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The purpose of this paper is to revisit the potential of the New Deal as a research context in management and organization studies and, in doing so, forward the role one of its chief architects, Harry Hopkins, played in managing the economic crisis. The exploration takes us to multiple layers that work together to form context around Hopkins including the Great Depression, the Roosevelt Administration, and ultimately, the New Deal. By raising Harry Hopkins as an exemplar of historical-narrative exclusion, the authors can advance the understanding of his role in the New Deal and how his actions produced early insights about management (e.g. modern crisis management).

The paper experiments with the methodological assemblage of ANTi-History and microhistorical analysis that the authors call “ANTi-Microhistory” to examine the life narrative of Harry Hopkins, his early association with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and later, the New Deal. To accomplish this, the authors undertake a programme of archival research (e.g. the digital repository of The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum) and assess various materials (e.g. speeches, biographies and memoirs) from across multiple spaces.

The findings suggest Harry Hopkins to be a much more powerful actor in mobilizing New Deal policies and their effect on early management thought than what was previously accepted. In the process, the authors found that because of durable associations with Roosevelt, key policy architects of the same ilk as Harry Hopkins (e.g. Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, Lewis Douglas, and others) and their contributions have been marginalized. This finding illustrates the significant potential of little-known historical figures and how they might shed new insight on the development of the field and management practice.

The aim is to demonstrate the potential of engaging historical research in management with the individual – Harry Hopkins – as a unit of analysis. By engaging historical research on the individual – be it well-known or obscure figures of the past – the authors are considering how they contribute to the understanding of phenomena (e.g. New Deal, Progressivism or Keynesian economics). The authors build on research that brings to focus forgotten people, communities and ideas in management studies but go further in advocating for space in the research to consider the scholarly potential of the individual.

The progressive limits to rights mobilization have become starkly apparent in the past two decades. No new suspect classes have been forthcoming from the Supreme Court since 1977 despite continued demands for legal recognition by lesbians and gays, indigenous peoples and others interested in expanding civil rights doctrine. Public tolerance for civil rights measures has likewise dried up. Since the 1960s, referenda on civil rights have halted affirmative action programs, limited school busing and housing discrimination protections, promoted English-only laws, limited AIDS policies, and ended the judicial recognition of same-sex marriage, among other issues. Nearly 80% of these referenda have had outcomes realizing the Madisonian fear of “majority tyranny”¹ and signaling the Nietzschean dread of a politics of resentment (Brown, 1995, p. 214; Connolly, 1991, p. 64).

This chapter examines the central role played by credit rating agencies in the production of “knowledge” about financial instruments. That “knowledge,” in the form of credit ratings, underpinned disintermediation in mortgage markets by giving investors confidence that they knew the risk-and-return properties of otherwise opaque collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and mortgage-backed securities. Credit ratings helped to “standardize” structured financial products and create liquid markets. However, this cognitive machinery failed and liquidity collapsed during the current crisis. I use this failure to examine the role of institutionalized cognition in the production of market liquidity.

This paper reviews the thirteen-year record of Open Economies Review (OER), an economics journal specializing in issues of the open economy, both at the micro and macro levels. It first examines the journal’s output – defined by number and type of articles published, location of the authors’ institutional affiliation, recurrent themes, and rejection rates – and then critically assesses the development of big themes in international economics and finance, where OER authors have made a contribution. The main conclusion is that national border represents a big constraint to the expansion of the open economy, a point not lost by OER authors.

According to what is reported by the North America Oral History Association, oral history was established in 1948 as a modern technique for historical documentation when Columbia University historian Allan Nevins began recording the memoirs of people who had played a significant role in American public life. While working on a biography of President Grover Cleveland, Nevins found that Cleveland's associates left few of the kinds of personal records – private correspondences, diaries, and memoirs – that biographers generally rely on for their historical reconstructions. Nevins thus came up then with the idea of filling the gaps in the official records with narratives and anecdotes from living memory. Accordingly, he conducted his first interview in 1948 with New York civic leader George McAneny, and both the Columbia Oral History Research Office – the largest archival collection of oral history interviews in the world – and the contemporary oral history movement were born (Thomson, 1998).