Overview of Scope and Aims of the School:
(This overview is only a guide. Students working on similar topics to those listed below are encouraged to speak to Daniel Menning and/or Christopher Miller in the first instance.)
With the COVID-19 virus spreading across the globe and many major economic countries shutting down social life and significant parts of the economy, we have recently witnessed an economic contraction which has proceeded at an astonishing pace as well as an equally swift, though rather more varied, rebound. Though it is too early yet to estimate the effects and predict the duration of the economic difficulties (including, for example, current shortages of raw materials and increased inflation) – particularly with the war in the Ukraine compounding such difficulties – , it is clear that many businesses suffered and many others were dislocated and/or remain in trouble. A significant number most likely will not survive in their pre-pandemic form, governmental bailout packages notwithstanding.
While interest in economic crises and their effects on businesses has increased over the past few years, starting with the Global Financial Crisis, the current conditions will likely give a new boost to research and result in a new thoughtfulness and a recalibration of research methods. This summer school therefore aims to better understand the linkages between businesses, government responses, and learning from crises through a combination of training masterclasses and a varied range of papers from PhDs and early career researchers working on the cutting edge of history and cognate disciplines.
Research Background:
Business and economic history has been at the forefront of explaining some of the major changes in economies and societies – starting with the work of Alfred Chandler in the 1960s. (Chandler 1962, 1977). Nevertheless, with regards to the business history of crises and crisis management specifically, the literature is far less well developed. There are three reasons for this neglect. First, the tradition of business history for several decades, until comparatively recently, was to study the history of individual firms, or less frequently sectors. Indeed, business history was once considered an applied branch of economic history for scholars wishing to move beyond macroeconomic trends. The net effect has been that the literature on firms has been dominated by commissioned histories where the historian is paid by the (surviving) company and given use of its archives. While often extremely valuable, these studies can tend towards “rise and fall” narratives.
Second, where business histories have studied crises specifically, commissioned works can potentially have some further methodological problems. Most obviously, many of the firms survived until at least the point the history was commissioned. Thus, it is perhaps a case of selection bias towards success – or at the very least towards the largest and most important companies (Berghoff 2006). Related to this, the nature of commissioned studies has also drawn criticism: namely, that success is often attributed to management rather than luck, while episodes of failure are attributed to external or unpredictable factors outside of management control.
Third, the causes and aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 have generated many millions of pages of scholarship and commentary in the last decade, with the effect of prompting historians to draw comparisons with the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression. For instance, Werner Abelshauser (2009) is one of many interested in learning from economic crises explicitly through using the examples of 1931 and 2008. While not every crisis was like 2008 in cause, scale or scope, it is not necessarily a new phenomenon: the 2000 dot-com bubble was compared in much the same way. (Ojala and Uskali 2006). As a result, the stock market crash in 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression have become by far the most studied economic crisis in history, with renewed interest from 2008 (Tooze 2019), while the effect of the more regular, smaller scale, economic crises suffered by businesses before and after 1929 is largely neglected. The current economic conditions promise to bring new momentum to the study of businesses in times of larger and smaller economic difficulties, and we are therefore inviting PhD students and ECRs (PhD awarded no earlier than 2019) working on these topics in history departments, management schools, or other cognate disciplines to submit proposals for the summer school.