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, and is an Affiliate Professor of Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. 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 published on the history of global business, specializing both in consumer products, including beauty and fashion, and services such as banking, reinsurance and commodity trading. He has written extensively on the business history of emerging markets, especially in Latin America, South Asia and Turkey, and launched and co-ordinates the Creating Emerging Markets oral history 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, a Fellow of the Japan Academy of International Business Studies, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Professor Jones's books include Merchants to Multinationals(Oxford University Press, 2000), Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to Twenty First Century (Oxford University Press, 2005), Renewing Unilever. Transformation and Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2005), (edited with Jonathan Zeitlin) the Oxford Handbook of Business History (Oxford University Press, 2008). and Beauty Imagined (Oxford University Press, 2010), which provides the first history of the global beauty industry from a business perspective. His recent research has focussed on the ecological and social impact and responsibility of business. Recent books include Profits and Sustainability: A Global History of Green Entrepreneurship (Oxford University Press, 2017), which provides a global history of green entrepreneurship from the nineteenth century until the present day, and Varieties of Green Business (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018), which examines variations in the nature of green business between industries and nations, and over time. He is now researching a new book entitled Alternative Capitalisms: Leaders, Values and Business Responsibility (Harvard University Press, forthcoming) which looks how religious, philosophical and other values have shaped concepts of business responsibility to society across the world.
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. Also available as an audio book and e-book.
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 swept into China, Brazil and Russia, but at the same time, these brands had 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.
