Conference

From Public Interest to Private Profit: The Changing Political and Social Legitimacy of International Business, May 5th - 6th, 2016

Location:

Synopsis: This conference of historians, business historians, management scholars, and business practitioners studied the corporate entity as it has changed over the past four centuries. Corporations started their lives as social, political, as well as commercial entities. By the nineteenth century, corporations became less accountable to the societies and states and became more self-consciously economic, private, and financial organizations. Since then, many interests have attempted to reintroduce the social purpose of corporations. The conference will offer participants the opportunity to place present day corporate activity into an instructive historical context and to discuss how corporate actors in the past addressed challenges and problems parallel to those facing corporations today.

Sponsors: Leverhulme Trust

Session 1: Long Term Narratives
Mark Bonham, Massey College - Canadian financial institutions: reviewing their global ambitions and corporate policies, 1900 to present
David Chan Smith, Wilfred Laurier University - Non-profit corporates and corporate social responsibility in the very long term
Koji Yamamoto, Tokyo University - Enterprises, literature and society between the Reformation and the Great Depression
Session 2: Corporate Societies in England’s Seventeenth Century World
Will Pettigrew, University of Kent - The social context for the development of the seventeenth century corporate executive
Edmond Smith, University of Kent - Social responsibility and corporate reputations: between institutions and personal networks
Aske Brock, University of Kent - Poor boxes, hospitals, and intellectual societies: the extra-corporate interests of company directors in the latter part of the seventeenth century
Session 3: The Formation of the Multinational in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Mike Wagner, Oxford University - Profit and surety: the British chartered trading companies and the state
Emily Buchnea, Newcastle University - Multinational enterprises in transition: Anglo-American trading firms and the direction of American expansion, 1815-1840
Keynote Address
Mr Justice Rothstein, The Canadian Supreme Court and the redevelopment of social corporations
Session 4: The Development of the Corporation in North America
Bob Wright, Augustana University - Non-profit corporations in the early United States
Joe Martin, Rotman School of Management - Social responsibility, Bloodshed at Seven Oaks, and the merger of the Hudson’s Bay and the North West Companies
Alison Kemper , Ryerson University - How accounting created Canada: The alienation of Rupert's Land by the Hudson's Bay Company
Session 5: Perspectives on Ownership
Janette Rutterford, The Open University - The Distant Shareholder
Les Hannah, London School of Economics - Pressures for shareholder value and how they differed in Germany, France, UK, US, and Japan for multinationals and domestic corporations in the decade before 1914
Philip Scranton, Rutgers University - Managing communist enterprises: Poland, Hungary & Czechoslovakia, 1945-1970
Session 6: International Challenges
Christopher Kobrak, Rotman School of Management - Managing cross-border responsibilities: Deutsche Bank, the United States and social reputation
Jason Russell, Empire State College - Adolph Berle’s critique of U.S. corporate interests in the Caribbean basin
Neil Forbes, Coventry University - The Rio Tinto Company and Spain: political and social legitimacy from the 1930s to the 1950s
Session 7: Corporate Constituencies in Space and Time
Jon MacKay, Said Business School, Oxford University - Networks of corporate elites in Canada near the turn of the twentieth century
Julia M. Puaschunder, New School - Intergenerational responsibility
Session 8: Business Practitioners Reflect
Moderator: A. R. (Sandy) Aird; James Arnett; The Honourable Hal Jackman