Hello! I have just returned from hibernation following two really great conferences. The first was the annual Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History conference, held in Adelaide on the 4-6 February. I spoke about corporate masculinity, reconnected with fabulous colleagues, met some new friends for the first time, and generally revelled in the loveliness of our shared academic endeavour.
The second event, held the following week, was the Academic Association of Historians in Business Schools (AAHBS). Here I also reconnected with fabulous colleagues, met new friends for the first time, and revelled in the loveliness of our shared academic endeavour. I have well-documented opinions on this group’s partitioning (I have no idea why they don’t co-operate with the other groups and I have no interest in excuses; we barely have enough resources as it is). Nevertheless, I was delighted to give the Ray Markey plenary address on ‘Business history for turbulent times’.
I used the metaphor of turbulence to discuss my work as a business historian, and to illuminate new ways of doing business history that are strategic, innovative, and meaningful. Turbulence, as I’m sure most of us have experienced, is chaotic, irregular motion with sudden changes in pressure and velocity. From the perspective of fluid dynamics, air is just doing what air does – it heats and cools, flows over mountains and valleys, collides and integrates with itself over and over. From our perspective, however, turbulence can be chaotic, unpredictable, unsettling, or even destructive.
It is, indeed, a turbulent time to be a business historian. University managers are increasingly hostile to all work done by university workers. Interdisciplinary fields like business history are very trendy, and provide good press conferences under the promise that they will bridge otherwise disconnected silos. However, in practice, rather than a bridge, business history often falls through the cracks, suffering under incentives that preference research and teaching produced within disciplines. Business history does not neatly fit neatly into professional training or accreditation standards. Fields of research codes, which determine rankings of departments and individuals, are marred by path dependencies and do not adequately capture the composition of interdisciplinary research. Journal rankings – particularly the ABDC list used in business schools – punishes interdisciplinary research by systematically ranking local business history journals lower than disciplinary counterparts
In light of this, business historians engage in multiple adaptations in order to survive in the modern, disciplinary neoliberal university. We publish in the well-ranked, international journals in our field, rather than local outlets. We are compelled to carve up our professional identity into disciplinary components in order to be recognised at the same level as our colleagues. For teaching, we must hide the history in contemporary business and management subjects, like a parent hiding vegetables in spaghetti bolognese. I teach diversity and inclusion, which is a HR subject, which gives me the opportunity to talk about history of social movements, history of capitalism and imperialism, corporate history and histories of work, and the history of race, gender, disability, and class. The students love it: history is often the element that I receive the most positive feedback about at the end of semester. However, if you were to look at the subject outline, and certainly the materials sent to the accreditation body, it is not an historical subject.
Business historians have been focussed on justifying their existence – their historicism – rather than choosing innovative frontier topics. In most areas that I have worked in there is a real lack of critical or radical research, and indeed the research questions tend to follow those that have long been established as meaningful and important in contemporary research. If you look at the recent issues of the three major international business history journals (Business History, Business History Review, and Enterprise and Society) in the past year, you will find plenty of variety, but little that was surprising in terms of the central topic. Articles mostly focussed on longstanding mainstream topics such as business co-operation, financing, governance and leadership, institutions, intersections with government, international business, marketing and consumerism, and general business strategy.
By way of critique, I think if you took a survey of business history topics in 1995, or 2005, you would receive a similar result. This is not to say that that they are unworthy of study, of course they are, but that in order to remain relevant to business and management disciplines, I think we must pay heed to what we can offer new frontier topics as well. If we, as a community, refuse to address them, then we must be content with being a little bit irrelevant.
I think the future of business history is to take more risks, to use the work we have done, to say something meaningful about the way the world is and was, and use it to try and make the world a better place. I’ve been reflecting recently on this, and I keep returning to the idea of meaningful research. This is the kind that connects individual findings to a broader context, informing decisions, or improving the way we do things. It changes the conversation in some way, by challenging existing wisdom or revealing something new. It doesn’t have to be ground-breaking, but it should be intentional, and aimed at producing knowledge that someone could actually use.
Meaningful research is, I think, central to our survival. It is mandatory for being adequately integrated into the centre of business school parent disciplines. In turbulent times such as these, I think we also have a responsibility to do meaningful research. The challenges we face as a species mean this work is too important, too necessary, for us to be content with curiosity alone. A very small number of examples that I found in my survey, which I think can be demonstrative, include work on the business of emotions, histories of philanthropy and business charity, and corporate sustainability. All of these topics use history to not only contribute to current frontier topics in the business disciplines (which is necessary for us to keep our jobs), but are also topics of importance in our modern world. Understanding the way that capitalism has, and continues to, feed consumerism, inequality, environmental degradation, is not only interesting and fundable, but is also, I think, the most meaningful work that we could do.