Faculty & Research
Harvard Business School faculty members have made notable contributions to the history of business. Faculty research is diverse, based in several of the School’s units, and reflects disciplinary backgrounds in economics, history, sociology, strategy, and political science.
- 13 Nov 2020
- News
Belgium’s reckoning with a brutal history in Congo
Re: Geoffrey Jones
| Few companies have ever atoned for their colonial pasts, let alone paid reparations. By contrast, in the late 1990s, Swiss banks and German companies including Siemens and BMW did both for their involvement in the Holocaust. “That’s fairly typical in the low degree of...
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- 2020
- Book
American Business History: A Very Short Introduction
By: Walter Friedman
| By the early twentieth century, it became common to describe the United States as a "business civilization." President Coolidge in 1925 said, "The chief business of the American people is business." More recently, historian Sven Beckert characterized Henry Ford's...
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- 2020
- Book Chapter
Luxury Tourism and Environmentalism
By: G. Jones
| This chapter examines the evolution of luxury tourism and its environmental impact. Whilst mass tourism is widely seen as environmentally damaging, the impact of luxury tourism is nuanced. During the first stage of the growth in the nineteenth century, the numbers of...
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- September 2020
- Case
Uber at a Crossroads (2017)
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
| This case describes the history of Uber, its business model—including the ways it differed from that of the traditional taxi industry—and its competition with Lyft. The case is set in 2017, a year in which Uber was plagued by even more scandals than usual, though its...
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- 02 Sep 2020
- News
The 1920s and H1B visas
Re: Marco Tabellini
| Second, the aggregate effects of restrictions on the economy are either null or negative. This is confirmed by Harvard Business School's Marco Tabellini (2020), who shows that areas less impacted by the quotas saw better economic outcomes, as measured by incomes and...
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- 01 Sep 2020
- News
Comeback Trail
Re: Nancy Koehn, David Moss & Debora Spar
| To better understand how to approach an economic recovery of this scale, we asked three HBS professors—David Moss, Nancy Koehn, and Debora Spar—to weigh in on what advice history can offer as we navigate the current economic crisis.
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- Forthcoming
- Business History Review
The Cost and Evolution of Quality at Cipla Ltd, 1935–2016
By: Muhammad H. Zaman and Tarun Khanna
| This article examines the evolution of Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer Cipla towards producing drugs that met the quality standards of European and U.S. regulators. It employs new research in Cipla’s corporate archives, the Creating Emerging Markets database, and...
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- 20 Aug 2020
- Book
From the Plow to the Pill: How Technology Shapes Our Lives
by Dina Gerdeman
| Many technologies have upended long-held beliefs about love, sex, marriage, and reproduction, says Debora Spar in a new book, Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny.
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- August 2020
- Case
Luckin Coffee (A): Caffeine-fueled Growth?
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
| This case describes the founding of Chinese coffee chain Luckin Coffee in 2017 and its path to surpassing Starbucks as the largest coffee chain in China (by number of stores) in 2019. Unlike Starbucks stores, which were designed to be welcoming “third places” for...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Building the Professional Firm: McKinsey & Co.: 1939-1968
By: Amar Bhidé
| This case history analyzes how the founders of McKinsey & Co. built one of the world's leading management consulting firms by developing a “system” of professional norms, approach to serving clients, personnel policies, organization, governance, and ownership. The...
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- 10 Jun 2020
- News
The Seeds of Ideology: Historical Immigration and Political Preferences in the US
By: Marco Tabellini
| Immigration to Europe and the US has met with a heated political backlash in recent decades, but the long-term impact of immigration on political ideology not well understood. This column focuses on the migration of millions of Europeans to the US between 1900 and...
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- 02 Jun 2020
- News
History teaches 3 essential leadership lessons for our current crisis
By: Nancy Koehn
| The COVID-19 pandemic and current unrest may seem unprecedented, yet this country has previously faced times of grave peril that have tested our leaders, front-line workers, and ordinary citizens. History offers important insights for navigating the high seas and...
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Initiative Leadership
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