Summer School: History of Business Systems and Entrepreneurship in Europe

AS: I thought that this announcement might interest some of the grad student business historians who read this blog. 

Now open for enrolment

Date: August 5 – August 16 2013

Summer School 2013, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

This summer the Utrecht University Summer School will offer the course History of Business Systems and Entrepreneurship in Europe.

This two-week course will examine business systems and various forms of entrepreneurship in Europe from a historical perspective. Also the global market and the increasing influence of non-European businesses will be examined.

Students will participate in seminars and will get lectures from academic professionals and senior managers from Dutch corporations.

There will be two excursions during the course.

Given the intensity and academic level of the course a good understanding of the English language is mandatory.

For further information please see:

 

History of Business Systems and Entrepreneurship in Europe 

 

 

Utrecht Summer School:

http://www.utrechtsummerschool.nl/

 

Or contact Maurits Rost.

Of Excel and Nations

In the General Theory, Keynes wrote: Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Personally, I think that Keynes was exaggerating the impact of intellectuals on public policy here. However, he was right to suggest that ideas have consequences. Politicians certainly try to defend whatever policy they have already decided to implement by citing academic studies and cherry picking data points from the historical record. In some cases, they may actually be influenced by the teachings of academic economists and even economic historians.

For the last three years, austerity policies on both sides of the Atlantic have been justified by citing a 2010 economic history paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that allegedly  demonstrated that debt loads over 90% of GDP were economically toxic. Now we find out the conclusions in the paper were due, in part, to an innocent but clumsy rounding error in Excel. See here.  Apparently, in doing their calculations, they made Excel cell L51 equal to AVERAGE(L30:L44) rather than AVERAGE(L30:L49), which accidentally meant that the strong post-1945 economic performance of such debt-laden countries as Canada, and Australia was not included in the average.

A new paper “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff” by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin has exposed some of the problems with the 2010 paper. See here.

Here is the abstract:

“Herndon, Ash and Pollin replicate Reinhart and Rogoff and find that coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period. They find that when properly calculated, the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0:1 percent as published in Reinhart and Rogoff. That is, contrary to RR, average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower. The authors also show how the relationship between public debt and GDP growth varies significantly by time period and country. Overall, the evidence we review contradicts Reinhart and Rogoff’s claim to have identified an important stylized fact, that public debt loads greater than 90 percent of GDP consistently reduce GDP growth.”

It remains to be see whether any of the policymakers who cited the 2010 paper will acknowledge that they were citing flawed research.

History of Capitalism Summer Camp

History of Capitalism Summer Camp

Cornell University

July 14 – 25, 2013

 

 

Want to write history using corporate archives?

Want to use numbers? 

Don’t know where to start?

 

Join 25 other historians and get the skills you need to understand economic theory, interpret quantitative sources, make sense of corporate archives, and write the new history of capitalism from the bottom all the way to the top

 

 

Topics Include:

 

Microeconomics

Macroeconomics

Data Analysis

GIS

Financial Statements

Corporate Finance

Business Strategy

Graphing/Data Representation

 

 

Session includes housing, breakfast, lunch, and all materials

Instruction will be by Cornell faculty and staff

Faculty: $1800                        Graduate Students: $600

 

To apply:  https://sites.google.com/site/historyofcapitalismsummercamp/

Event Announcement: After Networks: New Approaches to British Imperial History, c.1750-1970

Date and Location : 19-20 April, Humanity Manse and College Bounds, University of Aberdeen

In recent years, the study of the British empire has increasingly been driven by a focus on networks. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to reconstructing and conceptualising the various ‘imperial networks’, circuits, and circulations of people, ideas, and (to a lesser extent) resources that permeated the empire. The network turn has coincided with broader anti-structuralist trends and a resultant diffusion of network theory, transnational approaches, and attention to the study of globalisation across the humanities and social sciences. The turn has generated many fruits, highlighting the complex interconnections throughout the empire (and among colonies as well as between colony and metropole). Yet while the necessity of the network concept is well established, doubts are surfacing as to its sufficiency as a mode of analysis:

• How and why do networks form and evolve?
• Are some places more densely connected than others and if so why?
• How do networks interact with institutions?
• Should an attention to connectivity be tempered through a consideration of disconnection and dislocation?

The symposium aims to facilitate more nuanced and contextualised understandings of the value and limitations of networked approaches. It will do so by bringing togetherspeakers to offer papers (and ample time allocated for discussion) reflecting on networked approaches to the history of global empire, drawing perspectives from their own research.

Jatinder Mann on Integration Policy in Canada, 1950s-1960s

Some readers may be interested in Dr Jatinder Mann’s forthcoming talk about the precursors of official multiculturalism in Canada:

Jatinder Mann, ‘“Retaining migrant cultures”: Integration policy in Canada, 1950s-1960s’, North American Studies Seminar Series, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, UK, 5-6.30pm, Monday 29 April, 2013
Location: Fellows’ Dining Room, Hilda Besse Building, St Antony’s College, Oxford.

 

Is Business History Now Sexy?

For the longest while, business history was deeply unfashionable in North American history departments. Indeed, many of the people doing research on business history migrated to other disciplines. That’s changing, as the New York Times reports on page A1 of today’s city edition. See here.

After decades of “history from below,” focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy.

Even before 2008, classes dealing with the history of capitalism were starting to make their way back into the curriculum. The GFC accelerated this trend for a number of reasons, the most important of which, I think, the frequency with which journalists and policymakers compared the crisis to the 1929 stock market crash.

The article discusses the growing community of scholars who teach history majors about the history of business. Photographs of Julia Ott, Stephen Mihm, and Bethany Moreton are included.  These historians are members of the Business History Conference. Many scholars today identify with the label “history of capitalism” rather than “business history” and approach the study of the past with a set of assumptions very different from that of traditional  business history associated with Alfred Chandler. Fairly typical of the new type of business history is Bethany Moreton’s fascinating book To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009).This book is a cultural history of Wal-Mart that shows how evangelical Protestantism was used to justify the free market and to attack the cultural and political foundations of the New Deal. It’s about an alliance of Deep South entrepreneurs, largely female evangelical employees, and free-market ideologues. Moreton’s research combines an interest in business history with the study of gender and religion. It is also decidedly non-celebratory, in sharp contrast to some earlier works in the field.  Indeed, the book’s page on the HUP website notes that “The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition.” 

Business history, which has the company as its basic unit of analysis, should not be confused with econometric history, which is both far more quantitative and interested in macro developments. (I’m currently at the Economic History Society Conference and have been listening to presentations by both econometric historians as well as narrative business historians. It is fascinating watching the two groups in dialogue). However, my impression is that economic history is increasingly important in economics departments.   Business history of a type is also being re-integrated into the curriculum of many management schools. The Rotman School of Business in Toronto has committed to nurturing Canadian business history.

The culture of shareholder-management relations in British FSCs and MNCs, 1850-1914

Andrew Smith (Coventry University) & Kevin Tennent (University of York)

The fifty years before the First World War have been dubbed the ‘golden age’ of globalization.  Judged by the relative importance of international capital flows, the world in 1914 was more globalized than it is today. Britain was a major exporter of capital and London was a financial  hub that attracted company promoters from across the globe. British savings helped to  transform the economies of many regions. Although most British investment abroad took the  form of portfolio investment (e.g. the purchase of government bonds), some British capital was sent overseas through the purchase of shares in companies that had been incorporated in Britain. These firms included, among others, Free Standing Companies (FSCs), which had head offices in Britain and all of their productive assets overseas. Our paper examines shareholder revolts and protests in British companies with overseas operations in the period 1850 to 1914. Relations between managers and shareholders were sometimes very tense. The annual general meetings of such companies are therefore of interest to cultural historians of power, representation and the public sphere. Moreover, the evolution of investor relations within these companies was influenced by the broader social context, which included the gradual democratization of Britain’s political sphere and shifting ideas about foreigners. In some cases, shareholders were convinced that the directors, who were their agents, were not acting in their best interests. Shareholders felt particularly disadvantaged when parts of the company’s operations were overseas: unless a shareholder was willing to incur the massive costs of travelling to the overseas operation, the managers had a near monopoly of useful information. The informational asymmetries stemming from distance made FSCs and early multinationals (MNEs) fundamentally different from those limited liability firms whose shareholders were located in the same community as the primary asset. This paper undertakes a number of case studies and examines the strategies employed by boards to improve the perception of governance in FSCs and MNEs. It concludes that, although investment was to some extent a form of entertainment for investors, boards were typically able to win investors over by investing in the professionalization of management and providing a clear and predictable reporting structure. This paper is based on a range of primary sources, including company annual reports, investors’ manuals, newspaper accounts of company AGMs, and  pamphlets. These published sources have been supplemented by archival materials, including. These published sources have been supplemented by archival materials.

Previously, it had been relatively easy for shareholders to monitor their investments in companies, since most companies were owned by shareholders who lived close to the firm’s main asset. Shareholders who directly observed mismanagement were able to raise the issue  at general meetings. The emergence of companies with assets in distant countries changed the power relationship between shareholders, directors, and managers and raised new corporate governance issues. Our project will involve examining how the growth in the number of British companies with overseas operations affected the British system of corporate governance. Corporate governance denotes the systems by which companies are controlled.  Since the advent of the limited-liability company, a complex set of rules has evolved to protect the interests of shareholders and, in some jurisdictions, other stakeholders as well. The rules of corporate governance are designed to promote transparency, accountability, equity and efficiency relations between managers, the board of directors and the shareholders. Our paper covers the period from the passage of the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856 to the First World War, which disrupted the global economy and dramatically curtailed the level ofBritish investment overseas. The 1856 law is widely regarded as a key development in the history of British company law. By making the registration of limited liability companies much easier, it contributed to the rapid growth in the number of corporations in the British economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rights and duties of managers and shareholders were modified by statutes in 1862 and 1908, important court cases and evolving norms and customs. We know that some of the crucial court cases related to British FSCs. In other instances, shareholder discontent with managerial decisions manifested itself in rebellions in general meetings and other forums. Our paper investigates the impact of shareholder-manager disputes related to FSCs and multinationals on the evolution of corporate governance in Britain more generally. The period under consideration witnessed the development of a norm, later codified in law by Justice Thomas Warrington, that shareholders did not have a right to interfere with the actual management of the company. It is our view that the development of this norm was connected to the growth in the number of companies with overseas assets.