Yep, sounds pretty dangerous. What other very dangerous technology has humanity invented? The atomic bomb, of course. Which, it turns out, is one of the most overused historical analogies for AI ever.

For example, on the (excellent) HardFork podcast, the two hosts agreed that they felt very lucky that the Manhattan Project was conducted by the government and not a for-profit company, when discussing the recent model escapes.

I am not sure the Japanese share that feeling.

But, more importantly, this also ignores that even though it was government-run, the Manhattan Project and the Los Alamos research facility were still organizations, and by no means immune to the kind of accidents and miscalculations that have put the frontier AI labs on the news recently – far from it.

Los Alamos, 21 May 1946

Louis Slotin, screwdriver in hand, points his colleagues gathered round a plutonium core. They are about to witness a demonstration of an experimental procedure with the safety spacers removed. The scientists’ own name for it: tickling the dragon’s tail. Slotin’s screwdriver slips. A blue flash and radioactive heat erupts.

California, July 2026

OpenAI tests GPT-5.6 Sol and an undisclosed research prototype model in its evaluation sandbox, with safety guardrails deliberately removed for testing. The models find a way out of the secure environment. They venture out onto the web and hack another company, Hugging Face (and several others, as yet undisclosed), to steal the answer key to the cybersecurity task they were set.

As a university professor, can I just say that this is the most student-y logic for not doing the actual assignment and instead making an enormous effort to cheat, which likely involves more work than just trying to do the actual assignment…

Also in July, something similar happens at Anthropic, only that the Claude model tested walked through a hole created by a misunderstanding with its evaluation vendor, which had been undetected since April. It surfaced only because a competitor’s disclosure forced a retrospective across 141,006 runs. None of the three victim organizations had noticed.

The Manhattan Project and AI

So, do the many governance analogies get it wrong? Does it matter whether a potentially dangerous technology is developed by the state or private business?

When public AI discourse returns to the bomb, it is in one of two ways:

1. The Manhattan Project is used as a blueprint that should be emulated: An intense, state-led programme that decisively won the race against a rival superpower and delivered an important technological advantage – therefore, the US should do it again for AI. This is a key accelerationist narrative, endorsed by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s November 2024 annual report, which formally recommended Congress fund “a Manhattan Project-like program” to race to AGI.

But, much like with the previous spreadsheet analogy, the same history is invoked by those advocating a more cautious approach to AI and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence):

2. Christopher Nolan warned in 2023 that AI researchers are having their “Oppenheimer moment” , which was echoed at the Vienna autonomous weapons conference (April 2024, 144 countries) by Austria’s foreign minister Alexander Schallenberg: “This is, I believe, the Oppenheimer moment of our generation”.The New York Magazine went so far as to claim that “Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age“ . Oppenheimer, of course, famously reckoned with his role in developing nuclear technology – a central piece in Nolan’s eponymous biopic.

Both standard stories are about the leadership of states or individuals. Neither version really engages with the Manhattan Project as what it also was, a large organisation managing testing, contractors and secrecy day to day.

Governing nuclear technology

These two analogies are, of course, by no means the only ones – by now there are over 40 analogies of how the development of nuclear technology may be relevant to AI.

Scroll to the bottom to see further reading for the very interested.

But, all of them consider the implications at the level of states, treaties and regulation. If the lab appears as an organization at all, it appears as a black box to be regulated.

Of course, the question of how to regulate state-run nuclear labs or private-run AI labs is pretty topical right now. And the development of the first plan to control nuclear technology, the Acheson-Lilienthal Report (March 1946), was drafted by a panel with Oppenheimer as its intellectual engine, then revised as the Baruch Plan and presented to the UN after revisions in the same year. It proposed an international Atomic Development Authority that would own all fissionable material and monopolise every “dangerous” nuclear activity, with national weapons programmes abolished (but the US would keep its bombs until some provisions became effective).

Unsurprisingly, the proposal bombed, as the Soviets read this as freezing American advantage and the plan died in committee. Much like current proposals around slowing down AI-related research today are viewed as attempts to lock in one nation’s, or indeed one lab’s, advantage, such attempts are rarely viewed with anything less than cynicism. Worse, they do not address the collective action problem at its core: even though everyone would be better off if everyone cooperated, each individual is better off not cooperating.

The institutions that govern nuclear technology emerged much later. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was created in 1957, but the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons did not come into force until 1970. Agreement emerged after multiple near-misses, each of which had the potential for catastrophe, not to mention mutual vulnerabilities in a world in which a range of states hostile to one another controlled nuclear technologies. Calling for an IAEA-equivalent for AI skips the long and painful years of learning about mutually assured destruction. It is that learning, arguably, that gave rise to a stable international governance regime, not the design of the underlying institution.

The messy middle of technological revolutions

So we find ourselves in the messy middle – the technology is out there, its dangers are becoming apparent, but a stable oversight and governance framework is not yet in sight. So what is a frontier lab to do? Los Alamos, much like today’s labs, relied on secrecy.

Organizationally, this means threading the needle between the required openness required for innovation and the necessary secrecy to protect knowledge from leaking to competitors. The Manhattan Project and Los Alamos are famous for their secrecy regime.

However, this was completely undeservedly. There was significant Soviet espionage activity at Los Alamos, with several individuals embedded in the organization. Soviet nuclear tests happened in 1949.

That secrecy does not guarantee a viable “moat” is a realisation AI labs have come to quite quickly, with Anthropic accusing Chinese AI labs of distilling their models at scale.

The Trump administration blocked distribution of Anthropic’s new models after a jailbreak report, and asked OpenAI to hold back GPT-5.6 Sol pending guardrail assurances in June. Government pressure about the capability of these new models, and the accessibility of these models abroad, especially in China, appears to have pushed the whole field toward tighter guardrails, especially around cyber security.

When Hugging Face came under autonomous attack, its security team found the US frontier model it reached for would not help: as they put it, these models’ guardrails "cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker." They defended themselves with a Chinese open-weight model instead (GLM 5.2). The restrictions had not reduced the risk of cyber attack. Instead it hobbled the defence.

This is what Los Alamos-grade security looks like in practice: expensive, leaky, and prone to hurting the people inside. The nuclear secrecy regime became institutionalised, was used to silence critics and ultimately deployed against Oppenheimer himself in the 1954 security hearings.

Accidents do happen

Neither international governance nor prescribed secrecy really addressed the accidents that kept piling up after 1945.

Louis Slotin was demonstrating the criticality procedure to colleagues when his screwdriver slipped. Instead of the standard safeguard, which called for spacers to be inserted between the two hemispheres to prevent them from closing (see image), Slotin was known as a showman and he physically held the two halves apart with a flathead screwdriver. The purpose of the experiment was to measure criticality by bringing the core progressively closer to the critical point by surrounding it with neutron-reflecting material (the hemispheres), to determine exactly where that point lay. That is what the physicists called tickling the dragon’s tail. The danger was inherent to the method: the measurement is only informative near the edge.

When Slotin’s screwdriver slipped, the hemisphere seated fully, and the plutonium core was briefly brought to a supercritical state, producing an intense burst of neutron and gamma radiation; a blue flash and a wave of heat, but no explosion. He flipped the top shell off within a second, likely saving the observers, absorbed the largest dose himself, and died nine days later. Still, the observers received a significant dose of radiation – the historical museum at Los Alamos showcases the golden teeth caps worn by one of the scientists, Alvin Graves, to protect him from the radiation of his own fillings afterwards.

The plutonium core became known as the “demon core”, melted down and recast, because it had already claimed the life of another scientist, Harry Daghlian, a year earlier. Daghlian was working alone at night (against protocol), using an assembly in which he built a stack of bricks reflecting neutrons back towards the core, edging it towards criticality. Moving a final brick over the assembly, he dropped it onto the core, which went supercritical. He knocked the brick off by hand, taking a massive dose, and died 25 days later.

Los Alamos responded by redesigning criticality experiments to become remote-operated, with a quarter-mile distance.

But the accidents did not end here. Dangerous technologies remain dangerous even when mature.

• Goldsboro 1961: a B-52 breaks up over North Carolina and dropped two hydrogen bombs, one of which came uncomfortably close to detonation.

• Palomares 1966: a US B-52 collided with its refuelling tanker over the Spanish coast, dropping four hydrogen bombs, two of which had their conventional explosives detonate on impact and scatter plutonium over the village of Palomares, while a third took an eighty-day sea search to recover from the Mediterranean.

• Thule 1968: a cabin fire forced the crew to abandon a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs, which crashed onto sea ice near Thule Air Base in Greenland, where the conventional explosives detonated and spread radioactive contamination across the crash site.

• The 1980 Damascus Titan II explosion: a technician’s dropped socket punctured the fuel tank of a Titan II missile in its Arkansas silo, and the resulting fuel explosion killed one airman and threw the missile’s nine-megaton warhead out of the silo, fortunately without detonating it.

What can we learn from nuclear accidents about AI safety?

The news keeps coming about various escapes from AI labs’ testing environments in which frontier AI models evade their safeguard. We are still at the Slotin and Daghlian level of accidents. What will an equivalent to Goldsboro, Palomares or Thule look like in the age of AI?

Importantly, these accidents happened before international governance of nuclear technology was established, as well as after. Safety outcomes are determined at the organisational level. Redundancy and alarm systems generate their own failure modes, because adding layers of protection also adds ways to fail: each layer is machinery that can misfire or a signal that can be misread. Much like the guardrails on advanced AI models meant that they refused defensive work at Hugging Face, which was a safety layer generating a failure mode.

Sadly, organizational research tells us that near-miss learning of the type that both AI labs’ incident disclosures attempted is what organisations usually do worst. One reason for this is that near-misses tend to get reinterpreted as successes afterwards – the worst was avoided, the system is working!

So what should we take from this? When we hear about safety failings at the AI labs, public debate demands state action. But the failures are organizational; learning from mature nuclear technology should include awareness of numerous critical safety incidents over the years, some of them catastrophic.

Researching this post, my mind has been truly boggled by how lucky we all are not to be living in a nuclear wasteland.

The same history teaches different things at different levels: are you choosing to talk about states? Then it is a story about dominance, deterrence and diplomacy. At the level of organizations, it is a story about testing protocols, secrecy and near-misses. Neither is factually wrong, but opting for the exciting version of two superpowers vying for supremacy and its diplomatic resolution sidesteps the issues that actually give rise to accidents. The organizational story is one of decades of unglamorous mature technology operation, which is where frontier AI labs are headed.

Whether nuclear technology or spreadsheets, historical analogies transfer mechanisms, not outcomes – and mechanisms occur at specific levels.

Research assistance provided by Claude Fable. All mistakes remain my responsibility.

Some corrections on dates and procedures as I accidentally put the wrong document version into this post — this one now contains the correct dates!

Unrelatedly, History in Organizations has made it into the the various mysterious category of “Rising” - this time in History (appropriately). No, I also have no idea what that means, either.

Work, Leisure and Wellbeing

The University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

16^th to 18^th June 2027

The Association of Business Historians Conference 2027 will be held at the University of Sussex, located in Brighton, UK from 16^th to 18^th June 2027. The Association invites submissions to the conference committee on all areas of business history as well as on the conference theme of ‘Work, Leisure and Wellbeing’.

Business History’s central concern is the behaviour of the firm, organisations, and entrepreneurs, in their context and overtime. This is inherently linked to the work that people do and how they do it. This can be the strategy work done by senior managers. It can be the structures devised by managers for the planning and coordination of the organisation of work. Or it can be questions about where certain activities, such as research and development, sales and marketing, or manufacturing, have been located: within countries or, in different countries by multinational enterprises. For entrepreneurs the question of what works, what will work, and what does not work, not only shapes markets, and industries, but leads to the emergence of new ones. We might also reflect on the work that we, as business historians, do, and how we do it – and, how this compares to other historical or management disciplines

Leisure might well be thought of as the distinct opposite of work… but is it quite so simple? The growth of holiday resorts, and spa towns (which are sites of work) have been linked to greater disposable time and income. Leisure destinations have also been related historically to increasing awareness for the protection and maintenance of health, and for the increasing propensity for conspicuous consumption and display of wealth (Walton, 2014). In some instances, this has given rise to the creation of new business opportunities, the emergence of leisure-based industries (Parsons and Rose, 2004) and the rise of new tourist destinations and categories of tourism (Jones and Spadafora, 2017). Further, recent scholarship has explored the growth of sport and leisure activities in industrial and urban contexts (Gillet, 2019). Yet with the rise of new locations for tourism, traditional sea-side resorts, much like old industrial and manufacturing districts, can become “left behind.” This may raise interesting questions about the role of businesses and entrepreneurs in economic regeneration of such places. The conference location in Brighton, is an excellent space to reflect on these issues, and how we think about leisure as a business.

Finally, focusing on work and leisure enables us to we consider the concept and importance of wellbeing and health; its historical manifestations, as well as its commercialisation. While health and the health industries underwent a deep transformation in the twentieth century, our understanding of health has changed and evolved over the course of history; and continues to develop (Donzé and Fernández Pérez, 2019). This is applicable not just to physical health but also to a broader awareness of wellbeing: encompassing mental, social and even environmental health. Exploring the connections of organisations and entrepreneurs to these topics can ultimately help improve our knowledge of the workings of business and the economy over time.

We invite participants who are considering the conference theme to address these and related themes, but the conference committee is looking to develop a diverse programme for the conference and welcomes all papers and panels on any aspect of business history.

References

Donzé, P. Y., & Fernández Pérez, P. (2019). Health Industries in the Twentieth Century. Business History, 61(3), 385–403.

Gillett, A. G. (2019) ‘Sport in Urban England: Middlesbrough, 1870–1914’, Business History, 61(2), pp. 380–381

Jones, G. and Spadafora, A. (2017) ‘Creating Ecotourism in Costa Rica, 1970-2000’, Enterprise & Society, 18(1), pp. 146–183.

Parsons, M. C. and Rose, M. B. (2004) ‘Communities of Knowledge: Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Networks in the British Outdoor Trade, 1960–90’, Business History, 46(4), pp. 609–639.

Walton, J. K. (2014) ‘Family firm, health resort and industrial colony: The grand hotel and mineral springs at Mondariz Balneario, Spain, 1873–1932’, Business History, 56(7), pp. 1037–1056.

How to submit a paper or session proposal

The programme committee will consider both individual papers and proposals for entire panels. We are keen to encourage both developmental and more mature papers. Individual paper proposals should include a one-page (up to 300-word) abstract with title of the presentation and brief biographical note. Panel proposals should include a cover letter stating the title and 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 29^th January 2027.

The ABH Conference organiser is Dr Tom Buckley.

The Program Committee intend to send notifications of acceptance as soon as possible once the deadline has passed.

All questions and queries regarding the conference should be directed to Tom Buckley at ABH@sussex.ac.uk

The University of Sussex, founded in 1961, has a rich tradition of interdisciplinary research looking at problems that need a different perspective, across different periods of times. The University of Sussex Business School (https://www.sussex.ac.uk/business-school/) grew out of the founding departments of economics and the science policy research unit. The campus is located on the edges of the South Downs National Park, conveniently located close to Brighton, a creative seaside city known for its welcoming and inclusive culture.

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Poster submissions

The conference a welcomes poster proposals from graduate students on all aspects of business history.

Poster presenters will normally be in either the First or Second Year of their PhD and are ideal for those students who are presenting work at the Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop to showcase their research to the wider conference audience. Please note you need to apply for the poster session and the Tony Slaven Workshop separately.

Those wishing to be considered for inclusion in the programme must submit an application to Dr Tom Buckley (ABH@sussex.ac.uk) by 26th March 2027. This should provide:

• Title of your PhD project.

• An abstract (300 words) that explains the background to the poster; the questions addressed; the sources and methods employed; and likely conclusions.

• A current CV.

Approved posters must be submitted by 1^st June 2027, and a style guide will be circulated to all presenters selected for poster presentations.

Approved posters must be submitted by 1^st June 2027. A style guide will be circulated to all presenters selected for poster presentations.

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Call for Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop in Business History, 16th June 2027

The ABH will hold its fourteenth annual Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop on 16^th June 2027. This event immediately precedes the ABH Conference and will take place at the University of Sussex Business School. Participants in the Workshop are encouraged to attend the ABH Conference following the Workshop. They will also have an opportunity to participate in the presenting their research in the Conference Posters (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. Students at any stage of their doctoral studies, whether in their first year or very close to submitting, are urged to apply. The workshop provides new researchers with an opportunity to discuss their work with experienced researchers in the discipline and also includes professional development sessions. 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.

Each student delivers a 15-minute presentation that is either (depending on how developed your project is) a summary of your PhD prospectus giving an overview of the overarching themes, research questions, and methodologies, or a specific chapter/paper. Time is devoted 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.

You may ask questions and apply via email to the Workshop organiser Dr Ian Jones at ian.g.jones@sheffield.ac.uk. Please use the subject line ‘Tony Slaven Workshop’ and submit by 26th March 2027.

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Coleman Prize 2027

The ABH is pleased to announce that the 2027 Coleman Prize is open to PhD dissertations in Business History (broadly defined) having either a British subject or completed at a British university. All dissertations completed in the previous two calendar years (2025 and 2026) are eligible. In keeping with the ABH’s broad understanding of business history, applications are strongly encouraged from candidates in economic history, social history, labour history, intellectual history, cultural history, environmental history, the history of science and technology, the history of medicine, or any other subfield.

To apply for the Coleman Prize, supervisors are encouraged to nominate recent PhDs. Self-nominations are also strongly welcomed. Please send a PDF including the title of your PhD dissertation and a brief abstract (up to 2 double-spaced pages) to Dr Zane Jennings at zane.jennings@sas.ac.uk by 19^th February 2027. The abstract should make clear the dissertation’s contribution to business history. Longlisted candidates will be requested to submit electronic copies of their dissertations 19^th March 2027. Finalists will be notified by 7^th May 2027. It is a condition of eligibility for the Prize that finalists will present their findings in-person at the Association’s annual conference. A full list of past winners can be found here, along with a series of podcasts with some of the past winners talking about their research: https://www.theabh.org/previous-winners

Put these dates in the diary: the ABH will come to Brighton, UK, 16-18 June 2027. Below the CfP for the conference and the ever-popular Slaven Doctoral Colloquium. Have you completed your doctoral thesis in 2025 and 2026 in business history? Is it on a British subject or completed at a British university? Then you could submit your work for the long-running Coleman Prize — more information below. New books are coming fast at the moment — Klaus Meyer has published his historical research on the rise of the Nazi Party in Braunschweig, Germany. The University of Groningen, Netherlands, will host a two-day workshop in October “Between local and global”, on the financial and business history of the low countries. Also, Business History is searching for a new editor — could it be you?

Contents

1. ABH 2027 CfP, Slaven Colloquium & Coleman Prize

2. Encyclopaedia of Historical Organization Studies

3. CfP for financial & business history of the Low Countries workshop at the University of Groningen

4. Business History seeks new editor

1. Call For Papers: Association of Business Historians Conference 2027

The University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

16^th to 18^th June 2027

Work, Leisure and Wellbeing

The Association of Business Historians Conference 2027 will be held at the University of Sussex, located in Brighton, UK from 16^th to 18^th June 2027. The Association invites submissions to the conference committee on all areas of business history as well as on the conference theme of ‘Work, Leisure and Wellbeing’.

Business History’s central concern is the behaviour of the firm, organisations, and entrepreneurs, in their context and overtime. This is inherently linked to the work that people do and how they do it. This can be the strategy work done by senior managers. It can be the structures devised by managers for the planning and coordination of the organisation of work. Or it can be questions about where certain activities, such as research and development, sales and marketing, or manufacturing, have been located: within countries or, in different countries by multinational enterprises. For entrepreneurs the question of what works, what will work, and what does not work, not only shapes markets, and industries, but leads to the emergence of new ones. We might also reflect on the work that we, as business historians, do, and how we do it – and, how this compares to other historical or management disciplines

Leisure might well be thought of as the distinct opposite of work… but is it quite so simple? The growth of holiday resorts, and spa towns (which are sites of work) have been linked to greater disposable time and income. Leisure destinations have also been related historically to increasing awareness for the protection and maintenance of health, and for the increasing propensity for conspicuous consumption and display of wealth (Walton, 2014). In some instances, this has given rise to the creation of new business opportunities, the emergence of leisure-based industries (Parsons and Rose, 2004) and the rise of new tourist destinations and categories of tourism (Jones and Spadafora, 2017). Further, recent scholarship has explored the growth of sport and leisure activities in industrial and urban contexts (Gillet, 2019). Yet with the rise of new locations for tourism, traditional sea-side resorts, much like old industrial and manufacturing districts, can become “left behind.” This may raise interesting questions about the role of businesses and entrepreneurs in economic regeneration of such places. The conference location in Brighton, is an excellent space to reflect on these issues, and how we think about leisure as a business.

Finally, focusing on work and leisure enables us to we consider the concept and importance of wellbeing and health; its historical manifestations, as well as its commercialisation. While health and the health industries underwent a deep transformation in the twentieth century, our understanding of health has changed and evolved over the course of history; and continues to develop (Donzé and Fernández Pérez, 2019). This is applicable not just to physical health but also to a broader awareness of wellbeing: encompassing mental, social and even environmental health. Exploring the connections of organisations and entrepreneurs to these topics can ultimately help improve our knowledge of the workings of business and the economy over time.

We invite participants who are considering the conference theme to address these and related themes, but the conference committee is looking to develop a diverse programme for the conference and welcomes all papers and panels on any aspect of business history.

References

Donzé, P. Y., & Fernández Pérez, P. (2019). Health Industries in the Twentieth Century. Business History, 61(3), 385–403.

Gillett, A. G. (2019) ‘Sport in Urban England: Middlesbrough, 1870–1914’, Business History, 61(2), pp. 380–381

Jones, G. and Spadafora, A. (2017) ‘Creating Ecotourism in Costa Rica, 1970-2000’, Enterprise & Society, 18(1), pp. 146–183.

Parsons, M. C. and Rose, M. B. (2004) ‘Communities of Knowledge: Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Networks in the British Outdoor Trade, 1960–90’, Business History, 46(4), pp. 609–639.

Walton, J. K. (2014) ‘Family firm, health resort and industrial colony: The grand hotel and mineral springs at Mondariz Balneario, Spain, 1873–1932’, Business History, 56(7), pp. 1037–1056.

How to submit a paper or session proposal

The programme committee will consider both individual papers and proposals for entire panels. We are keen to encourage both developmental and more mature papers. Individual paper proposals should include a one-page (up to 300-word) abstract with title of the presentation and brief biographical note. Panel proposals should include a cover letter stating the title and 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 29^th January 2027.

The ABH Conference organiser is Dr Tom Buckley.

The Program Committee intend to send notifications of acceptance as soon as possible once the deadline has passed.

All questions and queries regarding the conference should be directed to Tom Buckley at ABH@sussex.ac.uk

The University of Sussex, founded in 1961, has a rich tradition of interdisciplinary research looking at problems that need a different perspective, across different periods of times. The University of Sussex Business School (https://www.sussex.ac.uk/business-school/) grew out of the founding departments of economics and the science policy research unit. The campus is located on the edges of the South Downs National Park, conveniently located close to Brighton, a creative seaside city known for its welcoming and inclusive culture.

---

Poster submissions

The conference a welcomes poster proposals from graduate students on all aspects of business history.

Poster presenters will normally be in either the First or Second Year of their PhD and are ideal for those students who are presenting work at the Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop to showcase their research to the wider conference audience. Please note you need to apply for the poster session and the Tony Slaven Workshop separately.

Those wishing to be considered for inclusion in the programme must submit an application to Dr Tom Buckley (ABH@sussex.ac.uk) by 26th March 2027. This should provide:

• Title of your PhD project.

• An abstract (300 words) that explains the background to the poster; the questions addressed; the sources and methods employed; and likely conclusions.

• A current CV.

Approved posters must be submitted by 1^st June 2027, and a style guide will be circulated to all presenters selected for poster presentations.

Approved posters must be submitted by 1^st June 2027. A style guide will be circulated to all presenters selected for poster presentations.

---

Call for Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop in Business History, 16th June 2027

The ABH will hold its fourteenth annual Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop on 16^th June 2027. This event immediately precedes the ABH Conference and will take place at the University of Sussex Business School. Participants in the Workshop are encouraged to attend the ABH Conference following the Workshop. They will also have an opportunity to participate in the presenting their research in the Conference Posters (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. Students at any stage of their doctoral studies, whether in their first year or very close to submitting, are urged to apply. The workshop provides new researchers with an opportunity to discuss their work with experienced researchers in the discipline and also includes professional development sessions. 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.

Each student delivers a 15-minute presentation that is either (depending on how developed your project is) a summary of your PhD prospectus giving an overview of the overarching themes, research questions, and methodologies, or a specific chapter/paper. Time is devoted 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.

You may ask questions and apply via email to the Workshop organiser Dr Ian Jones at ian.g.jones@sheffield.ac.uk. Please use the subject line ‘Tony Slaven Workshop’ and submit by 26th March 2027.

---

Coleman Prize 2027

The ABH is pleased to announce that the 2027 Coleman Prize is open to PhD dissertations in Business History (broadly defined) having either a British subject or completed at a British university. All dissertations completed in the previous two calendar years (2025 and 2026) are eligible. In keeping with the ABH’s broad understanding of business history, applications are strongly encouraged from candidates in economic history, social history, labour history, intellectual history, cultural history, environmental history, the history of science and technology, the history of medicine, or any other subfield.

To apply for the Coleman Prize, supervisors are encouraged to nominate recent PhDs. Self-nominations are also strongly welcomed. Please send a PDF including the title of your PhD dissertation and a brief abstract (up to 2 double-spaced pages) to Dr Zane Jennings at zane.jennings@sas.ac.uk by 19^th February 2027. The abstract should make clear the dissertation’s contribution to business history. Longlisted candidates will be requested to submit electronic copies of their dissertations 19^th March 2027. Finalists will be notified by 7^th May 2027. It is a condition of eligibility for the Prize that finalists will present their findings in-person at the Association’s annual conference. A full list of past winners can be found here, along with a series of podcasts with some of the past winners talking about their research: https://www.theabh.org/previous-winners

2. From Democracy to Fascism: Hitler’s German Citizenship

How did a democratic society turn fascist? This book explores the political dynamics of the Free State of Braunschweig from 1930 to 1933 surrounding Adolf Hitler’s appointment to civil service – a decision enabled by the traditional conservative parties that paved his path to German citizenship.

Prof Klaus Meyer, a well-known scholar in international business, has long been interested in history, and this is his first historical monograph (though by no means his first book). Focusing on the city of Braunschweig, his research carefully unpacks the political and organizational maneuvring that lead to the nationalsocialists building community support and coalitions with existing elites.

3. Call for Papers: Between local and global — Financial and business history of the Low Countries in an interconnected world

University of Groningen, 8 – 9 October 2026

Workshop theme

The Low Countries have long occupied a distinctive position in the history of global finance and international business. For centuries, the Netherlands and Belgium sat at the centre of international capital markets, trade networks and monetary systems, while businesses and financial institutions based in the Low Countries played an important role in connecting local economies to global markets, colonial territories and international production networks. At the same time, these globally connected economies continued to rely on local institutions to manage the pressures and shocks that openness brought. The tension between local embeddedness and global entanglement is not merely a historical curiosity. In a period of renewed geopolitical uncertainty, fragmenting trade relations and debate about the costs of economic interdependence, history offers a genuinely useful vantage point.

The Financial, Economic and Business History (FEBHIS) group at the University of Groningen invites submissions for a two-day workshop on the financial and business history of the Low Countries, to be held in Groningen on 8–9 October 2026. The workshop is open equally to all economic, social, financial and business historians, as well as scholars in related fields.

We welcome papers on the financial and business history of the Low Countries, broadly understood to include the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, their predecessor polities and their overseas possessions, across all time periods. We also welcome comparative contributions and papers on other geographical settings that speak to the workshop theme. We particularly encourage submissions that engage with the interplay between local institutions and global dynamics.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The role of international financial centres

• Multinational enterprises, international business and corporate expansion

• Trade, shipping, commodities and international production networks

• Monetary integration and disintegration

• Cross-border capital flows and their domestic consequences

• The financial and business dimensions of empire and decolonisation

• The resilience of local businesses and financial institutions in the face of external shocks

• Public finance, state formation and business-government relations

• Banking, credit and financial intermediation

The workshop will run over two days. The first day is dedicated primarily to early-career researchers and is intended to provide PhD students and postdoctoral scholars with a supportive environment in which to present and discuss work in progress. Senior scholars are warmly invited to attend and contribute constructively to the discussion. The second day will feature a broader research programme open to scholars at all career stages.

Presenters are expected to share work that has not yet been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The workshop is intended not only to foster discussion, but also to encourage the development of research with the potential to lead to publication in leading journals and to stimulate future conference sessions and collaborative initiatives in economic, business and financial history.

Submission details

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, together with a brief biographical note of no more than 100 words, to febhis@rug.nl by 31 August 2026. Please indicate in your submission whether you are an early-career researcher and whether you wish to be considered for a travel bursary. Decisions will be communicated by 7 September 2026. There is no registration fee for participation in the workshop.

Submission deadline: 31 August 2026

Notification of decisions: 7 September 2026

Workshop dates: 8-9 October 2026

Location: University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands

Organisers: Amaury de Vicq (a.devicq@rug.nl) and Abe de Jong (abe.de.jong@rug.nl)

Enquiries: febhis@rug.nl

4. Applications are invited for an Associate Editor to join the Editorial Team for Business History

The positions are for terms of up to four years in the first instance, starting in September 2026, renewable by mutual consent for further terms at Routledge’s discretion.

About the Journal

Business History is an international journal concerned with how businesses, organizations, and their environment develop over time, and how this influences contemporary organizations. It publishes interdisciplinary articles that contribute new insights into the past activities of organizations and their major stakeholders. Research in business history makes (1) empirical contributions by presenting new historical sources, which may be archival, visual or material, as well as oral history; (2) historiographic contributions, by engaging with research controversies in the field of business history, building new conceptual frameworks for understanding business or organizational activity in the past; or challenge existing conceptual frameworks that have shaped our understanding of the past; (3) theoretical contributions by using historical research to contribute to relevant social science and organizational theories by drawing on the past as an empirical setting. Business History continues to widen and deepen its international scope by promoting research on under-researched regions, time periods and topics.

All research articles in this journal are rigorously peer reviewed, based on initial editor screening and anonymized reviewing by at least two referees.

The Journal is indexed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus and numerous business journal quality lists, such as the CABS and ABDC lists. Please visit www.tandfonline.com/fbsh for additional information about the Journal and Publisher.

Job Description

We are seeking an Associate Editor to drive the strategy for Business History, working to enhance the impact and reputation of the Journal. The Associate Editor will manage the peer review process for papers assigned to them, recommending high quality papers to publish. Routledge provide an annual contribution to expenses incurred by the Editorial team.

Key Tasks

The tasks to be undertaken will include but will not be limited to:

● Working with the Editorial Team, Routledge and the Editorial Board to develop the editorial strategy and direction of Business History and acting as an ambassador for the Journal;

● Day-to-day manuscript and peer review management including selecting and managing peer reviewers and making recommendations for the final decision on papers assigned to you;

● Ensuring that all reviewers and authors uphold the Journal’s code of publishing ethics;

● Attendance and networking at international conferences and events to promote Business History and solicit submissions, invited contributions, and special issue proposals;

● Responsibility for enhancing the quality and reputation of Business History, particularly in relation to the quantity, quality and timeliness of published research;

● Commissioning topical special issues with active, well-respected Guest Editors;

● Working with the Editorial Team to refresh the Editorial Board and pool of reviewers as necessary in terms of subject specialisms and geographical representation;

● Attending Editorial Team / Editorial Board meetings during the year (typically quarterly).

Candidate Experience

We are seeking one outstanding and professional academic who is actively involved in the disciplines covered by Business History, with an international reputation for research excellence, and a passion for communication. We particularly encourage applications from business historians who have engaged deeply in the business history community. A history of submitting to and reviewing for business historical journals is essential. Prior experience of editing in an established journal is preferred, but not essential.

Applicants should be actively involved in networks within the field. Key qualities sought for the positions include energy, enthusiasm, managerial skills to oversee the editorial cycle, an understanding of research and publishing ethics, and the ability to meet deadlines and work effectively with Editorial Team members and a major publisher. The term of service will be four years in the first instance, renewable for two year periods thereafter.

Application Procedure

Applications must include a letter of interest, specifically referring to why you believe you are particularly qualified for the role of Associate Editor as part of an Editorial Team for Business History, and how you see your role in the future development and direction of the Journal (maximum of 1 side of A4). CVs should also be submitted.

To submit your application, or for further details, please contact:

• Niall G MacKenzie, Editor-in-Chief, Business History, niall.mackenzie@strath.ac.uk

• Christina Lubinski, Editor-in-Chief, Business History, cl.bhl@cbs.dk

• Vicki Whittaker Head of Portfolio for Business, Management & Economics Journals, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, Vicki.Whittaker@tandf.co.uk

Anyone who wishes to discuss this position informally with the Executive Editors are welcome to contact Niall MacKenzie or Christina Lubinski at the email addresses given above.

The deadline for applications is 1st September 2026

Candidates who pass the initial screening stage may be invited for an interview with the Executive Editors and Routledge, over video link.

All applications will be treated as strictly confidential. Routledge will judge each on its merits without regard to the race, religion, nationality, sex, seniority, or institutional affiliation of the candidate.

So, go ahead, and scan this weekly missive with Pangram. I did write it myself, but frankly, by now, Claude and I are so good at fooling the Pangram detector (which is by no means as accurate as they claim) that you wouldn’t know if it was if I did not tell you. #SorryNotSorry.

Catch-up service:

• I’ve been tracking how useful AI might be for academics for some time, starting with this one: AI for Qualitative & Historical Research

• And I’ve touched on AI for Research Communications before

• Most people are concerned by AIs making up stuff and hallucinating - but there are things you can do to ground your AI

In this high noon of feelings on technology’s latest moral panic, let me pour some truly ice-cold water over the whole thing.

Because I’m extra caustic right— I just had a big grant application rejected. No justification. No feedback. No resubmission. Just a short email for over three months of work...

OK, let’s move on.

Academics on social media

When I write for social media, for example, Notes here on Substack, or for LinkedIn, I normally write myself, but at other times have my AI provide the summary. And you know what I’ve found?

The AI-written stuff almost always performs better than what I write.

Yes, people indeed like slop. Or do they?

Let me be honest — I see a lot of people just post AI-generated text. I could not help myself the other day on Instagram, and wrote under a post “Hello, Claude!” because I could see the linguistic tics of the Opus family of models clear as day.

But then I also extend invitations to academic colleagues to write for our Business Research Unpacked Substack when I see their interesting research packaged for a LinkedIn audience. Even when I look at it and think: that’s ChatGPT writing, not so-and-so.

Why?

Because they actually made an effort to make their research accessible.

And that is hard, for a range of reasons we do not fully comprehend and cannot easily overcome.

The curse of knowledge

Ever heard of that one? Funnily enough, not a widely used phrased in among experts. We are more “knowledge is power” kind of people. But it was coined by a bunch of economists (which may explain why it is not popular):

In 1989 three economists, Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber, ran experiments in which better informed people were asked to predict how less informed people would behave. They could not do it. They kept assuming others knew what they knew, even when the mistake cost them money. They called it the curse of knowledge.

(This was Claude, btw. You did not think I’d read that myself, did you? I’ve got better things to do.)

Steven Pinker later argued this is the best single explanation for why clever people write badly. Bad academic prose is rarely vanity or laziness. It simply does not occur to the writer that the reader lacks the background, so the shorthand and the “linguistic gates” go unnoticed.

The awkward part is that none of this is visible from the inside. You cannot feel yourself doing it, which is why “write more clearly” is such useless advice. Nobody can proofread for their own blind spot.

Of course, we can ask someone to give it a friendly read. Two problems with this: Is it another academic? Can you guess what the problem might be? Plus they won’t have much time, either. If it’s not another academic, are they friends & family? Well, by the very nature of their relationship with you, their primary reason to agree is to manage their relationship with you, and guess what that means for the critique of your writing.

Sure, you can hire a professional copy-editor, because we have such vast research budgets and enormously generous employers (not). And what would a copy-editor rather do than help an academic understand the tropes of writing for social media?

You could buy a book and learn how to do it, though the book was likely out of date already when it was published. Also, what about the pile of academic reading you were supposed to be doing for the next journal submission?

So, this is the problem. Next week: what you need to know to better understand the difference between academic and general audience “internet” writing. In the meantime, check out Omeghie Okoyomoh’s TikTok that unpacks social science and entrepreneurship research for the YPs out there.

For full subscribers, some reading suggestions for excellent science communications here on Substack, and how you can set this up (with or without your AI) as a toolkit for your own writing.

Subscribe now

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Manage which type of content you receive from History in Organizations:

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References

Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings: An Experimental Analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232–1254. https://doi.org/10.1086/261651

Pinker, S. (2014a). The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Viking.

Pinker, S. (2014b, September 26). Why Academics Stink at Writing. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-academics-stink-at-writing/

Updates this week as we are heading into August: The Elgar Encyclopaedia of HOS is out and it is rich pickings! Even better, as HIO reader, Edward Elgar is giving you a substantial discount on the full price — read below. The provisional programme for the British Academy of Management History Subject Interest Group is out — do note it mentions speakers first, regardless of author order on full paper. (I am actually second author on both papers that I am presenting.) Finally, the granddaddy of business history journals is getting interviewed, or rather one of its editors-in-chief, Walter Friedman, is. If that is not enough summer reading for you, check out the ScholarStack directory. Enjoy!

Contents

1. Elgar Encyclopedia of Historical Organisation Studies now out!

2. Provisional BAM MBH schedule

3. BHR Centenary

4. ScholarStack by Helen Sword - A directory of scholarly writers on Substack

1. Elgar Encyclopedia of Historical Organisation Studies

Elgar Encyclopedias in Business and Management series

Edited by Nicholous M. Deal, Associate Professor of Management and Gabrielle Durepos, Professor of Organisation Studies, Department of Business and Tourism, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada

Publication Date: 2026 ISBN: 978 1 03533 292 2 Extent: 566 pp

This comprehensive Encyclopedia provides a lexicon of the field of historical organisation studies, tracing its evolution from an emergent movement to an established community of practice. It brings together key concepts, research methods, philosophies, influential thinkers and major publication outlets that are shaping the growing discipline.

I am really pleased to have four co-authored entries and one single-authored entry in the Encyclopaedia:

• 11 Archival ethnography (Stephanie Decker and Alan McKinlay)

• 19 Business History [journal] (Stephanie Decker, Christina Lubinski, and Niall G. MacKenzie)

• 44 Digital archives (Adam Nix, David A. Kirsch, and Stephanie Decker)

• 64 Handbook of Historical Methods for Management (Stephanie Decker, William M. Foster, and Elena Giovannoni)

• 74 Historical imagination (Stephanie Decker)

For more information, click here.

Retails now at £265 for the hardback and £48 for individual e-book copies.

2. Provisional BAM MBH schedule

Presenters are mentioned first, with University affiliation, co-authors follow.

September 7 - Online Session (Virtual Day)

Costly Reversibility as Strategic Commitment: Infrastructure Finance in the British Empire, 1840s–1914
Yasser Alvi, University of Cambridge

September 9 - 2:00 PM-3:30 PM

Covert diplomatic strategies: multinational enterprises and democratic reversals Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham, Marcelo Bucheli, Thomas DeBerge

The legacy of historical foreign occupation on modern corporate philanthropy Hailin Lu, University of Birmingham

The English Crown/State and the City of London in British West Africa: Longue durée, heterotopia and diplomatic relations, 1558-1820 Nelarine Cornelius, Queen Mary, University of London, Olusanmi Amujo, Ed Legon, Eric Pezet

September 9 - 5:00 PM-6:30 PM

Professional Life after a PhD in Business – Management History

• Anna Spadavecchia, University of Strathclyde;

• Akram Beniamin, University of Oxford;

• Elenia Charalambous, Royal Holloway, University of London;

• Adrian Cozmuta, University of Glasgow and Kyoto;

• Shannon Harris, University of St Andrews;

• Ian Jones, University of Sheffield

September 10 – 8:30-10:30 AM

Making Do and Moving On: Bricolage Dynamics and Strategic Renewal in Times of Prolonged Resource Scarcity Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham, Guting Shen, Adam Nix

The Dark Side of Direct-Selling: Jacob Factor, Stanley Spiro and the ‘White-Collar Bandits’ of Interwar Britain Matthew Hollow, University of York

Building Rhetorical Histories: Examining How Strategic Organizational Narratives Are Constructed Nicholas Wong, Northumbria University

How Did US Biotech Startups Finance Their Innovation? Three Case Studies from the Dawn of the 1980s New High-Tech Era Viren Mahurkar, London School of Economics

September 10 – 1:30-3:00 PM

A Microhistory of Entrepreneurial Career Change Gerry Kerr, University of Windsor, Francine Schlosser

Building the Best Damn Airplane: Coopetition and the Making of an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Wichita, 1925-1945 Shannon Harris, University of St Andrews

September 10 – 5:00-6:30 PM

Love & the City: placing Romeo and Juliet in between history, arts, organizing and imagination Giulia Achilli, University of Birmingham, Elena Giovannoni, Alessandro Lai, Riccardo Stacchezzini

Institutional marginalisation of gold mining policy: The structural exclusion of local enterprises by a mining industry association Albert Acheampong, Anglia Ruskin University, Swetketu Patnaik, James Tuffour, Ayikoru Maureen

Negotiating Empire — HSBC, Transaction Costs, and Strategic Partnerships in Securing Railway Concessions in Semi-Colonial China, 1898–1911 Xinyu Li, University of Hull, Qing Lu

3. 100 Years of Business History Review: Q&A with Walter Friedman

This year marks the centennial of the Business History Review, a publication that has grown alongside Baker Library’s collections and helped establish business history as a field of study. We sat down with Walter Friedman, director of the Business History Initiative, lecturer, and the journal’s co-editor, to discuss the journal’s origins and its evolution alongside Harvard Business School.

https://www.hbs.edu/news/stories/business-history-review-100

4. ScholarStack! 📚

A compendium of Substack newsletters by, for, and about scholarly writers

This is a neat resource if you want to read more diverse and interesting writing with a scholarly background. I always think of Substack as a wildly unedited magazine covering everything. That can be fun and interesting, but also overwhelming. If you prefer a more focused approach to finding other academics writing in this space, ScholarStack by Helen Sword is a great place to start. It is in an opt-in directory, so by no means comprehensive, but it is definitely worth browse to find your next newsletter.

⚔️ Helen's Word

ScholarStack! 📚

Sharpen your style and find joy in wordcraft with bestselling writing expert Helen Sword…

Read more

a year ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · Helen Sword

He had assumed that once he started, nobody would be around to answer his emails, on the reasonable-sounding basis that the students are gone. I let him down gently. There is no version of my (or anyone else’s) August with four spare weeks in it.

Catch-up service:

• Rewind: Last year’s Substack summer post - with added Kurt Vonnegut

• Do you have time for writing? Good. More posts are coming on that, but in the meantime, check these out:

  • Writing for Publication Part 1 and 2

• Some light reading needed for the break? Why not enjoy a historical analogy?

• I just had a galling rejection. So trust that I know what I’m talking about when I talk about academic rejection. At some point I might have calmed down sufficiently to be able to take my own advice…

When I mentioned this on LinkedIn in response to a funny post, colleagues arrived with their own versions pretty quickly. The assumption that we get three months off. The difficulty of fitting even a fortnight into that window. The additional confusion if you are part-time in academia and freelance the rest of the week. One colleague added that our non-academic friends and family all think the same.

I can relate: until about ten years ago, my mother would ring me midday, midweek, and open with “Are you working?”

From the outside, this seems a logical assumption: Students go home, therefore the work stops. Only not all of the students leave, and we do more than just teach students.

The students are … not gone

Last summer, I was at the World Economic History Conference in Sweden, and I took time out from sessions to do online meetings with MSc dissertation students (I supervised 11). My continental European colleagues were disbelieving: “But… it is summer!”

Maybe there are places where academics can take the summer off. In the UK, Masters dissertations are traditionally supervised over the summer, presumably a holdover from when a Master’s programme would recruit 12-15 students.

One of our Masters programmes, the one I teach on, was designed for 120 and recruited 400. When this dropped to 300 last year, we had to launch a January intake at short notice, to make up the numbers (I kid you not). My colleagues are now block-teaching into June and July on that one.

This year I supervise MBA dissertations. My students religiously book my office hours weeks in advance, and I can see five meetings for August already. So I go to the office most weeks, still two to three times per week. It is quiet, sure, but I bump into other colleagues all the time.

Why August is the one time of the year when email slows down (other than Christmas)

Academic work has no natural stopping point. There is always another paper, another review, another revision. What actually determines whether you can take leave (other than the school holidays, for some) is not how much work you have (which, by the way, you cannot hand over, as it is personal to you). It is whether somebody else can legitimately give you a deadline.

In term time they can, constantly. Teaching, marking deadlines, exam boards, committees, the whole machinery of academic labour controlled by other people. June and July are often brutal precisely because the teaching has stopped and everything deferred until “after term” lands at once, plus you are committed to attend conferences.

August is the one month when this is not the case. Our senior team and education leads are explicitly trying to keep August free of deadlines and meeting invites – I was on a call when they had to stop an administrator from scheduling a whole bunch of people for August. Because they work like anyone else, too. So this is the one time when everyone can go and not fret what they will find in their inbox when they are back.

Which is why the recruitment contractor was wrong in an instructive way. He thought August was empty. It is not. We are defending it against the continuous expansion of demands as the conventions of academic teaching, once bespoke and elitist, creak under their expanded demands. A large part of this falls on the business schools, so basically, nobody really cares. Also, I suspect, the parents don’t want their adult children at home for too long.

The bit nobody has told you

On 6 April 2026 a new duty came into force. The Employment Rights Act 2025 inserted a record-keeping requirement into the Working Time Regulations 1998. Employers must now keep adequate records demonstrating compliance with statutory annual leave entitlement, holiday pay, and payments in lieu of untaken leave on termination. Records must be retained for six years. Failure may constitute a criminal offence.

Employment lawyers looking at higher education have already identified the sector’s particular exposure. For the first 10 years of my career, academics basically did not book or record annual leave at all.

We used to consider it as a form of autonomy that we did not need to log anything and everybody is trusted to manage their own time. I got used to booking my annual leave formally in the mid-2010s. People complained, but I quickly realised that I never took my whole leave entitlement, and it made me take more time off than I had previously.

If you want to take a busman’s holiday, that’s your choice. I might have to, because I have to do something like one review per day for one journal or another at the moment, and it is beginning to really, really grate right now. Could we please all take a break from Manuscript Central and Editorial Manager for a bit?

For full subscribers, a cool app and website that helps you sell any books you no longer want, and make sure those second-hand and antiquarian bookshops you like to hang out in are well-stocked. Also a bit of a reading list on the current Pangram police controversy raging over here on Substack — required reading before returning in September to debates about whether student work should be scanned by Pangram for AI use.

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Perks

Going forward, I aim to have a reasonably up-to-date collection of special issues relevant to historical research in organizations. Obviously, I only know what I know (and can find online), so please send in other calls that I may have overlooked below.

1. Organisation Studies: SI on Restudies

2. Business History: SI on Indigenous Entrepreneurship

3. Update - Economic History of Developing Regions (13 August): SI on Business and Financial History of Colonialism

Organization Studies

Qualitative Restudies: Retheorizing in a Changing World

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2028

Guest Editors

• Tine Köhler, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Maria Rumyantseva, University of Sydney, Australia
• Catherine Welch, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Alex Bitektine, Concordia University, Canada
• Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham, UK

Business History

Business and Cities in the Global Economy

Special Issue Editor(s)

Valeria Giacomin, Bocconi University, Italy
valeria.giacomin@unibocconi.it

Youssef Cassis, European University Institute, Italy
youssef.cassis@eui.eu

Jan Logemann, University of Göttingen, Germany
jan.logemann@wiwi.uni-goettingen.de

Chinmay Tumbe, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, India
chinmayt@iima.ac.in

Abstract deadline

15 April 2026

Manuscript deadline

01 November 2026

Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond: Institutional Negotiation, Exclusion and Resilience

Special Issue for Business History

CFP Launch Date: 1 June 2026

Overview

This Special Issue examines Indigenous entrepreneurial agency under colonial rule, treating colonial institutions as both economic constraints and sociopolitical structures that shaped market access, legal standing and accumulation strategies. Defining Indigenous peoples is challenging given their diversity and presence across every continent. Scholars have nonetheless identified a number of broadly shared characteristics, including prior inhabitation of a territory before the arrival of later settler or dominant populations, some form of subjugation by those populations, the retention of distinct socio-cultural practices and institutions, a deep attachment to ancestral lands and resources, economic arrangements that are often, though not always, oriented around subsistence, and an association with distinctive languages (Peredo et al., 2004, pp. 5–6).

We invite business historical accounts of how entrepreneurs in colonised societies navigated, contested and reworked the rules of commerce, especially where access to courts, licensing, property rights, banking and credit markets was restricted or selectively enforced. Building on recent scholarship calling for a rethinking of entrepreneurship (Lubinski et al., 2025), growing attention to Indigenous and social entrepreneurship in the Global South (Colbourne, Peredo, & Henriques, 2024; Prouchet, 2025), and calls to engage more directly with colonial and postcolonial contexts and legacies in business history (Austin, Dávila, & Jones, 2017; MacKenzie et al., 2021, 2023; Decker, 2022), the Special Issue brings institutions and agency into the same analytical frame.

Objectives and Scope

Submissions should engage one or more of the following questions:

• Entrepreneurship under legal and financial exclusion: How did Indigenous entrepreneurs respond to constraints in courts, licensing, taxation, banking, property rights, labour regimes and credit markets? Relevant submissions might examine colonial courts, licensing, taxation and property rights as constraints or resources for Indigenous enterprise; financial exclusion and entrepreneurial responses through credit markets, banking, informal and hybrid finance; and the emergence of early Indigenous entrepreneurial projects and their historical significance in the context of colonialism and beyond.

• Institutional negotiation and boundary work: How did entrepreneurial actors exploit institutional gaps, navigate plural legal orders, reinterpret colonial rules, and/or mobilise intermediaries and brokers? Submissions might address entrepreneurial boundary work across plural legal orders; and brokerage and intermediation in the politics of market access, including gender, race, caste and ethnicity as cross-cutting dimensions.

• Resilience as strategy: What specific mechanisms sustained enterprise under constraint and with what distributive consequences? Submissions might explore cooperative, mutual-aid and associational forms as economic strategy in late-colonial settings; diasporic, kinship and inter-regional networks in trade, production and credit under colonial regulation; and moments of late-colonial economic nationalism and early decolonisation (c. 1940s–1970) as sites of institutional reconfiguration.

• Innovation as resistance: What were the mechanisms of technology adoption and adaptation through which entrepreneurs offered alternatives that subverted or circumvented colonial hegemony? Relevant submissions might, for example, address technology, innovation and entrepreneurial market response in early and late industrial colonial capitalism (1880–1940), as well as comparative or connected histories that explicitly engage the shared conceptual lens across cases.

Methodologically, we welcome submissions grounded in business historical approaches, including archival research, oral history, biography, microhistory, and comparative or connected history, that make clear empirical and interpretive contributions to the Special Issue’s themes. Engagement with postcolonial scholarship, subaltern studies, and critical perspectives on firms, markets and institutions is welcome, but not required.

We particularly encourage contributions that draw on a wide range of primary sources to recover Indigenous actors, experiences and strategies, such as company records, court records, licensing files, banking archives, trading accounts, petitions, newspapers and vernacular-language materials. Authors wishing to discuss unconventional sources or strategies for overcoming archival silences are warmly invited to contact the guest editors.

Timeline

Informal enquiries welcome: June-September 2026

Abstract / proposal deadline (800–1,000 words): 1 October 2026

Decisions on abstracts: 1 November 2026

Paper-development workshop(s): Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University

Full paper submission deadline: 1 May 2027

First-round peer-review decisions: September 2027

Revised paper deadline: 1 February 2028

Final revision deadline: 1 May 2028

Final acceptance target: June 2028

Expected online publication and launch: Autumn 2028

Expected print publication: Early to mid-2029

References

Austin, G., Dávila, C., & Jones, G. (2017). The alternative business history: Business in emerging markets. Business History Review, 91(3), 537–569.

Colbourne, R., Peredo, A.M., & Henriques, I. (2024). Indigenous entrepreneurship? Setting the record straight. Business History, 66(2), 455–477.

Decker, S. (2022). Postcolonial transition and global business history: British multinational companies in Ghana and Nigeria. Routledge.

Lubinski, C., Prouchet, L., Ferri, C., Jepsen, N.C. & Lei, W. (2025). Rethinking the histories and ideologies of entrepreneurship. Management & Organizational History. Online First.

MacKenzie, N.G., Perchard, A., Miller, C., & Forbes, N. (2021). Business–government relations and national economic models. Business History, 63(8), 1239–1252.

MacKenzie, N.G., Perchard, A., Miller, C., & Forbes, N. (Eds.) (2023). Varieties of capitalism over time. Routledge.

Peredo, A.M., Anderson, R.B., Galbraith, C.S., Honig, B., & Dana, L.P. (2004). Towards a theory of indigenous entrepreneurship. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 1(1/2), 1–20.

Prouchet, L. (2025). Connecting the dots: Business history research on social entrepreneurship in the Global South. Business History. Online First.

Submission Requirements

Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract or proposal for initial consideration. Submissions should be approximately 800–1,000 words and clearly set out the article’s research question, historical scope (including timeframe and location), sources and methodology, and anticipated contribution to the literature. Please also provide a tentative title, author name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information.

Proposals should be sent by 1 October 2026 to himadri@xlri.ac.in, with the other editors copied in: marktadajewski@gmail.com, andrew.perchard@otago.ac.nz, and zpittaki001@dundee.ac.uk. The email subject line should read: “CFP – Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond Special Issue.”

Formatting and Length: Final papers should adhere to Business History guidelines (typically in the range of 8,000–10,000 words, including notes and references). Authors will be provided detailed instructions for manuscript preparation upon acceptance of proposals. We welcome informal inquiries if you have questions about the fit of a topic or the preparation of your proposal. All articles will be submitted through the Submission Portal for the journal in order to be peer-reviewed before acceptance for publication.

Guest Editors

Himadri Roy Chaudhuri, Ph.D. in Marketing (University of Calcutta, India) is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Culture at the Xavier School of Business (XLRI), India. Dr. Chaudhuri has published widely in leading international journals, including the Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Homosexuality, and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, among others. His scholarship contributes to critical perspectives in marketing, often bridging cultural theory, ethics and policy concerns.

Mark Tadajewski, Ph.D. in Marketing (University of Leicester), is Honorary Professor of Marketing at the University of York, Visiting Professor at the Open University, and Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research critically interrogates the foundations of marketing theory and practice, with particular attention on how geopolitics shape the discipline. In business history, his work has examined alternative forms of business education and their influence on sales and managerial practice.

Andrew Perchard, PhD in History (University of Strathclyde) is Honorary Research Professor at Otago Business School, Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka / University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa–New Zealand, and Visiting Professor, Birkbeck, University of London, and Honorary Visiting Professor, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, both UK. His research has focused particularly on the subject of business–government relations and corporate political activity, deglobalisation and globalisation, as well as regional development and energy and industrial policy.

Zoi Pittaki, PhD in Economic History (University of Glasgow) is a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Dundee School of Business. Her research interests include entrepreneurship and institutions, entrepreneurship and growth, social entrepreneurship and historical institutionalism.

Economic History of Developing Regions

For a Special Issue on Business and Financial History of Colonialism

Abstract deadline

16 August 2026

Manuscript deadline

28 February 2027

Special Issue Editor(s)

Amaury de Vicq, University of Groningen
amaury.de.vicq@rug.nl

Jutta Bolt, University of Groningen
j.bolt@rug.nl

Oscar Gelderblom, University of Antwerp
Oscar.Gelderblom@uantwerpen.be

Journal information

Read the Instructions for Authors on Economic History of Developing RegionsView Economic History of Developing Regions on Taylor & Francis OnlineSubmit an article to Economic History of Developing Regions

Business and Financial History of Colonialism

We invite submissions for a special issue of Economic History of Developing Regions on the Business and Financial History of Colonialism. The special issue examines how colonial and imperial systems mobilised capital, organised production and labour, generated returns, and distributed gains and costs within and between colonies and metropoles. We interpret these themes broadly. Contributions may for example examine banks, capital markets, firm performance, labour organization, or institutional change.

A key criterium for consideration for the special issue is that the research speaks to the economic/business history of colonial rule of countries in developing regions.

The issue is primarily focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and welcomes research from across the colonial world, including Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• colonial investment, capital flows, and the financing of expansion, administration, infrastructure, and extraction;
• banks, stock markets, investors, insurers, public finance, taxation, debt, and monetary regimes;
• colonial firms, concessionary companies, plantations, mining enterprises, and trading houses:
• their performance, profitability, productivity, and business strategies;
• the recruitment and management of labour;
• the distribution of colonial gains and costs across firms, investors, workers, taxpayers, consumers, colonies, and metropoles.

We welcome contributions from economic history, business history, financial history, and related fields, and are especially interested in quantitative and archival research. Both case studies and comparative papers are welcome. We particularly encourage submissions from early-career researchers and scholars working on underrepresented regions.

Submission Instructions

Authors should submit an abstract of 400–600 words, including their affiliation and contact information. Full paper submissions will be invited after review of the abstracts by the special issue editors. Proposals will be selected on the basis of three criteria: (i) relevance to the special issue, (ii) strength of theoretical or empirical contribution, and (iii) clarity of writing.

All full submissions will undergo double-blind peer review in accordance with the journal’s standards. The journal’s editorial team will after peer review make all final decisions on special issue content. Publication is expected in 2028.

For enquiries regarding suitability, scope, or fit with the special issue, please contact the corresponding guest editor Amaury de Vicq.

Read the Instructions for Authors on Economic History of Developing RegionsSubmit an article to Economic History of Developing Regions

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Among my business school colleagues, I am often known as “the historian” or “the business historian”.

I don’t mind either of those things.

A few weeks ago, I took over as president of the Association of Business Historians, the UK's community of business historians and, I would argue, one of the more consequential ones anywhere. This post is partly about what I think the ABH could become. But to explain that, I have to start with a question of identity, mine and the field's.

What is business history?

On the way to the station after the ABH conference in the UK, we had an interesting conversation about how historians of science and technology now sit in engineering and science faculties. According to a colleague working across both fields, they don’t want to return to a history department. Why should they? Better paid, safer positions and access to larger research grants. Sounds like an all-round swish deal.

From where I sit, business historians have done something very similar: moving into business schools has brought better-paid, more secure academic positions and improved citation profiles — though it has not had much impact on grant capture, which remains low in business & management relative to field size.¹

I might genuinely not understand what drives discussions of academic identity. When I was in Italy in the spring (I know, I feel very lucky, too), I had the opportunity to teach business history, as it was an ERASMUS programme with one term focused on industrial heritage and business history. But I decided to replace the last session, which was supposed to be on the history of multinationals, with a session on teaching core strategy models to heritage students.

Why? Fair question.

Because I had gone on many study visits with this cohort (and a previous one) and realised that the bit they were missing in museums and on corporate visits was the answer to why some firms invest in heritage, and others do not. The answer can be developed pretty straightforwardly using a couple of key strategic models. So I gave a lecture on what the models are and how they apply to corporate and industrial heritage questions. Not to mention, they are quite useful when students think about career planning and their professional lives…

Honestly, that was the talk I enjoyed most, and some students told me they really liked that session as well.

So a fairer description of my professional identity may be that I like crossing borders. National, disciplinary and linguistic. The one thing you learn from doing this is that they will always describe you as the thing they are not. It’s because you sort of stand out. Sometimes it is othering. But often it is the thing by which you add value.

So, that’s me.

I am now the president of the ABH — sounds grander than it is, but isn’t that just very British?

We are one of the bigger national communities of business historians globally. Certainly per capita. I am not pointing to my map project because I know it has had more traction in the UK, and that, in particular, Japan, which has around 700 business historians, is vastly underrepresented. The US likely, too, but some academics there may prefer the term “historians of capitalism” or similar labels.

I actually think that we are one of the key communities in the field, and we have set the key trend for the field, together with other European and, to a lesser extent, Japanese business historians. And I am not sure that we have fully grasped the value of what we have built yet.

Does historical [insert other field here] mean “history under cover”?

To make the obvious statement first: calling something historical organization studies, historical entrepreneurship or management & organizational history, is not “history under cover”. We used that phrase for all synonyms used with the express purpose of avoiding the H-word.

Yet, the first use of “history under cover” was by Maielli (2006), who viewed it as a largely positive signal of existing interest in history in business schools, even though it subsequently acquired a far more negative connotation.

The keen-eyed among you may have noticed that all of the above use the word “history” or its derivative “historical”. They do not use words like “evolution” or “longitudinal”. We have moved on.

But we do not do “history for its own sake” or even history for other historians. Almost nobody actually teaches (business) history courses.

Should we, though?

At the final plenary session at the Association of Business Historians (UK), this question got another outing. I was surprised. I remember having this discussion fifteen years ago, or so. But not since, until now.

So here's what I think.

The history of everything

Whether we should teach business history depends on whether students should learn it. You might say “ but of course!” And I don’t disagree. Students who enrol in a history degree should be prepared to learn about the past.

Students who enrol in a business school degree can reasonably ask you why they should learn history. I don’t fear the question, because there are many good reasons.

If they study finance, it might help them better understand financial crises and bubbles.

If they learn about international business, it might help them learn more about both world history and national & international histories, to understand why countries developed differently.

If they learn theories, it may help them learn in which context the theories were developed and how they made sense of that context. And why today these theories may fit only imperfectly and not explain things as neatly as they hoped…

It’s almost like it makes sense to teach history as a constituent and irreducible part of the world we live in, and of the knowledge that we teach and learn.

Having deep expertise in business school subjects, coupled with historical knowledge, provides an ideal basis for teaching and applying business history within the business school curriculum.

And this is what many business historians in the UK have done.

Everything has a history

When we raise awareness that everything has a history, including every business school subject, issue and theory, then every business school should really have a historian (or more).

While we may not be there yet (and it may be some time), with more than 120 business schools in the UK, that is a far better professional basis than focusing on larger business history groups at a few business schools.

It also avoids the problem inherent in rotating university leadership that new leaders may look askance at the humanities in general and at any semblance of the humanities in the money-making part of the enterprise (also known as the business school).

When we accept that everything has a history (and that, as historical scholars, we should see this as an opportunity), then we need to rethink the role of our professional associations and what their service to the community should be.

Ironically, this goes back to Maielli’s (2006) original argument, which highlighted the latent interest in historical thinking across business school subjects.

Those with historical interests and research might be the only ones in their department or school. Training and professional networks will be more significant and require more effort.

As the key professional association for business historians and historical researchers in business schools, ABH should consider how best to serve the interests of current and future members who will rely on the Association for their connection to the field.

My ambition for the presidency is to rethink how ABH can become the meeting place for everyone interested in doing business history, the clearinghouse for new ideas, and the place to find training opportunities and community when you are starting out as a historical scholar.

If that is you, why don’t you check out the ABH?

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¹ While funding has increased, it remains lower than the funding received by mathematics — see CABS Research Income Report.

Maielli, G. (2006). History under Cover: The Problematic Relationship between Business Management and the Past. Competition and Change, 10(4), 341–356.

The rest of the post is for paid subscribers only and brings you some cool resources, curated readings and podcasts. This is also where more high-value and sensitive stuff lives.

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The world goes on.

Phenomena and events continue. Organizations continue organizing.

It’s like a crime scene.

The detective was not there when the crime occurred.

The detective collects clues and reads the crime scene.

None of their DNA needs to be excluded from the analysis, because they were not there to contaminate the scene.

Of course, we are not the first to compare research to a crime scene. Carlo Ginzburg, who recently passed away, wrote a piece comparing the historian to the detective.

Starter for 10: Do you know which piece I mean?

Historians never get to observe the crime as it happens.

Historical research follows a logic of reconstructing the scene based on clues and what remains of the event.

Social scientists do that far more rarely — they always want to be there to observe the phenomena.

But often they can’t.

So they ask people about the event or issue they are interested in.

But that is not actually the same as seeing it with your own eyes.

Now, when we observe organizations doing their thing, we see very little of what makes them tick.

Why is that?

Because in practice, much of the work of organizing is now digital: email, Slack channels, video calls.

Digital ethnography has been exploiting this for some time.

But what are they observing? Are they actually there all the time? Some are. But not always. So are they effectively accessing a digital archive presented as direct observation? And does that matter?

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What about Ginzburg?

There is one piece, but many versions.

Ginzburg originally compared his method to that of Sherlock in the Italian here:

Ginzburg, C. (1979). Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario. In A. Gargani (Ed.), Crisi della ragione: Nuovi modelli nel rapporto tra sapere e attività umane (pp. 57–106). Einaudi.

This was republished in Italian a few years later:

Ginzburg, C. (1986). Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario. In Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia (pp. 158–209). Einaudi.

The (maybe?) best-known version in English, with the freely available PDF:

Ginzburg, C. (1980). Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and scientific method (A. Davin, Trans.). History Workshop Journal, 9(1), 5–36. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/9.1.5

This is another good translation:

Ginzburg, C. (1989). Clues: Roots of an evidential paradigm (J. Tedeschi & A. C. Tedeschi, Trans.). In Clues, myths, and the historical method (pp. 96–125). Johns Hopkins University Press.

It’s a fun read - enjoy!

And that got me thinking.

1. If someone promises me a tool to get rid of a problem, I don’t want to plow through a long preamble (and I am an academic, so clearly more used to doing that kind of thing than the average reader. I still find it annoying.)

2. People still have problems with hallucinated references? (I don’t mean editors or reviewers — I know full well that publishers have spectacularly failed to invest in the straightforward system to make academics’ lives easier. Shameful, but who’s surprised?)

3. Why would anyone go to two different pieces of software to do these checks, when your own AI is perfectly capable doing it for it you? (Yes, even if said AI has created these hallucinations — which means you did not set up your subscription service properly.)

So I decided to write a post about it.

(Also in this post, does you AI know you from their training? Scroll down.)

Grounding your AI

Your AI draws on training data first, and will sometimes say they “inferred” or took it “from memory”. Be very wary when it does. If not properly set up, it may not even tell you. In that case, you have a problem.

Also, if you want to work seriously with an AI, make sure you have a subscription version. The free stuff won’t help you here.

Three things you need to do to get more out of your AI:

1. Create an instruction file (usually a free-text field within settings) that tells your AI how you want it to work with you.

2. Switch on memory. Check once in a while what is in there, and if that reflects what you want from your tool.

3. Familiarise yourself with skills/connectors/tools/plug-ins and make sure you have what you need here. Especially in Claude Co-Work, there are very useful ones available.

4. Read what releases are there and see what other users post about.

5. If you are very advanced, you may build your own. I am not there. Not even with vibecoding. But I sometimes like what people do when they make it available on Github.

From here on in, I can only tell you about my own set-up, which I find very good and suspect might be very good, period. On LinkedIn, a computing scientist from Germany asked why I did not just use Elicit or Consensus, which are built to do literature work. That was a good reminder to check these tools again; I gave up on them more than a year ago because I did not find them good enough. But they have really improved, so I endorse this message.

But I also said to the guy that I use MCP access to my own library and Scholar Gateway, which is pretty much the Swiss army knife when you work with and search for literature. I got no response on that. I suspect that, from my experience with German men (being German and growing up in Germany, living there until my mid-20s), this means he did not know you could do that with an MCP, and he was not going to say that publicly to a woman without a degree in computer science. But, you know, I might be wrong…

My Claude set-up

So here’s what I do with my Claude.

1. Global instructions

Tells it how I want to work and what my priorities are. For example, my file includes sentences such as these:

• I value precision and thoughtfulness over obsequiousness or overpoliteness.

• Always be clear about what you do not know, or where your conclusions are tentative.

• Always check everything for hallucinated references and flag them.

• Verify your own outputs as much as possible.

• Avoid classic AI phrasing and uses

I have a colleague who uses the other major AI frontier model. He says he set it to “spikey” because he wants it to give him a bit of lip.

Each to their own. I use Claude, which I doubt could josh you even if you tried. It’s very serious. It’s like your very-well-read aunt whose sense of humour is at best occasional.

2. Switch on memory and search across chats

By switching on memory and allowing the tool to search across your chats, it builds up context across interactions and learning preferences you may be less aware of. When it works well, it draws on prior analysis and chats when I ask it a question without context, and it can establish a context and give a better answer.

If you use it for lots of personal stuff, I would be more concerned, and use incognito mode and regularly wipe memory. But I don’t. It’s my Swiss army knife for work.

You can see what is in the memory on Claude via settings. Check it once in a while.

I’ve noticed that Claude regularly points out that I might not have time to do something. Me, addicted to overcommitment? It’s got my number, alright.

3. There are tons of useful integrations

Too many to go into, in fact. But if you have favourite integrations, skills, etc., do note them in the comments! I always like to learn more.

I will tell you about two here that I think are essential for academics.

3.1 Scholar Gateway

Wiley launched Scholar Gateway. In Claude, it is known as a Connector. It’s really good because it allows Claude to pull on the publishing data in there to both search and confirm references. If you do nothing else, make sure you get this. It is available to subscribers via institutional access and as a limited free trial to researchers. There are other options for your AI, so it is not the end of the world.

3.2 Zotero MCP

Two things to consider:

• This is by a private developer posted on GitHub. Not all of them are reliable, so it depends on your risk appetite. I’ve been using this for months, and it has been fine.

• You need to be using Zotero as your reference manager for this to make any sense. Should be obvious.

For info, this is a discussion of various tools out there. I think I used Zotero MCP. It works well and has a lot of fine-grained controls on what you want to allow Claude to do.

So, here you go, you have the nuts-and-bolts now, as promised. After the paywall, my evaluation of how well it works, examples of what to do with it and when dedicated tools perform better than my Swiss army knife solution. Also, do the major AI models “know” you? That is, are you in their training data? Whether your anxiety is based on privacy or on status, you can find out now.

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Editorial

Reclaiming history in IB research: expanding interdisciplinary inquiry through historical contextualization

• Stephanie Decker

• Geoffrey Jones

• Klaus Meyer

• Rebecca Piekkari

• Catherine Welch

History is not merely prologue to International Business (IB) research—it is a constitutive element of how we understand multinational enterprises, foreign market entry, institutional change, and cross-border value creation. Despite increased recognition of interdisciplinary collaboration, IB scholars remain unclear about how to rigorously integrate historical methods and insights from Business History. In this special issue introduction, we address the impediments to closer interdisciplinary collaboration between the two disciplines. We identify three critical points of clarification: temporal distance, archival sources, and historical contextualization. We propose integrative research designs that embed historical analysis directly into IB theorizing. Such research designs enable IB scholars to address causal questions, explore legacy effects, and develop time and context-sensitive theories. Historically-contextualized IB research can explain why standardized theories fail in specific contexts, reveal path-dependent sequences that quantitative snapshots miss, and develop theories that account for deep institutional and temporal variation. We establish evaluation criteria for rigorous historical research and create bridges between IB and Business History scholarship. By clarifying concepts, providing research designs, and modeling best practices, this special issue expands IB’s explanatory capacity for the time-embedded, context-sensitive phenomena that define international business.

Research Articles

Indigenization as a distinct path of expropriation: French and US investments in Spain, 1870s–1959

• Adoración Álvaro-Moya

• Rafael Castro Balaguer

• Caterina Moschieri

This study examines why and how multinational corporations (MNCs) may see their local assets transferred to or absorbed by their host-country partners. Drawing on transaction cost economics, we argue that factors beyond the traditional ones proposed by international business research—e.g., entry mode, country risk, or elite ties—can help explain this indigenization of MNC subsidiaries. Using a comparative historical analysis of French and US MNCs operating in Spain from the 1870s to 1959 and an in-depth analysis of the French Banque de Paris et des Pay-Bas (Paribas) and US International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), we examine why similar investment strategies and partnerships with the local elite led to divergent outcomes under increasing political instability and economic nationalism in Spain. French subsidiaries became more likely than their US counterparts to be indigenized by local partners, due to their operations in maturing sectors and the local partners’ growing ability to substitute foreign capabilities, shifting asset complementarities. Our findings advance the international business literature by conceptualizing indigenization as a distinct mechanism through which an MNC may see its assets expropriated by its local partners, often via strategic and discretionary transfer shaped by shifting complementarities, maturing industries, and persistent relational ties.

Success and failure in family firm internationalization: The case of Rothschild

• Liena Kano

• Luciano Ciravegna

• Andrew Johnston

• Alain Verbeke

In this study, we examine over 100 years of Rothschild’s international activity: we analyze this multinational enterprise’s (MNE’s) cross-border transfer of family-derived firm-specific advantages (FSAs) and the challenges of recombination thereof with novel resources. Family-derived FSAs hinge on the resources and features of the owning and controlling family. During the period of Rothschild’s international success in 19th-century Europe, the family itself served as a recombination mechanism for linking family-derived FSAs with complementary resources across borders. However, deploying family-derived FSAs in the American market and recombining these with nonfamily resources was hindered by bifurcation bias (a dysfunctional, affect-based heuristic characterizing family firms). We trace the manifestations of bifurcation bias over time and investigate its multifaceted impact on Rothschild’s internationalization. We suggest that effective resource recombination in host markets can be constrained by a two-stage authentication process. Here, the bifurcation bias in a first stage can influence which complementary resources in foreign markets will be accessed and how these will be integrated inside the firm. In a second stage, bifurcation bias can affect the functioning of the very actors supposed to be linking the complementary resources to be utilized and the extant, family-derived FSAs.

When does historical context matter? Explaining the emergence of competence-creating subsidiaries

• Andrew C. Godley

• Shane Hamilton

• Marrisa Joseph

Despite thorough attention to how context shapes subsidiary behavior, very little IB research has explored the dynamic impact of disruptive changes in historical context on organizational innovations in MNEs. Existing IB theory has robustly theorized the growth of competence-creating subsidiaries from the 1980s to the 2000s. However, our historical research demonstrates that this body of existing theory fails to explain an equally significant growth in subsidiaries with protean competence-creating characteristics from 1945 to 1970. We show that the introduction of the U.K. National Health Service in 1948 precipitated a major upgrade of research capabilities among a near majority of the population of subsidiaries in U.K. pharmaceuticals by 1970. Synthesizing from both IB and literature on historical methods, we analyze the impact of this disruptive transformation in context, identifying the specific mechanisms that produced the rapid growth in what we identify as proto-competence-creating subsidiaries. This occurred in response to a dramatically new context, in ways that differ from those predicted by current theoretical explanations, and led to an institutional innovation hitherto unknown to IB. The implications of this are significant in a contemporary moment of rapid institutional disruption, when existing conceptualizations of subsidiary behavior may increasingly fail to capture real-world dynamics.

How does colonial history matter for expatriate adjustment? The case of Brazilians in Portugal

• Roberta Aguzzoli

• Martyna Śliwa

• Jorge Lengler

• Chris Brewster

• Denise Rossato Quatrin

The literature on expatriation typically assumes that cultural and institutional familiarity facilitates expatriate adjustment. This assumption underplays the role of the historical context, especially the influence of painful colonial pasts that often lie beneath such familiarity. In addition, seeking to capture expatriate adjustment as a single measure, such literature does not engage with the differences in the extent to which expatriates achieve cognitive, behavioral, and affective adjustment. Using a qualitative study addressing the work experiences of Brazilians living in Portugal, we argue that to fully understand expatriate adjustment, we must pay attention to the historical colonial relationship between the expatriate’s home and host country. Specifically, we discuss the importance of social representations of history for how expatriates narrate, interpret, and act in response to their experiences. Our research makes two theoretical contributions. First, we explain how historical colonial relationships affect expatriate adjustment and how this leads to adjustment only being partial. Second, we develop a nuanced understanding of expatriate adjustment by drawing attention to its three interdependent dimensions (cognitive, behavioral, and affective), showing that an expatriate may be well adjusted in one dimension but less adjusted in another. We call for organizations to engage more, and more critically, with history.

Artificial states, ethnicity, and the survival of private participation infrastructure projects in Africa

• Shuo Zhang

• Jane W. Lu

Despite increasing interest, research within the context of Africa, particularly in relation to its unique historical dynamics, remains relatively underexplored in international business (IB). ​Our paper explores how colonial-era historical legacies continue to shape the outcomes of present-day private participation infrastructure (PPI) projects in Africa. By analyzing 301 PPI projects across 102 ethnic groups in 32 African countries, we offer insights into how borders misaligned with pre-colonial ethnic boundaries contribute to conflicts that undermine project viability. The findings reveal that ethnic partitioning, defined as the division of ethnic groups across artificial national borders, negatively impacts PPI project survival, with conflict mediating this relationship. While higher institutional quality mitigates these adverse effects, its impact remains marginal. We incorporate historical perspectives and highlight the importance of considering the path dependence of contemporary institutional environments. It also addresses the growing demand for Africa-focused IB research. By incorporating ethnicity into institutional analyses, our study also challenges the traditional IB assumption regarding the primacy of national borders in business activities. Our study points to the importance of understanding historical backgrounds when doing business in Africa.

The spirit of the times: historical conditions and market-seeking FDI strategies by U.S. alcohol firms

• Xuchang Chen

• Vladislav Maksimov

• Blake Dustin Matthias

• Stephanie Lu Wang

Market-seeking foreign direct investment (FDI) remains central for firms to expand their global presence and seize opportunities abroad. However, existing research often focuses on immediate or near-term drivers related to firms’ market-seeking FDI strategies, and thus neglects the valuable insights a historical perspective can provide. To address this gap, we draw insights from imprinting theory and propose a framework theorizing the dual-layered imprinting of historical conditions stemming from both extreme historical experiences and founding conditions. Using the U.S. alcohol industry as a research context, we employ a mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative and qualitative techniques. Our findings reveal that firms’ experiences during extreme anti-alcohol conditions, such as Prohibition, positively correlate with regulation-driven market-seeking FDI, while firms founded in more pro-alcohol periods prioritize speed-driven market-seeking FDI. Moreover, we identify how unrelated diversification, a strategy consistent with the anti-alcohol imprint but inconsistent with the pro-alcohol imprint, affects the relationship between historical imprints and FDI strategies through imprint amplification or decay. Our qualitative analyses elucidate the role of founders’ and leaders’ strategic decision-making in reinforcing the mechanisms through which historical conditions shape FDI strategy. This longitudinal framework provides insights into imprint formation, transmission, and manifestation, accounting for contextual variations and implications for FDI strategy.

Revisiting the Uppsala model from a history-to-theory perspective: New lessons on network positioning from a global electric company

• Alvaro Ferreira Silva

• Emanuel Gomes

• Ferran Vendrell-Herrero

• David W. Lehman

A firm cannot internationalize on its own. Rather, a network of multiple firms is critical. Accordingly, the Uppsala model has been reformulated in recent years to account for the role of networks in the firm internationalization process. Still unclear, however, is how a firm’s network position evolves—both within individual foreign market entries and across successive entries—under changing firm, industry, and macro conditions. This study utilizes the historical case method to address this gap. Specifically, it examines the birth, rise, and global dominance of Sofina, a Belgian electric company, as it entered various foreign markets from the turn of the 20th century until the start of the Second World War. Our analysis highlights network positioning as a dynamic process that unfolds both within and across market entries. Importantly, these processes are facilitated by ongoing firm commitments of financial, managerial, and physical resources, and are linked to different sources of organizational learning. They are also shaped by global events as well as firm- and industry-level factors. The explanatory model that emerges from this analysis suggests that firms may need to be more agile than previously acknowledged by continuously repositioning themselves within networks to successfully expand their global footprints.

Manufacturing national consent for industrial policy: a microhistorical analysis of Finnish shipbuilding

• Christian Stutz

• Saara Matala

Industrial policy, the use of state power to influence the development of industries, has become increasingly influential in international business, yet its firm-level dynamics remain understudied. Through a history-to-theory approach and microhistorical analysis, we investigate how the Finnish shipbuilding industry employed nonmarket strategies (NMS) to influence outward-oriented industrial policies that supported its international expansion. Grounded in New Institutional Economics, we identify two key industrial policy shifts – in the mid-1950s and early 1980s – that reduced cross-border transaction costs for Finnish shipbuilders to enhance their international competitiveness. Before each shift, the industry proactively aligned its business interests with national policy priorities, engaging in what we term “manufacturing national consent” – positioning the sector as critical to national interests to legitimize supportive policies. We critically assess the double-edged role of NMS in industrial policy, demonstrating that while it creates regulatory capture and hinders alternative economic pathways, it also fosters government–business collaboration, improving the prospects of effective policy design. We further account for country-specific factors and broader inter-country dynamics to analyze policy implications for home-country firms. In all, our study contributes to the revitalization of industrial policy as a topic in the IB discipline by uncovering the active role of firms in shaping policy outcomes.

Parallel internationalization during radical industry transformations: the case of Telecom Finland

• Zeerim Cheung

• Aleksi Niittymies

We examine how radical industry transformations shape firms’ internationalization, addressing the limited theorization of how industry-level dynamicsinfluence internationalization processes. Drawing on a historical case study of Telecom Finland’s internationalization during two radical transformations in the European telecommunications industry (1987–1998), we show how industry transformation simultaneously orients firms toward parallel internationalization and constrains its execution through systemic industry uncertainty, leading to two contributions. First, we offer an industry-driven explanation for why firms internationalize into multiple markets in parallel. Industry transformation enables parallel entries by creating simultaneous opportunities and actively orienting firms toward parallelism, as industry conditions shape what managers interpret as viable responses. Second, we expand understanding of uncertainty in internationalization processes by introducing the concept of systemic industry uncertainty, a form of transformation-driven uncertainty originating at the industry level, shared across actors, interdependent across markets, and irreducible within the relevant decision windows. Distinct from the market-specific uncertainty emphasized in internationalization process literature, systemic industry uncertainty impedes established uncertainty-reduction mechanisms—learning, network-based knowledge, and diversification—showing that uncertainty shapes internationalization in previously unrecognized ways. Our findings suggest that managers should closely follow industry-level developments, as these play a more central role in shaping internationalization than existing models assume.

Catch-up service:

• Historical analysis and AI – what the spreadsheet tells us about AI and work (recent post)

• Publication Strategy for QS Quacquarelli-Symonds World University Rankings (recent post)

• Publishing in Business History (now free)

• Publishing Strategies

Sorry, the video is for full subscribers only, but you get a free tester post, and you can use it here.

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Another busy week with newsletters and updates out from several national business history associations and an important summary from the current state of the campaign to ensure that the BBC Archives remain accessible to researchers and the public. Also, call for papers for next year’s BHC in Mexico, and a workshop in Germany (in German), the new issue of Enterprise & Society is out, and the journal has an advance online review of Beckert’s Capitalism by Lipartito. Also an introduction to a Canadian business archive, and CBHA award winners, as well as the German business history association (GUG) on the AGI Symposium — and no, it is no artificial general intelligence!

Contents

1. BBC Written Archives Campaign

2. CfP BHC 2027

3. E&S new issue & advance online

4. Selected announcements

5. CBHA: Award winners

6. CBHA: Canadian business archives

7. AGI Symposium

8. CfP “Trade, insurance and monetary systems in the age of imperialism” [German]

1. Update from the BBC Written Archives Campaign

Welcome to our latest update about the Written Archives Centre campaign. We have news of an important breakthrough for staff and users, as well as some recent press coverage.

The win

A small number of WAC users meet with the BBC archives team three times a year to hear about plans and as a forum in which to raise concerns. As we explained in our submission to the government’s Charter consultation:

“it was confirmed at a user group meeting in November 2025 that staff at WAC - a superb team of professional archivists who assist with queries - have been instructed not to inform users of the existence of unavailable files. We believe this is also intended to minimise workload, as the information could legitimately be used as the basis of Freedom of Information access requests.”

To explain the last point, we are aware that a number of WAC users have been turning to the separate path of FOI in order to attempt to access the files they need for research. This is a legitimate process that has been effective in most cases that we know of but the process relies on the user first having the awareness that emails from WAC archivists will sometimes elide vital information. The staff would simply tell you about available vetted files. As matters stood, if a user then responded and specifically asked for information about unvetted files, the archivist would have to seek permission from a manager before responding. This was needless bureaucracy, delayed the process for the user, and was clearly an infringement on the professionalism of WAC’s archivists.

As was pointed out by users attending the November meeting, this policy - introduced by the Lead Curator - risked making us look foolish years down the track when files were then revealed to have existed all along and which contradicted our published writing on the subject. The Head of Library and Curatorial Services grasped why this was an issue, but it was not until six months later that she sat down with WAC staff in order to hear their views.

It has since been decided that WAC archivists will no longer need to seek permission from managers to share information with users about unvetted files. They will be free to use their discretion. However, it remains incumbent on WAC users to press for information about unvetted material.

Our advice is to keep this new arrangement in mind and consider asking in first instance for the file references and exact titles of both vetted and unvetted material relating to your area of interest. This will not be received as presumptuous or problematic, but an opportunity to give you a full answer.

The reason why we stress the importance of file references and exact titles for unvetted material is so that you can submit an FOI request with a degree of accuracy. However, please do not refer to that directly in your correspondence with WAC staff as it is not something they can get involved with. You are more than welcome to contact us at the campaign group if you need advice on this entirely separate and quite straightforward FOI process.

We consider this an important win for staff, and a win for the campaign to have affected positive change both for staff and users. It is of course less than ideal, and we continue to seek a restoration of the system of on request vetting, but it will make a positive difference for the time being.

Parliament

We are currently developing a campaign within Parliament as the Charter makes its way through the two houses. For those new to this mailing list we encourage you to look at our previous submissions to the Government consultation and the shorter version to the Commons Select Committee consultation. These documents sum up the campaign so far and the issues at stake.

Please get in touch if you have ideas or contacts who may take an interest in our determination to strengthen the status of the WAC within the next Framework Agreement between BBC and government.

Press Coverage

Finally we can now share with you the full text of the column in the June issue of Sight and Sound by its regular television columnist Andrew Male. Within his wider assessment of how the BBC is using its archive online, he includes comments from us on the situation at WAC.

We’ll be in touch with more updates in the near future.

Ian Greaves, Kate Murphy and John Wyver

2. CfP Business History Conference 2027

The Business History Conference invites submissions for its 2027 annual meeting, to be held March 18–20 at the Sheraton Mexico City Maria Isabel Hotel in Mexico City, Mexico.

The conference theme, Business History and Political Economy, focuses on the role of corporations as political actors that shape and influence the economic and political environments in which they operate. The program committee welcomes panels and papers that examine how firms develop strategies to influence these systems. Submissions addressing emerging or less developed economies, as well as corporations operating across borders, are particularly encouraged. Interdisciplinary approaches drawing on political science, economics, and sociology are also welcome.

The committee prioritizes fully formed panel proposals (3–4 papers, chair, and discussant), though individual paper submissions will be considered and organized into thematic sessions.

Each proposal should include a one-page abstract (300 words) and a one-page CV for each participant. Panel proposals must also include a cover letter with session details and organizer contact information.

Submission deadline: October 16, 2026
Submission instructions: https://thebhc.org/proposal-instructions
Notification of acceptance: December 15, 2026

Graduate students and emerging scholars are encouraged to apply and may be eligible for travel support.

Additional events include the Dissertation Colloquium and the workshop in Spanish, Tercer Taller “Empresariado en América Latina en Perspectiva Histórica y Global”, held prior to the conference.

3. Enterprise & Society new issue & advance online

You can find the new issue here.

I really enjoyed reading this advance online review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History:

Kenneth Lipartito. “Capitalism’s Wild Ride”, https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2026.10133

Ken considers the book from the perspective of business historians, which I feel is urgently necessary, and he provides a very balanced read. Capitalism has increasingly become a byword for dealing with the economy and economic actors, if you do not want to get bogged down in the details of business and organising, or in national variations.

4. Selected announcements

Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. The deadline for proposals for the Krooss prize is November 14. Call now open for 2026 dissertations.

Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship Program. The deadline for proposals for Research and Dissertation fellowships is November 1 2026.

Hagley Prize and Ralph Gomory Prize Book Nominations. The deadline for publishers to submit new books for consideration for the best book in business history award is November 30. Four copies of each book must accompany the nomination.

The program for the World Congress of Business History is now available: https://unternehmensgeschichte.de/db/app/WCBH2026. As part of our Conference programming, we are excited to offer a series of podcasts about Toronto and its business history.

• Episode One: “A Visitor’s History of the University of Toronto,” is produced by Dr. Steve Penfold and Dr. Louis Reed-Wood and tells a remarkable institutional story in twenty minutes, providing the context for our Conference site.

• Episode Two: “A (Very) Brief History of Toronto,” produced and hosted by Dr. Steve Penfold and Dr. Louis Reed-Wood, gives a wonderful insight of the history of the city and how it has evolved into its modern form in twenty minutes.

• Episode Three: “The Bata Shoe Museum,” takes a look at the Bata Shoe Museum, an absolutely unique and truly fascinating institution located just on the edge of the University of Toronto campus. The Museum is one of the optional events during the Congress. Our hosts talk to Elizabeth Semmelhack, Director and Senior Curator at the Museum, and discuss capitalism, labour, gender, the exhibits at the museum, and what shoes tell us about human history--and also that time when the Ontario Provincial Police brought a shoe mystery to the Museum.

CFA for the John E. Rovensky Fellowships in U.S. Business or Economic History (2026-2027) and the John E. Rovensky Fellowships in International Business or Economic History (2026-2027) is open through July 6th.

Networks of Creative Persuasion in Advertising and Marketing — Conference at the Hagley Library, November 6, 2026. Submit proposals of no more than 500 words and a one-page C.V. to Carol Lockman at clockman@Hagley.org.

19th Annual Meeting of the African Economic History Network — Gothenburg, Sweden, October 23–24, 2026. More information.

IX Congreso Latinoamericano de Historia Económica (CLADHE), que se celebrará en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Ciudad de México) del 28 de junio al 1 de julio de 2027. CFP here.

First call for sessions for the 2028 World Economic History Congress in Montevideo, Uruguay, is now open. The deadline is in September and sessions can be submitted here.

5. CBHA Annual Award Winners

The Canadian Business History Association (CBHA) is proud to announce four winners in our annual or biannual award categories. We wish to extend our congratulations again to:

Brian Gettler - who was awarded the 2026 Best Scholarly Article in Canadian Business History for his article titled: “The Vincent-Picard Family’s Investments: Wendat Wealth and Notarized Contracts in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.”

Clarence Hatton-Proulx - (a former CBHA Kobrak Fellow) who was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Best Scholarly Article category for an article titled: “The Role of Forecasts in Planning for Energy Infrastructure: A Historical Look at Past Futures in Postwar Quebec.”

Joe Borsato - who was awarded the CBHA’s 2026-2028 Kobrak Fellowship for his post-doctoral research project titled: “Vast Rupert’s Land: Prince Attash’s Voyage and Cree Commerce in the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Bay.”

Letian Wang - who was awarded the 2026 Desautels Research Fund in Private Enterprise, History & Law - for his PhD research currently titled: “Farewell to The Chinese Times” studies the demise of The Chinese Times (Tai Hon Kong Bo) newspaper in Canada.

Congratulations to all, and thank you for advancing the study of Canadian business history!

5. CBHA Archives Spotlight

Archive Spotlight! Explore the Business History Collections at the University of Waterloo

Did you know that Special Collections & Archives (SCA) at the University of Waterloo is one of the largest local history repositories in the Waterloo region? I spoke with archivist Nicole Marcogliese to learn more about their collections, specifically those related to business history in order to give the CBHA network an inside look at what is available to researchers.

Researchers can access SCA’s collections online in two ways: by exploring descriptive records in SCA’s Archives Database, or by browsing a curated selection of digitized materials in the Waterloo Digital Library. Both are excellent starting points for research; however, the Archives Database is particularly useful as it functions like an index and organizes materials into distinct thematic collection strengths that are clearly presented on the homepage.

For those interested in studying business history, be sure to explore SCA’s regional development, industry, and settlement collection strength, which provides access to descriptions of relevant materials. This thematic area includes numerous collections that support research on a wide range of business history topics. I selected two to highlight here:

Dare Foods Limited is a family-owned Canadian food manufacturer producing cookies, crackers, candies, and fine breads across facilities in Ontario, Quebec and South Carolina. The company began in 1889 as a grocery store founded by Charles H. Doerr, evolving into a biscuit and candy manufacturer by the early 20th century. Under Carl M. Doerr (Carl Dare), the company expanded internationally, introducing Dare products to over 40 countries and acquiring several food companies. The Dare Foods Limited collection in SCA documents the company’s operations and growth through records like account books, meeting minutes, letters patent, share registers, financial statements, and photographs as well as biscuit, cracker, and candy formulas and package samples.

Descriptive records for this collection can be found in the Archives Database here and a selection of digitized content from the collection can be viewed online via the Waterloo Digital Library here.

Photo caption: Photograph of John Doerr sitting in the driver’s seat of the Doerr’s Candies delivery car in front of The Gettas Restaurant. Citation: University of Waterloo Libraries. Special Collections & Archives. Dare Foods Limited fonds. C.H. Doerr and Company : Doerr’s Candies delivery car and driver. GA163-31-399.

The Dominion Rubber Company, a division of the Canadian Consolidated Rubber Company based in Montreal, was one of the largest industrial employers in Kitchener-Waterloo during the twentieth century. The company operated the Dominion Tire plant on Strange Street in Kitchener and later became part of Uniroyal. The company played a significant role in the region’s manufacturing growth, producing tires and other rubber products. The Dominion Rubber Company collection in SCA captures the company’s history through photographs, newsletters, administrative records, and other materials related to factory operations, employees, and corporate activities. These records provide insight into both the company’s development and the broader industrial history of the Waterloo Region.

Descriptive records for the Dominion Rubber Company collection can be found in the Archives Database here and a selection of digitized content from the collection can be viewed online via the Waterloo Digital Library here.

Photo caption: Photograph of Dominion Tire employees standing on the factory floor around a large piece of machinery and looking at camera. Left to right: Fred Tremble, Bert Lavigne, Bert Pinnell, unidentified, and Stan Boyes. Citation: University of Waterloo Libraries. Special Collections & Archives. Dominion Rubber Company fonds. Dominion Tire staff. GA335-7-430_016.

These are just two of the many business history collections in SCA at the University of Waterloo! If you would like to speak with SCA staff about these collections or explore them further in person, please find the department’s contact information below. Additional details are available on the Visit SCA page.

Special Collections & Archives

University of Waterloo Libraries

Congratulations to SCA on celebrating 50 years of preserving local heritage this year!

6. AGI Symposium

No, it is not artifical general intelligence, but a new joint symposium between Austria, Germany and Italy - below the description and announcement in German:

AGI-Symposium «Business History in Austria, Germany and Italy» in Rom

Die Gesellschaften für Unternehmensgeschichte in Deutschland (GUG), Italien (ASSI) und Österreich (ÖGU) haben ein gemeinsames Projekt ins Leben gerufen: Das „AustriaGermanyItaly“ (AGI)-Symposium, in dem das Fach Business History im internationalen Kontext diskutiert und weiterentwickelt werden soll. Konkret geht es dabei um eine Darstellung der Forschungsschwerpunkte in den einzelnen Ländern, aber auch um Praxisnähe sowie um Möglichkeiten eines Brückenschlages zwischen Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft. Das erste AGI-Symposium ging am 8./9. April 2026 sehr erfolgreich am Österreichischen Historischen Institut (ÖHI) in Rom über die Bühne. Die ÖGU dankt dem Team des ÖHI rund um Direktor Andreas Gottsmann sehr herzlich für die Gastfreundschaft!

Für 2027 ist nunmehr eine zweite AGI-Ausgabe fixiert, die am 1./2. April in der Deutschen Handelskammer Wien über die Bühne gehen wird.

7. CfP “Trade, insurance and monetary systems in the age of imperialism” [German]

Call for Papers

23. Sitzung des Arbeitskreises Bank- und Versicherungsgeschichte am Freitag, den 27. November 2026 im Hause der ODDO BHF SE, Gallusanlage 8, 60329 Frankfurt am Main

Handel, Versicherung und Zahlungsverkehr im Zeitalter des Imperialismus

Im Zeitalter des europäischen Imperialismus expandierte der internationale Handel in einem bis dahin nicht gekannten Maße und stellte damit nicht nur Kaufleute und Reeder, sondern auch die mit ihnen zusammenarbeitenden Banken und Versicherungen vor wachsende Herausforderungen. Diese betra-fen das erforderliche Wissen über neue Waren und Märkte, über neue Geschäftspartner, ihre jeweili-gen Handelspraktiken, Sprachen und sozialen Konventionen sowie – nicht zuletzt – die Bereitschaft zur Erkundung neuer Handelsrouten über Land und See sowie die Kenntnis der sich unter Umständen rasch wandelnden politischen Rahmenbedingungen. Aber was trieb diesen expandierenden Handel des 19. Jahrhunderts eigentlich an? War es in erster Linie die Initiative und das Gewinnstreben der Kaufleute und Reeder? Welchen Stellenwert besaß die staatliche Handels- und Kolonialpolitik?

In seiner 23. Sitzung möchte der Arbeitskreis Bank- und Versicherungsgeschichte diesen Fragen am Beispiel der Entfaltung des deutschen Handels mit und vor allem auch in Ost- und Südostasien im 19. Jahrhundert genauer nachgehen. Dabei sollen insbesondere die folgenden Aspekte erörtert werden:

▪ Welche Waren wurden von deutschen Kaufleuten und Reedern zu welchen Bedingungen und mit welchen Erträgen im jeweiligen wirtschaftlichen und politischen Umfeld der Länder Ost- und Süd-ostasiens gehandelt? Wie sahen die von ihnen vorgefundenen, veränderten und neu geknüpften Handels- und Schifffahrtsnetzwerke aus?

▪ Wie haben die deutschen Kaufleute und Reeder ihren Handel mit und in Ost- und Südostasien finanziert und versichert? Wie wurde der Zahlungsverkehr mit ihren Geschäftspartnern abgewi-ckelt? Mit welchen Banken haben deutsche Kaufleute und Reeder vor Ort und in Europa bevorzugt zusammengearbeitet?

▪ Welche Zahlungsbilanz- und Währungsprobleme ergaben sich aus dem expandierenden Handel mit und in Ost- und Südostasien? Wie konnten Handels- und Finanzkrisen wie etwa die von 1857 von den beteiligten Handelshäusern bewältigt werden? Welche Rolle spielten dabei die Zentral-banken?

Dieser Call for Papers richtet sich an Historiker:innen, die laufende oder abgeschlossene Forschungs-projekte zum diesem Thema präsentieren wollen. Der Workshop ist für Teilnehmer:innen aller Qualifi-kationsstufen offen, für Doktorand:innen in der Frühphase ihrer Dissertation bis hin zu habilitierten Historiker:innen. Vorschläge zu Vorträgen, die einen oder auch mehrere dieser Aspekte aufgreifen und exemplarisch behandeln, senden Sie bitte inklusive kurzer Angaben zu Ihrer Person (zusam-men etwa eine Textseite) als PDF-Dokument per E-Mail bis zum 17. Juli 2026 an die Ge-schäftsstelle der Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte e.V., zu Händen von Ralph Dieter Tarka, tarka@unternehmensgeschichte.de.

So, if you do not know the QS ranking, you might be in a country and at a university that are not reliant on overseas students. But if you work in the UK or Australia, you are guaranteed to know what it is and why it is important: it is the single most important determinant in recruiting Chinese students.

As the story goes, Sheffield dropped out of the QS100 one year, and its international student recruitment cratered, only to recover in the next year, when the university rejoined the top 100.

If that still sounds absurd to you because you are somewhere where this does not matter, this statement is probably only slightly exaggerated: Being in the QS100 makes the difference between another round of redundancies (possibly not the voluntary kind) and no redundancies for universities in the UK and Australia.

And yes, we also have the REF, but it is not annual, and that is increasingly the signal, not the money.

That’s all grand, but why am I writing about it on History in Organizations? Because business school academics who can publish in historical journals (and get cited, important caveat!) have literally just hit the jackpot.

And this is super-secret, not widely known at all, knowledge, so the rest is behind a paywall and will stay there.

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Our introduction to the History Special Issue in the Journal of International Business Studies is finally out (more on the SI later). There are quite a few historical papers and events at the Academy of International Business 2026 conference in Manchester, UK, this week. Also, the Association of Business Historians 2026 conference overlaps with AIB at the end of the week, especially the Doctoral Workshop (programme below) and part of the main conference (programme also below). That’s been slightly inconvenient for me, as I am track chair for research methods at AIB and incoming ABH president, so I am missing my own paper presentation to make it down to Reading from Manchester on Friday. May the gods of traffic smile on me this week…

1. New article alert

Really excited that the introduction for our forthcoming special issue in the Journal of International Business Studies has finally been published! We discuss the areas where IB and historical research differ, and how the two can be brought into closer conversation. The publisher sent me this free link for distribution.

2. AIB 2026 Historical Papers

This year’s Academy of International Business in Manchester offers pretty rich pickings for historians:

The Past, Present, and Future of the Multinational Enterprise: Implications for International Business and Policy

Chair: Jonathan Doh

In honour of the 50th Anniversary of Buckley and Casson’s “The Future of the MNE”

The panel examines which insights from the Future of the Multinational Enterprise are relevant, enduring, and applicable to present day international business and public policy contexts, and those perspectives that require updating, adapting, or abandoning in the present-day global environment. It further projects 50 years into the future, asking what we expect the role of MNEs, governments, and other international organizations to be and how they would compare to the perspectives from the book published a century prior.

Panelists:

• Jonathan Doh, Villanova University

• Peter Buckley, University of Manchester

• Mark Casson, University of Reading

• Sarianna Lundan, Aalto University

• Jun Du, Aston University

Research Methods Qualitative Clinic: Historical Approaches in Management Research

This AIB research methods clinic explores the rich potential of historical methods for advancing management and organizational research. Led by Prof. Stephanie Decker, participants will explore how historical approaches offer unique pathways to theoretical development and empirical insight. Focusing on different approaches to historical research—from using history as an empirical setting to employing historiography as a theoretical resource—the clinic will provide practical methodological insights for international business scholars.

Facilitator:

• Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham

This session is organized by the AIB Research Methods SIG.

Fellows Café: MNEs and Populist Politics

Fellows Cafés are open to all conference participants. Please join us at this AIB Fellow led small group discussion focused on an IB topic of current and mutual interest.

Participating Fellow(s):

• Klaus Meyer, Western University

Several countries have seen a rise in populist political parties, in some case they attained influence in governments. For MNEs, this changes key aspects of the institutional environment in which they operate. Starting from a historical perspective, the Café will explore the strategic options and ethical challenges MNEs face.

Revisiting the Past to Understand the Future: Archival Research as a Tool for Advancing International Business Scholarship [3.1.6]

Chair: Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki

Revisiting the Past to Understand the Future: Archival Research as a Tool for Advancing International Business Scholarship

• Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham

• Giulia Galizzi, University of Vienna

• Eriikka Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, University of Turku

Regulation and Technology

Chair: Shengwen Li

Geopolitical Projects Are What MNEs Make of Them: A Social Constructivist Perspective on Interfirm Relations in the Belt and Road Initiative in Africa

• Simon Züfle, Reutlingen University

Geopolitical Strategy of MNEs: Effects of Corporate Governance Institutions

• Chia-Wen Hsu, National Chung Cheng University

• Yung-Chih Lien, National Taiwan University

• Yen-Hsien Lee, Chung Yuan Christian University

Political Stability, Economic Policy Uncertainty, and High-Growth SMEs in Europe

• Ignacio Requejo, University of Salamanca

• Fadi Hawach, Bethlehem University

• Chao Zhang, Northumbria University

Multinational Enterprises and Democratic Reversals

• Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham

• Marcelo Bucheli, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Thomas DeBerge, Loyola University Chicago

3. ABH 2026 Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop in Business History

2nd July 2026, in-person only

Henley Business School, University of Reading

8:30-9:00 Registration and welcome

9:00-10:30 Session 1 (Chair: Nicholas Wong, NU)

Paper 1

Jaclyn Hiebert (UoE) - Heritage brands: How history and sustainability influence the brand narrative

Paper 2

Helen Lu (UoB) - Passing the torch: The historical legacy of colonial occupation on modern corporate philanthropy

Paper 3

Olufunke Olawale (UWS) - Between two worlds: Dual embeddedness, kinship trust, and Nigerian diaspora entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom

10:30-11:00 Morning Break

11:00-12:30 Session 2 (Chair: Niamh Brennan, UCD)

Paper 1

Sophia Wigglesworth (UoY) - Responsibilisation in the pre-paid funeral market

Paper 2

Vanessa Pinheiro (UoY, UECE) - The historical organization of DNOCS in light of Historical Organization Studies and critical organizational history

Paper 3

Matthieu Kwasniuk-Zelazny (PSL) - Represent to control: A historico-ethnographic analysis of American managerial institutions in the twentieth century

12:30-13:30 Lunch Break

13:30-14:30 Session 3 (Chair: Richard Marks, Oxf.)

Paper 1

Simon A.C. Martin (UoS) - Brunel – The father of the high-speed railway, reframing the Great Western Railway through a business management lens (1835–1948)

Paper 2

Yasser Alvi (Cantab.) - Infrastructure finance as British geoeconomics: A comparative Study, 1840s–1914

14:30-15:00 Afternoon break

15:00-16:00 Session 4 (Chair: Simon Mollan, UoY)
Paper 1

Qinxian Zhang (UoG) - Comparison of the impact of the EU and the US antitrust laws on M&A strategies of multinational enterprises in the digital economy era

Paper 2

Carlito Junior (UNIRIO) - Merchant and tileworks owner: The firm Bulhões & Faria, credit relations and production at the Fazenda do Anhangá (Estrela, c. 1850–1882)

16:00-17:00 Joint Plenary Session on Academic Publishing

Chair: Lucy Newton (UoR), Former Associate Editor at Business History
Speakers: Adam Nix (UoB), Associate Editor and outgoing Book Reviews Editor at Business History.

Rosie Nix, Managing/ Administrative Editor, Business History

Michael Heller (NU), Editor of numerous special issues, former editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series Debates in Business History

4. ABH2026 Full conference programme

Main Conference Sessions

Parallel Session 1 1A: Archives, histories and approaches

Friday 3rd July 2026, 09.30-11.00 Room: 108; Chair: TBC

1. Who do archives serve? The organization of historical archives through the lens of historical organization studies and critical organizational history – Vanessa Pineiro (State University of Ceará/University of York), Ana Silvia Rocha Ipiranga (State University of Ceará), Gabriele Ferreira (State University of Ceará)

2. Business History in an other form: the Institute for the History of Aluminium (IHA) at the service of Business History - Léa Rémy (Institute for the History of Aluminium)

3. From Memory to Method: Oral History as a Bridge between Theory and Practice in Business History Education – Michaela Tasotti (University of Graz)

1B: Early Modern trade, finance and innovation

Friday 3rd July 2026, 09.30-11.00 Room: G10; Chair: TBC

1. Trade in Luxuries within the British Empire, 1697-1780 – Karolina Hutkova (London School of Economics), Noam Yuchtman (London School of Economics)

2. How did the 18th century businessman Christopher Wilson move money without using banks? – Richard Senior (University of Cambridge)

3. Who wants to be a Millionaire? Bankruptcy and Failure in the Pursuit of Innovation – Joe Lane (University of Reading)

1C: Retail, infrastructure and logistics in the twentieth century

Friday 3rd July 2026, 09.30-11.00 Room: G15; Chair: TBC

1. Motorways, Juggernauts and Supermarkets: The Transformation of British Freight and Retail 1958-1973 – James Fowler (University of Essex), Roy Edwards (University of Southampton)

2. Bricolage Dynamics and Strategic Renewal under prolonged scarcity: The Case of Sun Sun Department Store in wartime Shanghai, 1937–1945 – Guting Shen (University of Birmingham)

3. Managing Knowledge Across Acquired Stores House of Fraser and the Transfer of Tacit Practices – Yamur Gunduz (University of Reading)

Plenary Panel 1

New Directions and New Opportunities: Joint ABH-BAC Spotlight on UK Business Archives

Friday 3rd July 2026, 11.30-13.00

Room: G11; Chairs: Matthew Hollow (University of York); Mike Anson (Bank of England/BAC)

1. Philippa Mole - Head of Archive, The Guardian Foundation

2. Claire Tunstall - Global Head of Art, Archives and Records Management, Unilever

3. Caroline Gould - Principal Archivist, The Museum of English Rural Life and Special Collections, University of Reading

4. Phyllis Macfarlane – Chair of the AMSR’s Content Committee

Parallel Session 2

2A: Risk, trust and tax avoidance

Friday 3rd July 2026, 14.00-15.30 Room: 108; Chair: TBC

1. Asset Management in the Long Run: The Scottish Investment Trust 1888 – 2021 – Graeme Acheson (University of Strathclyde), Gareth Campbell (Queen’s University Belfast) and Patrick Herbst (University of Stirling)

2. Risk Management and Financial Innovation in Pre-WW1 London: The Case of Option Certificates – Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos (The Open University) and Oluwatoyin Dosumu (University of Manchester)

3. Tax Planning, Avoidance and Evasion: Business Profits in World War One Britain – Mark Billings (University of Exeter)

2B: Banks and banking practices across time and space

Friday 3rd July 2026, 14.00-15.30 Room: G10; Chair: TBC

1. New Zealand banking iconography in London: co-creating wealth in the context of colonialism and the British Empire – Billie Lythberg (University of Auckland) and Lucy Newton (Henley Business School)

2. The Bank of England and the rescue of Armstrongs, 1921-1936 – Valerio Cerretano (Università di Firenze)

3. ‘Emerging from the Shadows’, Britain’s Eighteenth-Century Direct Tax System – Amy Stanning (Lancaster University)

2C: The emergence and evolution of industries

Friday 3rd July 2026, 14.00-15.30 Room: G15; Chair: TBC

1. Football industry in Victorian England: a case study of industry emergence – Alessandro Giudice (Bayes Business School), Alessandro Giudici (Bayes Business School) and Paolo Aversa (King’s College London)

2. The Tyneside industrial cluster, 1840-1910: agency and ‘co-operative competition’ – John F. Wilson (Northumbria University) and Mark Stoddart (Northumbria University)

3. Responsibility in the Pre-Paid Funeral Market: 1980-2026 – Sophia Wigglesworth (University of York)

Parallel Session 3

3A: The State and Industrial Policy

Saturday 4th July 2026, 09.00-10.30 Room: 108; Chair: TBC

1. High tech state venture capital in the UK; the National Enterprise Board and Inmos – Leon Gooberman (CardiC University) and Max Munday (CardiC University)

2. License to Fail: The Rise and Fall of Indian Airlines under Postcolonial State Ownership (1953 – 1991) – Hrick Das (Queen’s University Belfast)

3. Varieties of Decolonisation: A Typology of Business-State Relations in Post-Colonial Contexts – Kondwani Happy Ngoma (Stockholm School of Economics) and Emmet Oliver

3B: Banking, finance and policy in the late twentieth century

Saturday 4th July 2026, 09.00-10.30 Room: G10; Chair: TBC

1. Barclays international expansion in Japan in the 1980s – Ian Jones (University of SheCield), Simon Mollan (University of York), and Ayumu Sugawara (Tohoku University)

2. Policy and access to credit: the Commercial Bank of Greece in the 1980s – Virgina-Anastasia Fournari (University of Thessaly)

3. Verifying the role of industrial policy in the development of the British pharmaceutical industry, 1957-1990 – Tom Buckley (University of Sussex) and Andrew Godley (University of Sussex)

3C: Industry during the nineteenth century

Saturday 4th July 2026, 09.00-10.30 Room: G15; Chair: TBC

1. Entrepreneurs and Empires: Role of Business Associations in the Rise and Fall of Sugar Industries in 19th Century Empires – Karolina Hutkova (London School of Economics)

2. Late Entry, Shared Know-how: The Czech Sugar Industry in the Nineteenth Century – Lucie Mařanová (Prague University of Economics and Business)

3. City Bankers, Iron Rails, and the Khedivate: Foreclosing on the Egyptian State Railways – Yasser Alvi (University of Cambridge)

Parallel Session 4

4A: Interdisciplinary connections within Business History

Saturday 4th July 2026, 11.00-13.00 Room: 108; Chair: TBC

1. Acid communism hippie libertarianism? Interpreting the business history of the Grateful Dead – Simon Mollan (University of York)

2. A Five Stage Model of the History of Internal Communication in the United Kingdom – Michael Heller (Newcastle Business School)

3. From under the system to part of the system: workers’ experience of scientific management in the twentieth century – Michael Weatherburn (Imperial College London)

4. Business History in the Mobilities Paradigm: Interdisciplinary Brokerage as Disciplinary Amplification – Simone Fari (Universidad de Granada)

4B: Institutions, regulation and networks

Saturday 4th July 2026, 11.00-13.00 Room: G10; Chair: TBC

1. Nineteenth Century Royal Charters: A Comparative Analysis of Four Charters – Sean Bradley Power (MBS School of Business) and Niamh M. Brennan (University College Dublin)

2. From Acts to Indices: A Policy–Based Measure of State–Business Relations in Britain, 1968–1990 - Maks Ludzinski (London School of Economics)

3. New data on the City-Industry divide debate: networks, financial elites, and industrial connections – Simon Mollan, Phillip Garnett, Chris Corker, Kevin Tennent, (University of York), Mark Billings (University of Exeter)

4C: Entrepreneurship, identities and society

Saturday 4th July 2026, 11.00-13.00 Room: G15; Chair: TBC

1. Gendering Enterprise: Jewish Women’s Social Activism in Early Twentieth-Century – Angelina Palmén (Uppsala University)

2. Sources for the Study of Chilean (Santiago-Based) Women Entrepreneurs in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Possibilities and Limitations – Cecilia Morán (Universidad San Sebastián)

3. Survivors, Refugees, Entrepreneurs: Jewish Refugee Entrepreneurs in Britain, 1933-1971 – Scott Cairns (Liverpool John Moors University)

4. The failure of social enterprises: a historical analysis of social imprinting vs institutional pressure – Xiaoqing Li (Brunel University of London) and Zoi Pittaki (University of Dundee)

4D: Roundtable on Business History PhDs in the Business School: Interdisciplinary Challenges and Opportunities

Saturday 4th July 2026, 11.00-13.00 Room G11; Chair: Stephanie Decker

1. Beyond Context: How History Produces Theoretical Insight – Yamur Gunduz (Henley Business School)

2. Why History in Business Schools? Reflections from a PhD Researcher – Guting Shen (University of Birmingham Business School)

3. Perspective Taking: Understanding Business History Through A Japanese Lens – Jaclyn Hiebert (University of Exeter Business School)

4. Bridging Methods and Disciplines: A Quantitative Researcher’s Perspective - Hailin Lu (University of Birmingham Business School)

5. Doing Qualitative Business History Research in (an Increasingly Quantitative) Economic History Department – Tom Learmouth (London School of Economics)

6. Title TBC: Jessica Lomas (Henley Business School)

Plenary Panel 2

Business History and the Classroom: Reflections on Historical Informed Education

Saturday 4th July 2026, 14.00-15.30 Room: G11; Chair: Peter Miskell

1. Decolonizing Business History Pedagogy: Critical Perspectives for Learning and Education – Stephanie Decker (University of Brimingham)

2. Responsible Management and Business History: A Missing Conversation? – Adam Nix (University of Birmingham)

3. Business History Education in a STEM University Context – Michael Weatherburn (Imperial College London)

4. Recognising the Value, Purpose and Function of Teaching Cases in Business History – Nicholas Wong (Northumbria University)

TL, DR: New here? This is the first in an occasional series pulling apart the historical analogies people reach for when they argue about AI. First up: the spreadsheet. The popular version says it destroyed the bookkeeper while accountants thrived, so AI will do the same for us. That is true as far as it goes, but it leaves a lot out. The bookkeepers and the accountants were mostly different people, with very different fates. And the same spreadsheet gets blamed for the 1980s buyout boom that hollowed out companies. The point is not which analogy is right. It is that analogies choose their moral first and find a history to fit.

I’m a keen reader of the many historical analogies that proliferate around AI, but as a historian, they make me want to check the sources and develop a richer historical context. There are so many of them; I keep discovering more, and I suspect it is beyond the ability of a single human to keep up with them all. As a genre, it has simply exploded. So I am starting a series to unpack what they can and can’t tell you about AI.

The rise of historical analogies reminds me of the sudden interest in the Great Depression after the 2008 Financial Crisis. But these were still the early years of social media, so many remained in the journalistic domain and were generally well-researched and based on long-form treatments (mostly academic, some journalistic). The standard history of financial crises was dusted off again.

This time round, it is a little different because everyone suddenly writes historical analogies, frequently to promote their services or make a living on Substack, and the quality and transparency of their research are… well… mostly focused on producing a compelling story and argument.

Narrative is narrative, right? Never mind that one is fictional, the other historical. Some serious academics make that argument.

But I don’t buy it.

And I think historical analogies are a great way to illustrate why they really aren’t.

Full subscribers get the first read, and I’d love your comments and ideas. After two weeks, I’ll make them freely available and repost them on LinkedIn, because having historians weigh in on overused historical analogies might just be quite important and maybe a public service highlighting the value of the humanities and social sciences.

The Analogies

There are so many, and they are used to argue that we should be wary of the threats of AI as much as that we should be optimistic. Let’s start with the one I most enjoyed reading and researching recently…

The spreadsheet

Disclaimer – I love a good spreadsheet. The spreadsheet analogy is mostly used to reassure people about artificial intelligence and jobs. It goes like this:

In 1979, a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin grew tired of recalculating ledgers by hand and built the first electronic spreadsheet, VisiCalc. Within a few years, the spreadsheet had swallowed the work of the bookkeeper, the clerk who spent their days adding columns of figures. And yet the accounting profession did not collapse, but expanded. The machine took over the arithmetic, and the humans moved up to the interesting work. So, this analogy implies that AI will do the same for the rest of us.

Great story, and the historical details are essentially correct. It provides succour to worried university graduates when white-collar automation comes up. The journalist Tim Harford wrote an entire essay about it in 2024: “What the birth of the spreadsheet teaches us about generative AI.”

Many aspects make this an enticing analogy: the humdrum nature of the spreadsheet today makes it quaint and appealing to think about it as revolutionising everything.

The technology story

So, it is a damn fine technology story. Don’t underestimate what the spreadsheet means, not just to the quants folk, but to anybody in a management position. Being a research director in the late teens, spreadsheets became central to my armoury. And I’m a qualitative researcher.

The origin story is well-documented – sadly, nobody told or taught it to me when I was at Harvard Business School in 2007/08, which seems like a shocking oversight for the Business History group there.

Bricklin, a Harvard MBA student, class of 1978, claimed to have come up with the idea while watching a professor erase and rewrite the interlocking figures of a financial model on the blackboard. He imagined what he later called a word processor that worked with numbers. With Bob Frankston, he founded Software Arts and released VisiCalc for the Apple II at the end of 1979.

It turned out to be the first “killer app”, software so useful that people bought the computer in order to run it. Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3 (1983) overtook it on the IBM PC, and Microsoft Excel eventually won the market once the graphical interface arrived. Steven Levy captured the cultural moment early, in a 1984 essay for Harper’s that charted the emerging “spreadsheet way of knowledge”, a faith that the world could be captured in rows and columns. The article is great and well worth a read – evoking a period from an adult perspective that I remember only as a child. Charmingly, it also reproduces a simple screenshot of what a VisiCalc matrix actually looks like – because it was still an “out there” concept for many at the time.

The VisiCalc (and wider spreadsheet) story is so appealing given what a moderate, non-revolutionary technology introduction it was. Nevertheless, employment numbers can be linked to it very clearly: since 1980, roughly the moment VisiCalc took off, around 400,000 jobs for bookkeepers and accounting clerks disappeared in the United States, while about 600,000 jobs for accountants were added. The numbers behind it come from a much-shared 2015 episode of NPR’s Planet Money on “Spreadsheets!”.

Harford’s piece provides the bigger picture: the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted some 339,000 accountants and accounting clerks in 1980 and around 1.4 million accountants and auditors by 2022. The mechanism is the interesting and paradoxical thing: When something, in this case accounting, gets cheaper, businesses and consumers buy far more of it. Questions that were once too expensive to ask, the endless “what if we changed this assumption” scenarios, suddenly became trivial, so people asked many more of them. Cheaper analysis produced more demand for analysis, and the humans who could interpret it became more valuable rather than less.

This concept highlights that demand increases as prices drop and explains why, for example, automation has not, overall, eliminated human jobs so far. Automation may be substituting for some human tasks, but this can raise the value of the tasks it cannot do, and when demand for the product is elastic (i.e., you’d happily have more of it if you had enough money to afford it), then you will see a net growth in jobs.

The related analogy is that of the bank teller: cash machines did not reduce the number of bank tellers; their roles just shifted towards more human interaction and advice, and less tallying and reconciling of accounts. So, ATMs reduced the cost of running a branch, banks opened more branches, and for a couple of decades, teller numbers rose rather than fell.

Fear not, spreadsheets and bank tellers give hope

The function of any one of these analogies is not to tell the history but to end with the moral of the story, like in Grimm’s fairy tales. So, it is worthwhile watching for the sleight of hand of the analogy magician when they present you with the history.

1. Bookkeeping clerks and accountants are not the same job, really. My mother worked at a bank and then for a tax advisor, essentially as a bookkeeping clerk. She was never a qualified accountant or tax advisor. Instead, she prepared the messy receipts from their clients, who needed endless chasing, and fed that into the database (a software product called DATEV, for anyone who can remember). As a child, I sometimes helped her paste receipts on paper with a Pritt stick while she tallied them on a desk calculator. Bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks remain a far larger occupational category than professional accountants. But their numbers have been shrinking, not just because of the spreadsheet, but also because of related innovations, such as enterprise software, outsourcing and the long migration of routine record-keeping into automated systems (once breathlessly promoted as “the paperless office”). The Bureau of Labour Statistics still expects clerk employment to decline, projecting a further 6% decline between 2024 and 2034 as software takes on more routine work. The 400,000-versus-600,000 framing compresses four decades of messy structural change into a single clean swap.

2. Ergo, “the accountants did fine” is not the same as “the bookkeepers did fine.” A profession can grow in aggregate, while a specific group of people within it loses secure, decently paid work and fails to move up to the higher-value jobs that replace it. The clerk, who was made redundant in 1985, did not generally become a financial analyst. Aggregate flourishing and individual displacement sit comfortably side by side, and an analogy that lumps all this together quietly omits the people who bore the cost of the transition. For starters, my mum, being a bookkeeping clerk, was not coincidental. Many of these jobs were female-gendered, and current AI automation may put at risk roles dominated by women in particular, as Molly Kinder pointed out recently on her Substack.

3. Finally, the spreadsheet not only redistributed work but also changed what counted as knowledge. Other writers, like David Oks, have argued that by making financial modelling cheap and infinitely revisable, the spreadsheet helped create a particular way of seeing the corporation: as a bundle of assets and cash flows to be optimised rather than an organisation that made things. It powered the leveraged buyout, the rise of private equity, and the long financialization of American business. Michael Milken, the famous junk-bond financier, asked years later to explain the deal-making frenzy of the 1980s, reportedly credited the creators of VisiCalc. This makes the spreadsheet indirectly responsible for the quiet atrophy of companies like Boeing and General Electric that valued financial engineering over the invisible engineering knowledge that created them. The title references James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998), a book I enjoyed reading in the mid-noughties and only recently realised is widely read and referenced in Silicon Valley tech circles. Which is somewhat odd, given that it argues that systems built to make the world legible from above tend to destroy the local knowledge that made it work.

The Value of Analogies

So: same history – different lessons. It’s almost as if Sting was right that history will teach us nothing. But not so fast. Analogies seek to extrapolate a mechanism for which a history is sought, and that choice was made before the history was consulted, not after. Basically, an argument by historical analogy is rarely built on the analogy itself; rather, the analogy is chosen to illustrate the outcome. Fitting data post hoc is rarely a good approach, and analogies built on this logic only work as long as the audience does not actually know the history referenced. Analogies illustrate mechanisms – claims about why something happened, not whether that mechanism fits the present. The reassuring spreadsheet story rests on the idea that cheaper prices create more demand, but this only works if demand for the product or service is elastic: if something becomes cheaper, you want more of it. If food becomes cheaper, there is a limit to how much more food you are going to consume. If software becomes cheaper, will you be buying more software?

Not all types of technological innovation work this way. The washing machine, another modest technology, made laundry cheaper for households. Instead of consuming more laundry services, households absorbed the work as society moved further towards a self-service economy (a pattern identified by the sociologist Jonathan Gershuny in 1978). With this, an economically value-added sector vanishes from sight in any economic analysis.

So, what is the right analogy for AI? Washing machines or spreadsheets? That is the wrong question. Neither explains in isolation what was happening at the time, because historical analysis, in contrast to historical analogies, is multi-causal: more than one mechanism operates at any one time; they all interact, and, like sound waves, either amplify each other or cancel each other out.

Take Oks’s claim that the spreadsheet was the cause of the dealmaking frenzy of the 1980s. Other significant mechanisms in play include the availability of cheap credit and undervalued equities: you could buy a company for less than the worth of its parts and finance the purchase with cheap borrowed money. Alongside this, the “junk” bond market created access to easy finance. The combination of these factors (alongside political, tax-related, and ideological changes), rather than any spreadsheet acrobatics, is what made the arithmetic of the leveraged buyout work. Having computers running spreadsheets made this more obvious and easier to scenario-plan, but the macroeconomic conditions and financial innovations that created the opportunities were the more fundamental ingredients. Without it, the spreadsheets could not have pointed the path to profit.

Drawing analogies between past dynamics of technology and work isn’t always based on an understanding of historical complexities – rather, they are assembled as illustrations of mechanisms that their authors believe are at play now. They are easy to spot because the nature of their argument is fundamentally different from that of historical explanations: historical analogies normally extrapolate a single causal mechanism. Historical explanations are almost always multi-causal and complex. Because life and technological change in the past felt equally crazy, unpredictable and threatening – much like today.

References

• Autor, David H. 2015. “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (3): 3-30. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fjep.29.3.3

• Bruck, Connie. 1988. The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders. London: Penguin.

• Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook: Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/bookkeeping-accounting-and-auditing-clerks.htm

• Frey, Carl Benedict. 2026. “‘Can a machine do this job?’ is the wrong question.” Financial Times, 14 June 2026.

• Harford, Tim. 2019. How computing’s first ‘killer app’ changed everything. 21 May 2019. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47802280

• Harford, Tim. 2024. “What the birth of the spreadsheet teaches us about generative AI.” https://timharford.com/2024/03/what-the-birth-of-the-spreadsheet-teaches-us-about-generative-ai/

• Kinder, Molly. 2026. “The invisible disruption.” Kinder Futures: Dispatches on AI, work and what comes next, Substack, 10 June 2026.

• Kindleberger, C. P. (1978). Manias, Panics And Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. New York: Basic Books.

• Levy, Steven. 1984. “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge.” Harper’s Magazine, November 1984. https://harpers.org/archive/1984/11/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge/

• Oks, David. 2026. “Seeing like a spreadsheet: How the commercial spreadsheet reshaped America.” https://davidoks.blog/p/how-the-spreadsheet-reshaped-america

• Planet Money. 2015. “Episode 606: Spreadsheets!” NPR, 27 February 2015. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/389027988

• Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

• Sumner, Gordon, ‘Sting’ ‘History Will Teach Us Nothing’ from the album ‘Nothing Like the Sun, 1987.

History in Organizations now has over 600 subscribers! It never ceases to amaze me — when I started this, I did not think that there would be that many readers for this kind of blog. A big THANK YOU to everybody!

Contents

1. BAM-CABS Guide to running inclusive events

2. New book alert! Global Enterprise in Australia

3. Hagley Center Fellowships and Grants announcement

1. All Welcome Guide to inclusive, accessible and sustainable events

After my rant last week, a colleague and friend reminded me that there are plenty of free resources out there to support people who actually want to run inclusive, accessible and, increasingly, sustainable events. The key one is the brief “All Welcome” guide published jointly by the British Academy of Management and Chartered Association of Business Schools. It’s free to download, just follow the link: https://www.bam.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/inclusive-accessible-and-sustainable-events.html

2. New book alert: Global Enterprise in Australia

Global Enterprise in Australia

International Business Down Under since Federation

By Simon Ville, Pierre van der Eng, André Sammartino, David Merrett, Monica Keneley

ABSTRACT

For two centuries, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have arrived in waves on Australia’s shores. Highly visible and influential household names among them – Ford, IBM, Kodak, Electrolux, ANZ – but also many smaller, lesser-known enterprises. Foreign MNEs in Australia today account for almost half of our top 2,000 firms and control over A$1.4 trillion of assets. There is much we do not understand about these important institutions, why they chose to invest here, how they entered, and why some firms survived for long periods, while others exited.

The history of MNEs, more than most topics, is inextricably connected to international experience. Across half a century of research, their history has emerged as a vibrant field of investigation in North America, Europe, and, increasingly, Asia. MNE activity in Australia, briefly referenced in some of these studies, formed an important part of the global presence of many firms. This is the first history of foreign MNEs in twentieth-century Australia, filling a major gap in the economic and business history literature of Australia and of the history of international business globally. It integrates the important and distinctive Australian experience with an extensive international and comparative scholarship on big business and MNEs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

International Business in Australia Since Federation

The Contours of Multinational Enterprises and Their FDI in Australia Since 1900

Australia as a Multinational Host

The Evolution of Multinational Enterprise Engagement with Australia

The Design and Management of Australian Subsidiaries

Industry Dynamics

Inside the Enterprise

Conclusion and Prospective

3. Hagley Center Fellowships and Grants announcment

The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware is pleased to announce the recipients of grants and fellowships awarded April 2026. Please note that the next deadline for applications for the exploratory grant and Henry Belin du Pont is June 30th. Here is the link on Hagley Museum and Library’s website for further info and to apply….https://www.hagley.org/research/grants-fellowships.

Exploratory Grant

Louis Bissieres, Associate Professor, Universite Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle: Banking in the Countryside in the Early Republic

Hsiao-Yun Chu, Professor, San Francisco State University: Exquisite Boredom: Ladies fancy work boots and the birth of the leisure crafts

Charlie Colenutt, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Cambridge: Multinational Contractors and the Political Economy of Anglo-American Imperialism, 1880-1918

Adia Cullors, Ph.D. Candidate, New York University: Black Powder: Medicine and Militancy in the Black Atlantic, 1741-1897

Adam Fertig, Teaching Assistant, NYU: Development’s groundwork: American business and environmental review, 1970s-1990s

Leo Garofalo, Professor, Connecticut College: Coca and Opium Counterpoint: Economic Racialization of Products and Laborers in the Andes

Sofia Grant, Ph.D. Candidate, Johns Hopkins University: Designing for Autoimmune Disease: Universal Design, Patients’ Knowledge, and Embodied Experience in Twentieth Century America

Henry Jacob, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University: A Corridor of Capitalism: A History of Ships and Shipping through the Panama Canal

Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Ph.D. Candidate, George Washington University: A Global Environmental History of U.S. Space Infrastructure

Kathleen McHugh, Ph.D. Candidate, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Home Economics is the Solution to all Your Problems: Home Economics, Feminism, and Activism in Twentieth-Century Americs

Flor Isabel Palomino Arana, Independent scholar: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Photographers and their Aesthetics, Techniques and Subjects, Peru, Chile and United States

Mariela Pichardo, Yale University: DuPont (China) Inc.

Hannah Scott Deuchar, Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary University of London: The Arabic Typewriter: Toward a Global History

Andrew David Allan Smith, Associate Professor, Birmingham Business School: Federalizing the Quarter: SEC Reporting Rules and the Rise of Shareholder Primacy of the 1970s

Patrick Sullivan, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University: Signal by Signal

H.B. du Pont Fellowship

Peter Astras, Assistant Teaching Professor, Syracuse University: The Life and Mind of Hudson Maxim

Jasper Cattell, Ph.D. Candidate, Brown University: The World Without Work? The Regulatory Politics of the Work/Environment Divide

Nida Kadayifci, Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University: The Small Business Smokescreen: A Historiographical intervention into Employment Law Exemptions through Family and Medical leave Act, 1984-`993

Anca Lasc, Associate Professor, Pratt College: Toward a Unified Aesthetic of Window Design--the Art, Science, and Business Venture of Window Dressing at the turn of the Twentieth Century

Jonathan Robins, Associate Professor, Michigan Technological University: Forgotten Fibers: Biomaterials in Industry before and after Synthetics

Yen Nie Yong, Senior Lecturer, Kyoto University: Unnaturally Caring: Shaping Female Bodies for Service Labor in Southeast Asia

Brandywine Dissertation Fellowship

Charlotte Leib, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University: An Environmental and Energy History of the New Jersey Meadowlands

Exploratory Grants

Hagley Exploratory Research Grants

These grants support one-week visits by scholars who believe that their project will benefit from Hagley research collections, but need the opportunity to explore them on-site to determine if a Henry Belin du Pont Fellowship application is warranted. Priority will be given to junior scholars with innovative projects that seek to expand on existing scholarship. Applicants should reside more than 50 miles from Hagley, and the stipend is $400. Application deadlines: March 31, June 30 and October 31

Henry Belin du Pont Fellowships

These research grants enable scholars to pursue advanced research and study in the collections of the Hagley Library. They are awarded for the length of time needed to make use of Hagley collections for a specific project. The stipends are for a maximum of eight weeks and are pro-rated at $400/week for recipients who reside further than 50 miles from Hagley, and $200/week for those within 50 miles. Application deadlines: March 31, June 30 and October 31

The Brandywine Dissertation Fellowships

Brandywine Dissertation Fellowship is designed for graduate students who are actively working on their dissertation. A residential fellowship for three to four months duration, it provides $10,000 and free housing on Hagley’s grounds along with an office and other amenities. Brandywine Dissertation fellows are expected to work at Hagley at least four days weekly and to participate in events organized by Hagley’s Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society.

We invite applications from Ph.D. candidates whose research on important historical questions uses Hagley’s research collections. Applications should demonstrate superior intellectual quality, present a persuasive methodology, and show that the dissertation makes significant use of Hagley research materials. Research in Hagley’s collections may take place prior to the fellowship residency. Potential applicants are strongly encouraged to consult with Hagley reference staff at askHagley@Hagley.org prior at to submitting their dossier.

Application Deadline: March 31

And the idea was to make the talk about two kinds of gaps at once: the first is the gaps you experience when you work in inter- or multidisciplinary fields, which describe the difficulties of moving between different epistemic communities. Last week’s post began by considering the need to make our research interesting to more than just our “home” epistemic community.

The second kind of gap is one I have worked on a lot: gaps in the archive, where the historical record is silent. At the Modern British Studies conference, many participants just considered gaps and silences as normal for historians, whether they are in physical archives or digital. That’s nice for the humanities folk, where muddling through passes as a method.

It plays less well with the more “scientist-ic” audiences: business and management, and also transport studies.

And this is kind of why I ended up at the workshop (which was actually very good). I am not a transport person. I use it, but I don’t research it. So when I was first invited, I wanted to have a conversation first, because I was kind of confused. What would I have to say to a transport studies group?

Turns out the concept of the meeting was to provide some knowledge and experience sharing from management & organizational history (or indeed historical organization studies), to transport historians seeking to engage more with transport studies. Because business historians reinvented themselves as MOH to establish a space in business and management. Transport historians, who are reasonably close to business historians, are largely aware of this move and have apparently been considering how it might translate into better engagement with transport studies.

So, what did I do? A very limited crash course in transport studies (more on the how below) and a bit of a consideration of what shape the gap between transport history and transport studies is compared to MOH and business and management. The argument I landed on was gaps. Explaining the unavoidable archival silences through an explicit methodological framework: historical triangulation.

Because you always need to explain to people not familiar with archives why the dataset is not as flawless as expected.

And coincidentally, we just published a piece with our wonderful doctoral student, Guting Shen, about how to do historical triangulation:

Decker, S., Nix, A. and Shen, G. (2025). Minding the gaps: Triangulation strategies for colonial and postcolonial archives. Business History. DOI

OK, it is about the historical records of department stores in Republican China, which we use as worked examples. But, as the discussions at the Modern British Studies conference showed in the previous week, gaps and silences really affect EVERYONE who works with archives. All sorts of reasons for this, more on that below.

So this may be a transport story on the surface, but the underlying problems will be familiar to anyone doing historical research in other fields, or, frankly, anyone working across disciplinary and epistemic boundaries.

Catch-up service:

• Historical methods in organizational and business research: a practical guide (always free)

• Are we entering a digital dark age? Or: Talking to other people (1) (archival silences, born-digital edition)

• AI in peer review (less moral panic, more useful guidance)

Read more

It’s like Groundhog Day – it feels like it was only yesterday (actually it was 2024) that the AOM Management History Division featured three men-only panels. And they are at it again – not sure why I am even surprised; same cast of characters. (Just to be clear, I admire the work of these individuals, which frankly makes this way more disappointing.) I‘m sure they tried (I was asked, but I’m not going – see the FT) and many people are not going to AOM this year, especially from overseas. But this also suggests that there are apparently barely any senior women in the field in the US. Let that sink in and what that says about this field. Because it is all nice and well that I am (yet again) the only one making a point of calling out what is a largely unacceptable practice elsewhere in academia. (I know that some male colleagues in sociology refuse to join male-only panels as a matter of course. At BAM, we have clear policies on this, and a PDW like this would simply not have been accepted.) But it’s not about me being pissed off. It’s about historical research in management looking to all intents and purposes like a retrograde field where you go when the modern world is a bit too much for you. Anyway, info under point 1, and I added a Hoff for you. More excitingly, we have a new CfP on Indigenous Entrepreneurship in Business History, and the next BAM MBH Publishing Historical Research seminar has been announced for 1 October – this time we are talking to Dr Anastasia Sergeeva, University of Bath, about her work on Magnum Photos.

Contents

1. Yet another Manel at AOM MH Division

2. SI CfP for Business History

3. NEW MBH Publishing seminar announced 1 October

1. Another Manel at AOM

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: AOM 2026 PDW

Developing Theory from Historical Research

Sponsors: MH, OMT, TIM, STR, RM

Saturday, Aug 01, 2026 from 8:00 AM to 10:30 AM ET

Submission Deadline: Friday, July 17, 2026

Who is this PDW for?

If you are:

engaged in (or interested in) conducting research with historical data, and doing inductive/abductive (i.e. theory-building) work, and hoping to publish your work in top management journals then this is the PDW for you!

Overview

This PDW brings together a distinguished panel of scholars to stimulate an interactive and developmental exchange on conducting inductive research using historical data. Our core focus will be on the theory-building / theoretical contribution part of the research process – how do we understand the past to inform the present? How do we move from the setting being studied to higher-level conceptualisations, while maintaining a balance between generalisation and contextualization?

Importantly, our aim will be to focus on these questions from a practical standpoint, taking away useful advice that scholars can adopt in their research practices. And for those of you who have the opportunity to discuss ongoing projects with the panelists, you will also get tailored advice for your specific projects.

Panelists

· David Kirsch, University of Maryland

· Andrew Nelson, University of Oregon

· Ryan Raffaelli, Harvard Business School

· Roy Suddaby, University of Victoria

Organizer: Rohin Borpujari, University College London

Structure

1. Panel Talk and Group Q&A: For the first part of the PDW, our panelists will lead exchanges around topics such as which research questions are best suited to historical case studies; how to balance the needs for contextualization vs. generalization in theorizing; how to write up a historical case study for publication in management journals, etc.

2. Roundtables and Individual Feedback: Pre-selected participants will have the opportunity to engage in quick, entrepreneur-style “pitches” to the experts (separated into 4 different roundtables), with a view to receiving developmental feedback specific to their projects.

Each participant will have 20 minutes in total – 10 minutes to describe their project (or project idea) and what areas they would like feedback on, and 10 minutes to receive feedback / engage in discussion with the expert.

How to Apply

Part 1 is open to all attendees and does not require any application in advance.

For Part 2, in order to ensure quality interactions with panelists, we are limiting the number of “pitches” to 16 (i.e. 4 per panelist). If you are interested in receiving feedback on a project that you are currently working on, please submit your interest to r.borpujari@ucl.ac.uk by 11:59 pm ET (Eastern Time) on Friday July 17, 2025.

Specifically, please submit an abstract or overview of your project, including two questions that you would like to ask the panelists to receive feedback about that project. Please keep this document limited to 1 page, single-spaced, in PDF format.

In addition, in your email, please rank order your preference for which panellist roundtable you would like to be a part of (with the number “1” referring to your first choice panellist and “4” referring to your fourth choice panellist).

Note: In addition to the 1-page abstract, you may, if you wish, submit a theoretical model or diagram that you are working on in case your project is at a more advanced stage and you would like comments on the theoretical model you are building.

If you have any questions about the PDW or the application process, please feel free to reach out at r.borpujari@ucl.ac.uk

------------------------------

Rohin Borpujari

UCL - University of London

LONDON

2. Special Issue for Business History

Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond:

Institutional Negotiation, Exclusion and Resilience

CFP Launch Date: 1 June 2026

Overview

This Special Issue examines Indigenous entrepreneurial agency under colonial rule, treating colonial institutions as both economic constraints and sociopolitical structures that shaped market access, legal standing and accumulation strategies. Defining Indigenous peoples is challenging given their diversity and presence across every continent. Scholars have nonetheless identified a number of broadly shared characteristics, including prior inhabitation of a territory before the arrival of later settler or dominant populations, some form of subjugation by those populations, the retention of distinct socio-cultural practices and institutions, a deep attachment to ancestral lands and resources, economic arrangements that are often, though not always, oriented around subsistence, and an association with distinctive languages (Peredo et al., 2004, pp. 5–6).

We invite business historical accounts of how entrepreneurs in colonised societies navigated, contested and reworked the rules of commerce, especially where access to courts, licensing, property rights, banking and credit markets was restricted or selectively enforced. Building on recent scholarship calling for a rethinking of entrepreneurship (Lubinski et al., 2025), growing attention to Indigenous and social entrepreneurship in the Global South (Colbourne, Peredo, & Henriques, 2024; Prouchet, 2025), and calls to engage more directly with colonial and postcolonial contexts and legacies in business history (Austin, Dávila, & Jones, 2017; MacKenzie et al., 2021, 2023; Decker, 2022), the Special Issue brings institutions and agency into the same analytical frame.

Objectives and Scope

Submissions should engage one or more of the following questions:

• Entrepreneurship under legal and financial exclusion: How did Indigenous entrepreneurs respond to constraints in courts, licensing, taxation, banking, property rights, labour regimes and credit markets? Relevant submissions might examine colonial courts, licensing, taxation and property rights as constraints or resources for Indigenous enterprise; financial exclusion and entrepreneurial responses through credit markets, banking, informal and hybrid finance; and the emergence of early Indigenous entrepreneurial projects and their historical significance in the context of colonialism and beyond.

• Institutional negotiation and boundary work: How did entrepreneurial actors exploit institutional gaps, navigate plural legal orders, reinterpret colonial rules, and/or mobilise intermediaries and brokers? Submissions might address entrepreneurial boundary work across plural legal orders; and brokerage and intermediation in the politics of market access, including gender, race, caste and ethnicity as cross-cutting dimensions.

• Resilience as strategy: What specific mechanisms sustained enterprise under constraint and with what distributive consequences? Submissions might explore cooperative, mutual-aid and associational forms as economic strategy in late-colonial settings; diasporic, kinship and inter-regional networks in trade, production and credit under colonial regulation; and moments of late-colonial economic nationalism and early decolonisation (c. 1940s–1970) as sites of institutional reconfiguration.

• Innovation as resistance: What were the mechanisms of technology adoption and adaptation through which entrepreneurs offered alternatives that subverted or circumvented colonial hegemony? Relevant submissions might, for example, address technology, innovation and entrepreneurial market response in early and late industrial colonial capitalism (1880–1940), as well as comparative or connected histories that explicitly engage the shared conceptual lens across cases.

Methodologically, we welcome submissions grounded in business historical approaches, including archival research, oral history, biography, microhistory, and comparative or connected history, that make clear empirical and interpretive contributions to the Special Issue’s themes. Engagement with postcolonial scholarship, subaltern studies, and critical perspectives on firms, markets and institutions is welcome, but not required.

We particularly encourage contributions that draw on a wide range of primary sources to recover Indigenous actors, experiences and strategies, such as company records, court records, licensing files, banking archives, trading accounts, petitions, newspapers and vernacular-language materials. Authors wishing to discuss unconventional sources or strategies for overcoming archival silences are warmly invited to contact the guest editors.

Timeline

Informal enquiries welcome: June-September 2026

Abstract / proposal deadline (800–1,000 words): 1 October 2026

Decisions on abstracts: 1 November 2026

Paper-development workshop(s): Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University

Full paper submission deadline: 1 May 2027

First-round peer-review decisions: September 2027

Revised paper deadline: 1 February 2028

Final revision deadline: 1 May 2028

Final acceptance target: June 2028

Expected online publication and launch: Autumn 2028

Expected print publication: Early to mid-2029

References

Austin, G., Dávila, C., & Jones, G. (2017). The alternative business history: Business in emerging markets. Business History Review, 91(3), 537–569.

Colbourne, R., Peredo, A.M., & Henriques, I. (2024). Indigenous entrepreneurship? Setting the record straight. Business History, 66(2), 455–477.

Decker, S. (2022). Postcolonial transition and global business history: British multinational companies in Ghana and Nigeria. Routledge.

Lubinski, C., Prouchet, L., Ferri, C., Jepsen, N.C. & Lei, W. (2025). Rethinking the histories and ideologies of entrepreneurship. Management & Organizational History. Online First.

MacKenzie, N.G., Perchard, A., Miller, C., & Forbes, N. (2021). Business–government relations and national economic models. Business History, 63(8), 1239–1252.

MacKenzie, N.G., Perchard, A., Miller, C., & Forbes, N. (Eds.) (2023). Varieties of capitalism over time. Routledge.

Peredo, A.M., Anderson, R.B., Galbraith, C.S., Honig, B., & Dana, L.P. (2004). Towards atheory of indigenous entrepreneurship. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 1(1/2), 1–20.

Prouchet, L. (2025). Connecting the dots: Business history research on social entrepreneurship in the Global South. Business History. Online First.

Submission Requirements

Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract or proposal for initial consideration. Submissions should be approximately 800–1,000 words and clearly set out the article’s research question, historical scope (including timeframe and location), sources and methodology, and anticipated contribution to the literature. Please also provide a tentative title, author name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information.

Proposals should be sent by 1 October 2026 to himadri@xlri.ac.in, with the other editors copied in: marktadajewski@gmail.com, andrew.perchard@otago.ac.nz, and zpittaki001@dundee.ac.uk. The email subject line should read: “CFP – Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond Special Issue.”

Formatting and Length: Final papers should adhere to Business History guidelines (typically in the range of 8,000–10,000 words, including notes and references). Authors will be provided detailed instructions for manuscript preparation upon acceptance of proposals. We welcome informal inquiries if you have questions about the fit of a topic or the preparation of your proposal. All articles will be submitted through the Submission Portal for the journal in order to be peer-reviewed before acceptance for publication.

Guest Editors

Himadri Roy Chaudhuri, Ph.D. in Marketing (University of Calcutta, India) is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Culture at the Xavier School of Business (XLRI), India. Dr. Chaudhuri has published widely in leading international journals, including the Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Homosexuality, and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, among others. His scholarship contributes to critical perspectives in marketing, often bridging cultural theory, ethics and policy concerns.

Mark Tadajewski, Ph.D. in Marketing (University of Leicester), is Honorary Professor of Marketing at the University of York, Visiting Professor at the Open University, and Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research critically interrogates the foundations of marketing theory and practice, with particular attention on how geopolitics shape the discipline. In business history, his work has examined alternative forms of business education and their influence on sales and managerial practice.

Andrew Perchard, PhD in History (University of Strathclyde) is Honorary Research Professor at Otago Business School, Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka / University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa–New Zealand, and Visiting Professor, Birkbeck, University of London, and Honorary Visiting Professor, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, both UK. His research has focused particularly on the subject of business–government relations and corporate political activity, deglobalisation and globalisation, as well as regional development and energy and industrial policy.

Zoi Pittaki, PhD in Economic History (University of Glasgow) is a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Dundee School of Business. Her research interests include entrepreneurship and institutions, entrepreneurship and growth, social entrepreneurship and historical institutionalism.

3. Publishing Historical Research in Management Journals 4

Staged by the BAM Management and Business History Special Interest Group

10am – 11.30am BST1 October 2026

Description

Join us for our next MBH webinar on publishing historical research in top journals in management and business history! This interactive event will feature scholars who share their experiences of successfully positioning their historical work for key journals. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about how to develop approaches and strategies for publishing in top journals and build knowledge and skills around how to position historical research in management and business history journals.

We will be joined by Dr Anastasia Sergeeva, whose research focuses on entrepreneurial reasoning and value-laden aspects of innovating and organizing.

Her co-authored article in the Strategic Management Journal is available open access here: https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.3727 Please read the article in advance of the webinar for an in-depth discussion with the author and other participants.

Provider Information

BAM Management and Business History Special Interest Group

Who Should Attend?

The event speaks to Sections A1 and A2, as detailed in the BAM Framework.

Speakers

Dr Anastasia Sergeeva

Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), University of Bath School of Management

Guting Shen

PhD Student, University of Birmingham

Facilitator

Professor Stephanie Decker

Professor of Strategy, Birmingham Business School

Dr Nicholas Wong

SIG Co-Chair

Dr Anna Spadavecchia

SIG Co-Chair

Benefits of attending

• Develop strategies to publish historical research;

• Build knowledge and skills how to position work for different types of journals;

• Gain deeper insights into review and editorial processes.

Contact

Please contact the BAM Office at eventsandcommunications@bam.ac.uk with any queries.

Event Fee

BAM Members and Student Members: Free
Non-Members: £60

If you are booking multiple paid events as a Non-Member, it may be cheaper for you to purchase a BAM Membership as nearly all BAM Events are free or at a discounted rate for Members.

For more information about Becoming a BAM Member, please visit BAM Membership

Registration closes on 30th September 2026 at 23:59 BST