Search results

The construct of “tradition” is commonly used in studies of society and culture and refers to historically patterned institutionalized practices that emphasize the “presentness of the past” in their transmission. However, there is “very little analysis of the properties of tradition” (Shils, 1971, p. 124), especially in the management literature. We draw on illustrative examples from Martha Stewart Living magazine to reveal the use and meanings of traditions and their relevance to understanding institutional micro-foundations in contemporary living. We investigate how organizations bundle various aspects of institutions in their presentation, and seek to advance theory on how institutions matter in everyday life.

The most powerful and effective forces of hierarchizing are those that naturalize difference so that it is beyond dispute and something to be tacitly accepted. In the Classic Maya world, this “social speciation” was materialized and naturalized through a complex web of ritual practice, deity emulation, enhancement of body aesthetics, and the fabrication and possession of hypertrophic goods. The architecture of Classic Maya royal courts broke with an older Maya residential pattern of accretional construction filled with ancestral burials in order to materialize more effectively social difference, to provide space for exclusive ritual performance, and to showcase the highly valued and gendered labor of textile production. Such instruments of authority are “weapons of exclusion” that can be wielded to fend off assaults on hierarchy. From this perspective, informed by the ritual economy approach, the profound transformations of the 9th century in the Maya lowlands are considered an assault that was not defendable.

The labor theory of value (LTV) offers a lucid and forceful example of a “theory” thought to stand outside “history.” Considered as an “objective” form of theorizing, the LTV seeks transhistorical truths about the relationship between humans and nature – whereby, as everyone knows, value in the world is produced by the fundamental force of human labor power. Marx is typically taken to have subscribed to some form of the LTV, and thus to have signed on to this form of theorizing. This article refuses to treat Marx as an analytic, ahistorical theorist who would either affirm or deny the LTV. Rather, I read Marx as a genealogist who excavates the story of labor and value within the specific historical context of an emerging capitalist social formation. This genealogical approach to Marx, and particularly to his less-often-discussed, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, shows plainly that Marx never subscribed to the LTV, but more importantly that he eschewed the form of theory that the LTV presumes. Rather than seeking to make transhistorical theoretical claims about the relation between labor and value, Marx meant to demonstrate to his readers something about the way in which a definite and concrete (historically situated) capitalist social formation establishes value. A capitalist social formation establishes its own specific value relations, by first constituting, and then dissimulating, a link between labor and value.

Business history has long been recognized as providing an important dimension to international-business (IB) studies. Much of this historical work has focused on mapping historical growth patterns of multinational enterprises (MNEs) but there is also a growing literature on the long-term impact of MNE investment on host economies, and this paper reviews this research. The focus is primarily on developing-country host economies, and more broadly on the global distribution of wealth and poverty. The article suggests three major arguments. First, it is necessary to take a long-time horizon when assessing impact on host economies. Second, it is necessary to incorporate societal and cultural impacts alongside more traditional measures of economic impact. Third, there is weak historical evidence that MNE’s have had a substantial positive impact over the long run on the development of host developing economies. A hypothesis is suggested that, given adequate domestic growth-supporting institutions and human-capital development, developing countries achieve more sustained development from excluding foreign-owned MNEs rather than hosting them.

In this chapter, we follow the growth of the pricing discipline, especially through the ideas of one of the earliest of pricing's pioneers: Dan Nimer. The Nimer influence on pricing has been foundational, sewing seeds for the growth and development of various pricing fields and subfields – pricing objectives and pricing strategy, value-based pricing, costing and pricing, financial analysis of pricing, and price sensitivity. The ideas we present in this chapter originated largely with Nimer, many in his own voice. We interweave them with the ideas of other contributors to the pricing discipline to show the development of the field. Dan taught many foundational pricing concepts; they are captured in seminars and articles kept through the years. Founding pioneer to pricing, Nimer's influence will remain long into the new century as pricing enters a new phase as a strategic capability of the firm.

In United States v. United Shoe Machinery Corp., United Shoe Machinery (USM) was found guilty of illegal monopolization due to its leasing practices. Existing scholarship on this case largely focuses on the issue of leasing versus selling. In this article, we provide a more comprehensive analysis of this important decision. In addition, we examine USM’s antitrust experience before and after the famous 1953 case. We find that USM’s business practices were largely procompetitive and, therefore, did not warrant condemnation.