Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction
Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession
Anthony J. Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Mark Rennella, Entrepreneurs, Managers, and Leaders: What the Airline Industry Can Teach Us About Leadership
Polaroid collection held at Baker Library's Historical Collection
Latin American Business History Resources and Research
A case study by Geoffrey Jones
David Moss, "Reversing the Null: Regulation, Deregulation, and the Power of Ideas"
Geoffrey Jones, Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry
Aldo Musacchio, "Laws versus Contracts: Shareholder Protections and Ownership Concentration in Brazil, 1890 "1950"
Andrea Ryan, Gunnar Trumbull and Peter Tufano, "A Brief Postwar History of U.S. Consumer Finance"
Tom Nicholas, "Independent Invention During the Rise of the Corporate Economy in Britain and Japan"
Noel Maurer, "The Empire Struck Back: Sanctions and Compensation in the Mexican Oil Expropriation of 1938"
enable educators, practitioners, and policymakers to learn from the past through rich and nuanced evidence on the key issues faced by the world today. Since the work of Joseph Schumpeter and the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History in the 1940s, Harvard has taken an interdisciplinary and global approach to understanding business history.
This article examines the attempts of several generations of manufacturers of cooking and heating appliances to manage competition in their very unconcentrated industry. They started with overt price-fixing, which soon failed, then moved on to a variety of more effective techniques—particularly joint regulation with the aid of a strong craft union, and the adoption of uniform cost-accounting and price-setting systems. The article illuminates the numerous ways in which a trade association could make cartel-like behavior work in an industry whose structural characteristics were apparently unfavorable and also the importance of state intervention to shaping and eventually limiting this strategy.
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The Heard papers, one of the largest collections of business records relating to the nineteenth-century China trade, present a look into momentous events of Sino-Western relations and the day-to-day activities of American traders in the treaty ports.
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The current era of globalization, shifting economic power, and financial shocks have many echoes in past events, from which lessons can and should be learned. Business history provides rich and nuanced evidence on the key issues faced by the world today, including the drivers and consequences of globalization, the sources of innovation and entrepreneurship, the role of business in political systems, and the responsibilities of business to creating a more sustainable world. Harvard Business School has a unique record of investing in business history and asserting its role in management education. In 1927 it created the first endowed professorship in the field. It created the first journal in the field, the Business History Review, which it continues to host as the premier scholarly journal. This tradition continues in the current Business History Initiative, announced by Dean Nitin Nohria at the end of 2011. Our goal with the Initiative is to create a multidisciplinary center, international in orientation, for the study of the history of business and of capitalism. → More on Geoffrey Jones
Harvard Business School has a long and distinguished tradition of research in the history of business. Context is always crucial in business decisions. Learning from the past is a vital resource for business leaders. The new Business History Initiative reflects the School’s belief that history matters, to our students today, and to the future. → More on Nitin Nohria