Business History

Business History is a featured research topic and an initiative at Harvard Business School.
 
Harvard Business School has a long tradition of investing in business history, and of asserting its central role in management education. In 1927, the School created the first endowed professorship in the field. It also founded the field’s first journal, the Business History Review. Since the work of Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard's Center for Entrepreneurial History in the 1940s, the School has taken an interdisciplinary and global approach to understanding business history. Today business historians at the School investigate a broad range of themes, including entrepreneurship, innovation, globalization, and environmental sustainability.

Featured Works

 

  1. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

    Sustainability and Green Business in Latin America During Globalization Waves

    Geoffrey Jones

    This working paper examines the impact of modern business enterprise on the natural environment of Latin America during the globalization waves between the 19th century and the present day. It argues that although global capitalism created much wealth for the region, this was at the cost of massive ecological destruction in Latin America. During the first global economy considerable wealth was created from the exploitation of natural resources for the land-owning elite in Latin America, at the cost of large-scale ecological destruction. During the Great Reversal in the mid-20th century, public policies aimed at “catching up” resulted in the co-proliferation of hydro-electric schemes and resulting co-creation of ecological damage by firms and governments. In the new global economy since 1980, renewed economic growth and consumerism resulted in mountains of waste in increasingly polluted mega-cities. Biodiversity and the natural environment have been challenged across the subcontinent. However, there were interesting positives as these ecological horrors also created opportunities for a surprising cohort of green businesses across sectors ranging from beauty and health to ecotourism. In the 21st century, both business and governments in the region needed to address sustainability issues far more seriously, before a point of no return was reached.

    Keywords: Globalization; Natural Environment; Outcome or Result; Business History; Pollution and Pollutants; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Tourism Industry; Latin America;

    Citation:

    Jones, Geoffrey. "Sustainability and Green Business in Latin America During Globalization Waves." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-009, August 2018.  View Details
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  2. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

    Business, Governments and Political Risk in South Asia and Latin America since 1970

    Geoffrey Jones and Rachael Comunale

    This working paper provides a new perspective on how businesses have responded to political risk in South Asia and Latin America over the last half century. The existing business history literature on political risk is focused on the experiences of Western multinationals in the 20th century, especially in Nazi Germany and the post-colonial developing world. This working paper is instead focused on perceptions of political risk by domestic business leaders active in Latin America and South Asia since the 1970s. Employing data from the Creating Emerging Markets oral history database developed at the Harvard Business School, the working paper identifies five major sources of political risk: macroeconomic and policy turbulence, excessive bureaucracy, political instability, corruption, and violence. Employing NVivo coding, marked regional differences were identified. Macroeconomic and policy turbulence was the biggest perceived source of risk in Latin America. Excessive bureaucracy was the biggest source of perceived risk in South Asia. There were regional differences also in how leaders in different regions responded to the same risk. In both regions business leaders reported having to dedicate significant time to navigating government regulations, but interviewees in South Asia frequently reported attempting to steer clear from highly regulated industries, while many interviewees in Latin America discussed how they adapted to heavier government oversight by forming closer ties or working relationships with incumbent administrations.

    Keywords: Business and Government Relations; Risk Management; Government and Politics; Business History; South Asia; Latin America;

    Citation:

    Jones, Geoffrey, and Rachael Comunale. "Business, Governments and Political Risk in South Asia and Latin America since 1970." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-102, May 2018.  View Details
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  3. Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2018

    Coco Chanel: From Fashion Icon to Nazi Agent

    Geoffrey Jones and Emily Grandjean

    This case describes the career of the iconic French fashion designer Coco Chanel who created a transformational business during the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in her early adulthood, Chanel leveraged relationships with acquaintances, friends, and romantic partners to build her fashion business and legendary luxury brand based on understated elegance. Chanel’s famous “little black dress” was accompanied by many other innovations including the use of jersey as material for daytime clothing and her development of the Chanel No. 5 perfume. The case pays close attention to the importance of Chanel’s networks among the cultural elite and European high society. It explores how she embraced the rise of Anti-Semitism among many members of the upper class at that time. During World War II, Chanel lived in the Ritz Hotel in Paris in occupied France, where she entered into a romantic relationship with a high-ranking German intelligence officer. Subsequently, Chanel herself became an intelligence operative for the Nazis. The case ends with Chanel in Switzerland in 1945 after she departed France following the Liberation of Paris by Allied forces. This case can be used to explore multiple issues including creating and building an iconic fashion brand; entrepreneurship; and ethical responsibility of business.

    Keywords: Business History; Biography; Entrepreneurship; Relationships; Brands and Branding; Ethics; Fashion Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry;

    Citation:

    Jones, Geoffrey, and Emily Grandjean. "Coco Chanel: From Fashion Icon to Nazi Agent." Harvard Business School Case 318-139, April 2018.  View Details
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  4. Article | Keiei ronshū [Meiji Business Review] | March 2018

    Global Business over Time

    G. Jones

    This article explores how business enterprises have been powerful actors in the spread of global capitalism between 1840 and the present day. It also shows how global firms, emerging out of industrialized Western economies, created and co-created markets and ecosystems through their ability to transfer a package of financial, organizational, and cultural assets, skills, and ideologies across national borders. It argues such firms have been shapers of, as well as responders to, globalization waves over the last two centuries. Global firms are also shown to be actors in periodic deglobalization waves. This was because their function was to reinforce the gaps in wealth and income rather than disrupt them. Business enterprises proved disappointing institutions for knowledge and technology transfer. During the first global economy, multinational resource and related investments were highly enclavist and embedded in the institutional arrangements of Western imperialism and autocratic dictators. Western firms reinforced rather than disrupted institutional and societal norms, which restricted growth in many countries outside the West. They often functioned, as a result, as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. In the more recent globalization era, the strategies of Western corporations have moved beyond the practices of the colonial past, but linkages and spillovers to local economies have often been disappointedly low. Their ability, and motivation, to locate value-added activities in the most attractive locations means that they strengthen clustering rather than encourage dispersion of knowledge.

    Keywords: global; multinational; business history; Globalization; Business History; Globalized Firms and Management; Globalized Markets and Industries; Economic Systems;

    Citation:

    Jones, G. "Global Business over Time." Keiei ronshū [Meiji Business Review] 65, no. 1 (March 2018): 1–26.  View Details
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  5. Chapter | Business Groups in the West: Origins, Evolution, and Resilience | 2018

    Britain: Global Legacy and Domestic Persistence

    G. Jones

    This chapter explores the British experience in a volume which examines the historical evolution of business groups in developed Western economies. The chapter argues that during the nineteenth century British merchant houses established business groups with diversified portfolio and pyramidal structures overseas, especially in developing economies, including both British colonies and the independent nations of Latin America. While these types of business groups remained a significant form of firm organization among enterprises specializing in overseas ventures, they did not become the dominant form of large enterprises within British economy itself. Business groups organized under the holding company such as Calico Printers' Association and Associated Portland Cement, as their names imply, were eventually a federation of many specialized companies. As they seldom committed to administrative centralization, their efficiency gain as a business organization remained marginal. The chapter first looks at the appearance and development of industry-focused and family-owned companies before World War II and the relative decline in importance of internationally-focused business groups during the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter then discusses the rise and fall of diversified and conglomerate type of groups like Hanson Trust and BTR, and the more durable Virgin Group and its counterparts. The empirical evidence presented in the chapter demonstrates that diversified business groups can add value in mature markets such as Britain. Even the much-criticized conglomerates of the 1970s-1990s were quite successful forms of business enterprise, and the demise of many of them appears to owe more to management fads than to serious underperformance.

    Keywords: business groups; business history; conglomerates; Globalization; Entrepreneurship; Business History; Organizations; Business Conglomerates; United Kingdom;

    Citation:

    Jones, G. "Britain: Global Legacy and Domestic Persistence." Chap. 5 in Business Groups in the West: Origins, Evolution, and Resilience, edited by Asli M. Colpan and Takashi Hikino, 123–146. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.  View Details
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  6. Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2018 (Revised April 2018)

    Yunnan Baiyao: Transforming a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise

    Michael Chu, William C. Kirby, Nancy Hua Dai and Yuanzhuo Wang

    This case tells the story of how Wang Minghui, Chairman of Yunnan Baiyao Group since 1999, transformed a single-product traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) state-owned enterprise (SOE) into a major diversified consumer health player in China's highly competitive fast-moving consumer goods market. The case also traces the development of the company from a private business to a SOE and then to a SOE under mixed state-private ownership.

    Keywords: state-owned enterprise (SOE); competition; traditional chinese medicine; Yunnan; Yunnan Baiyao; consumer health; enterprise transformation; Transformation; Health; Business History; State Ownership; Private Ownership; Business Strategy; Commercialization; Competition; Consumer Products Industry; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; China;

    Citation:

    Chu, Michael, William C. Kirby, Nancy Hua Dai, and Yuanzhuo Wang. "Yunnan Baiyao: Transforming a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise." Harvard Business School Case 318-078, February 2018. (Revised April 2018.)  View Details
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  7. Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2018 (Revised March 2018)

    Kickstarting Tomato Jos in Nigeria

    Sophus A. Reinert and Risa Kavalercik

    In the spring of 2016, Mira Mehta (HBS 2014), faced a difficult decision. Following a successful Kickstarter campaign and winning the second place in the HBS New Venture Competition—Social Enterprise Track, she had moved to Northern Nigeria, where she founded the tomato paste company Tomato Jos. Though her brand had gained traction, she had, in the face of endless foreseen and unforeseen obstacles, yet to produce any actual paste. As the Nigerian government pondered new tariffs to protect local alternatives against the competition of ostensibly cheap and low-quality “killer tomato paste,” Mehta considered a job offer from a major agricultural company that would secure her financially, but at the cost of her independence and, perhaps, of her dreams.

    Keywords: Nigeria; entrepreneurs; import substitution; China in Africa; Killer Tomato Paste; Mira Mehta; Tomato Jos; Developing Countries and Economies; Social Entrepreneurship; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Government Legislation; Business History; Emerging Markets; Business and Government Relations; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Nigeria;

    Citation:

    Reinert, Sophus A., and Risa Kavalercik. "Kickstarting Tomato Jos in Nigeria." Harvard Business School Case 718-027, February 2018. (Revised March 2018.)  View Details
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  8. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

    Modeling Oral Business History Data: An Application to Markets and CEO Communication

    Prithwiraj Choudhury, Dan Wang, Natalie A. Carlson and Tarun Khanna

    We shed light on oral business history data, widely available and yet underutilized, as a relevant and useful resource for strategy and management scholars. Specifically, we outline a novel methodology based on topic modeling and sentiment analysis to illustrate that such data can be used to generate insight about the relationship between a firm’s past financial performance and the language and tone of speeches by the firm’s CEO. Using 88 CEO interviews conducted between 2008 and 2017, archived at the publicly accessible Harvard Business School online repository titled “Creating Emerging Markets,” we employ our unique methodology to study how environmental factors, such as unexpected market returns, are related to the range of topics and sentiments expressed by CEOs’ spoken words. In doing so, we match the data from the CEO interviews with financial performance data for the set of firms led by those CEOs as well as market performance data from the countries in which these firms are headquartered. Our results suggest that greater abnormal returns just prior to the date of the CEO interview are positively correlated with certain emotions expressed by CEOs, such as surprise, fear, and anticipation, an indication that unanticipated firm performance heightens the emotional states of firm leadership, with possible consequences for subsequent strategy choices. Furthermore, greater abnormal returns also are positively correlated with CEOs’ tendency to focus their speech more on work-related topics than personal topics.

    Keywords: Spoken Communication; Business History; Data and Data Sets; Finance; Performance;

    Citation:

    Choudhury, Prithwiraj, Dan Wang, Natalie A. Carlson, and Tarun Khanna. "Modeling Oral Business History Data: An Application to Markets and CEO Communication." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-064, January 2018.  View Details
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  9. Case | HBS Case Collection | November 2017

    Outrageous Ambition: Duke University

    William C. Kirby and Yuanzhuo Wang

    Duke University had grown from a one room schoolhouse in rural North Carolina in 1859 to one of the leading research universities in the U.S. and the world. Since the late 1950s, Duke’s leaders had consciously used the process of strategic planning to guide the development of the university as a whole, building up programs in interdisciplinarity and initiating ambitious projects in internationalization. Under the leadership of President Richard Brodhead, Duke first built a medical school in Singapore in collaboration with the National University of Singapore, then embarked on a journey to build a university on American standards in the People’s Republic of China with its own four year liberal arts curriculum. Will Duke realize its many “outrageous ambitions” as it transitions to a new president?

    Keywords: Duke University; strategic planning; university governance; internationalization; Duke Kunshan University; interdisciplinarity; Higher Education; Interdisciplinary Studies; Global Strategy; Governing and Advisory Boards; Business History; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategic Planning; Education Industry; United States; China; Singapore;

    Citation:

    Kirby, William C., and Yuanzhuo Wang. "Outrageous Ambition: Duke University." Harvard Business School Case 318-043, November 2017.  View Details
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  10. Case | HBS Case Collection | November 2017

    The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies

    Joshua Lev Krieger, Tom Nicholas and Matthew Preble

    In the early 1960s, a popular drug taken by patients worldwide for a range of maladies was found to cause severe birth defects and other health problems in babies born to mothers who had taken it during a certain stage of fetal development. As many as 10,000 children may have been affected. Just a handful of these children were born in the U.S., where safety concerns were raised by Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the medical officer handling the thalidomide application at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. However, the company hoping to distribute the product in the U.S. had already given away thousands of pills for doctors to run clinical trials. Once the full extent of the global thalidomide crisis became generally known, the U.S. Congress significantly reformed the country’s drug approval process, to ensure that all new products were both safe and effective. It subsequently became much more arduous for pharmaceutical firms to bring new drugs to market. Some critics therefore argued that the new regulations were actually detrimental, as they prevented or delayed good drugs from coming to market. What was the right balance between consumer protection and access to potentially life-saving drugs?

    Keywords: regulation; Business and Government Relations; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Product Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business History; Health; Government Legislation; Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Pharmaceutical Industry; Public Administration Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Australia; Germany; Europe;

    Citation:

    Krieger, Joshua Lev, Tom Nicholas, and Matthew Preble. "The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies." Harvard Business School Case 818-044, November 2017.  View Details
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Initiatives & Projects

  • Business History

    The Business History Initiative seeks to facilitate learning from the past through innovative research and course development, employing global and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Faculty

HBS Working Knowledge

PicPic
re Geoffrey G. Jones and Amy C. Edmondson
Companies have thought for decades about business-focused solutions to fix the deteriorating environment. But judging by continually rising waters and temperatures, we may need a rethink about what s
Pic
re Geoffrey G. Jones
This study shows how perceptions of political risk by business leaders in emerging markets have differed between regions. For Latin Americans, macroeconomic and policy turbulence were the biggest sou
Foreign businesses located in at-war countries are often victims of expropriation. Historian Valeria Giacomin explores how German businesses in the United Kingdom and India mitigated risk and even be

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by Sophus A. Reinert and Risa Kavalercik

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