Search results

This article aims to explore the impact of the Great War on the Sheffield armaments industry through the use of four company case studies in Thomas Firth, John Brown, Cammell Laird and Hadfields. It charts the evolving situation the armaments companies found themselves in after the end of the conflict and the uncertain external environment they had to engage with. The article also examines the stagnant nature of armaments companies’ boards of directors in the 1920s and the ultimate rationalisation of the industry at the close of the decade.

The research design is based around a close examination of the surviving manuscript records of each of the companies included, the records of the speeches recorded by chairpersons at annual meetings and some governmental records.

The article concludes by outlining how the end of the Great War continued to affect the industry for the following decade and the complex evolving situation with a changing external environment and continuity of management internally ultimately leading to mergers in the industry.

This article uses a number of underused manuscript records to examine the Sheffield armaments industry and explores the effect of a global mega event in the Great War on one of the most technologically advanced industries of the period.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect back over his career as a management and business historian so far as to consider opportunities for the future of management and business history as a disciplinary area.

The paper consists of two segments – the first half is an auto-ethnographic personal reflection looking at the author’s research journey and how the discipline as experienced by the author has evolved over that time. The second half is a prescriptive look forward to consider how we should leverage the strengths as historians to progress the discipline forward.

The paper demonstrates opportunities for management and business history to encompass new agendas including the expansion of the topic into teaching, the possibility for the advancement of empirical contributions and opportunities for findings in new research areas, including the global south and public and project management history.

The paper demonstrates that historians should be more confident in the disciplinary capabilities, particularly their understandings of historic context, continuity, change and chronologies when making empirical and theoretical contributions.

In this chapter, the authors adopt a macrofoundations perspective to explore punishment within institutional theory. Institutional theorists have long focused on a single type of punishment – retribution – including the use of sanctions, fines, and incarceration to maintain conformity. The authors expand the types of punishment that work to uphold institutions, organized by visible and hidden, and formal and informal characteristics. The four types of punishment include (1) punishment-as-retribution; (2) punishment-as-charivari; (3) punishment-as-rehabilitation; and (4) punishment-as-vigilantism. The authors develop important connections between punishment-as-charivari, which relies on shaming efforts, and burgeoning interest in organizational stigma and social evaluations. The authors also point to informal types of punishment, including punishment-as-vigilantism, to expand the variety of actors that punish wrongdoing, including actors without the legal authority to do so. Finally, the authors detail a number of questions for each type of punishment as a means to generate a future research agenda.

This paper aims to report findings from the first year of the Vanguard Laundry evaluation study, which explores the impacts of a work integration social enterprise (WISE) on health.

Drawing on social determinants of health (SDH) conceptual framework, a mixed-methods longitudinal case study is used to evaluate the health impacts of a WISE employing people with lived experience of mental illness. In stage one of this study, 31 participants including staff and managers completed semi-structured interviews, validated health and well-being measures and a questionnaire based on the organisation’s theory of change. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively, and qualitative data are analysed thematically.

Data provided further evidence of the conceptualised WISE pathways for impact on SDH through employment, social integration, increased income, improved social position and living conditions. While social enterprise (SE) beneficiary staff had lower well-being scores than other staff members and management, the majority reported improved health, increased social supports and enhanced well-being through improved material conditions and increased sense of purpose, confidence and social connection.

Stage one of this study relied on self-reported data. Future stages will incorporate income support and health data extracted from government agencies with participant consent.

This paper responds to calls for longitudinal studies that include a range of participants and use health outcome measures to further explore how a WISE impacts health through acting on SDH.