rates, the liquidity injected into the US and European banking systems flew over into Latin American economies as global demand dropped and commodities prices crashed downwards. The boom of private and public indebtedness over the past decade has increased the economic and financial vulnerabilities of a region that has historically been dependent on international trade and exposed to external shocks such as the current pandemic. In a context where governments have stepped in to offset the impact of the coronavirus crisis, debt levels are now approaching the peak seen during the international debt crisis of the 1980s, raising fears amongst policymakers and business leaders of new defaults and another “lost decade”.

The Special Issue “Business and Finance in Latin America: From the Oil Shock to the Debt Crisis” aims to bring new insights into the current debates by looking at how local and foreign entrepreneurs, financiers and state actors reacted to, and dealt with, the unstable economic and political context that preceded and followed the outbreak of the international debt crisis of 1982.

The scholarship on the business history of Latin America has expanded markedly over the last three decades. The number of historical studies of firms and entrepreneurship in the region grew considerably and covers a large variety of topics, such as foreign investment, multinational enterprises (MNEs) diversification strategies, family-based economic groups, business connections with social and political elites, and sectors or industries, namely trade, banking, mining, transport, agricultural and manufacture. However, while the bulk of these research has concentrated on firms that dominated before 1914 and the interwar and post-World War II years, the turbulent period of the 1970s and 1980s has received much less attention. Indeed, little is known about how the multiple crises that the region experienced in these years affected the way firms and entrepreneurs ran their businesses and overcame their debt and financial difficulties. The reasons why some companies disappeared while others survived and new ones entered the Latin American market has not yet been explored.

This Special Issue will contribute to filling this gap and provide new light on how the economic, financial, and political crises affected industries and business organizations operating in the region. To that end, the guest editors Carlo Edoardo Altamura (Graduate Institute, Geneva) and Sebastian Alvarez (University of Zurich/University of Oxford) welcome contributions and interdisciplinary research from scholars who use historical methods and original or primary sources to explore:

The behaviour and business strategies of financial and non-financial companies in the run-up to, and the aftermath of, the 1982 financial fallout.
The impact of the debt crisis and the responses of MNEs and domestic firms in Latin America.
The way that national and international companies managed economic and political risk in the region during the 1970s and 1980s.
How business actors coped with foreign debt, inflation, and the uncertainties unleashed by changing government policies and crises during the 1970s and 1980s.
The effects of the debt crisis and economic and structural reforms on state-business and domestic-foreign capital relationships.
The long-term outcomes of the crisis and the reorientation of businesses in line with the neoliberal policies of Latin American politics.

Please send your proposals as an extended abstract (max 2000 words) to the guest editors (edoardo.altamura@graduateinstitute.ch; sebastian.alvarez@history.ox.ac.uk) specifying the research question, methodological approach, sources, and main contribution to the literature. The deadline for the submission is April 15, 2021. Selected authors will be required to submit full papers by June 2022. Submitted papers will be subject to peer review according to BH publication procedure.