Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, and Faculty Chair of the School's Business History Initiative. He holds degrees of BA, MA and PhD from Cambridge University, UK. He has an honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and an honorary PhD from the University of Helsinki, Finland. He taught previously at the London School of Economics, and Cambridge and Reading Universities in the UK, and at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He has held Visiting Professorships at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, and Universidad de los Andes, Bogota. Elsewhere at Harvard, he serves on the Executive Committee of the Harvard Center for African Studies, the Faculty Committee of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and on the Policy Committee of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
Professor Jones researches the evolution, impact and responsibility of global business. He has written on the history of international entrepreneurship and multinational corporations, specializing in consumer products including beauty and fashion, as well as services such as banking, reinsurance and commodity trading. He has written extensively on the business history of emerging markets, especially in Latin America and Turkey, and launched and co-ordinates the Creating Emerging Markets project at the Harvard Business School. Professor Jones developed and teaches the Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism course, which explores the role of entrepreneurship in the globalization cycles of the last two hundred years, in the second year of the MBA program. He is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business.
The book explores the phenomenon of green entrepreneurship from the nineteenth century to present day. The book spans between various industries such as organic food, natural beauty, clean energy, sustainable finance and eco-tourism. It explores the motivations of green entrepreneurs and how they built their businesses, and asks if historical experience gives cause for optimism concerning whether business can save the planet. The story shows how hard it has been to reconcile profits and sustainability, but it also highlights how through a willingness to be “crazy” and to think outside the box, green entrepreneurs opened up new ways of thinking about sustainability. Yesterday’s crazies turn out to be the historical origins of the sustainable world of the future.
The global beauty business permeates our lives, influencing how we perceive ourselves and what it is to be beautiful. The brands and firms which have shaped this industry, such as Estée Lauder, Chanel, L'Oréal, and Shiseido, have imagined beauty for us. This book takes an in-depth look at the global beauty industry from its emergence in the nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how today's global giants grew. It shows how successive generations of entrepreneurs built brands which shaped perceptions of beauty, and the business organizations needed to market them. They democratized access to beauty products, once the privilege of elites, but they also defined the gender and ethnic borders of beauty, and its association with a handful of cities, notably Paris and New York.
Today globalization is changing the beauty industry again. The book shows how global brands have swept into China, Brazil and Russia, but at the same time, these brands are having to respond to a far greater diversity of cultures and lifestyles as new markets are opened up worldwide. In the twenty first century, beauty is again being re-imagined anew.
