The International Business Archives Handbook

Understanding and managing the historical records of business

Alison Turton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754646631
• eBook ISBN: 9781351801867
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The International Business Archives Handbook provides up-to-date information and guidance on key issues relating to the understanding and management of the historical records of businesses.

Key features include:
• Chapter contributions from a range of experts in their respective fields.
• Content covering business archive and business history initiatives around the world.
• Practical advice combined with thought-provoking discussion on issues hitherto little addressed.
• Useful quick-reference tables, global case study examples and further reading suggestions.

The handbook is an invaluable guide for students, archive professionals and business historians alike. It is also an important reference tool for business professionals involved in information management more generally.

Part 1
Business archives in context

Chapter 1
An introduction to business archives

Katey Logan

The role of business in global development

Business touches everything in the modern world. Business archives, though less well understood, constitute the written record of business, and are the key to unlocking our knowledge of it. This opening chapter shows how an increasing interest in and care of business archives is shaping our academic and general understanding of business development, at a time of phenomenal change in global commercial activity.

Western economies

In advanced economies, business and industry is the economic nucleus, commanding a position in society first held by royalty and then by government. Initially industry was regarded by some with suspicion – as, although a wealth creator, it was associated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with exploitation of workers, degradation of the environment, and ruthlessness in the pursuit of profit and the destruction of competition. While industry stripped society of free time and green spaces, astute governments through taxation of the new industrial and middle classes, established health and social services, cultural sponsorship and patronage, and education for all, and even employed large sectors of the population in nationalised industries – born out of the political need to control key strategic assets.

Public and private industry

By the twenty-first century there has been a further shift as the nationalised sector has been re-privatised by some governments keen to relinquish large, unionised industrial workforces and their burdensome on-costs.¹ As a result a much larger proportion of the working population exists within the private sector and the old battle lines of public/private sector are softening. As the 2008 global financial crisis has demonstrated in spectacular form, the success and failure of large corporations impact economic and social wellbeing across all sections of society. As a new political equilibrium is arrived at, the state is publicly recognising the role of the private sector as paymaster to the economy, and to counter nascent anti-globalisation movements, the private sector is stepping up to the challenge of engaging in the social and welfare agenda. In progressive societies, a new discourse is emerging and the era of big business is becoming the era of responsible and ethical business.

Emerging economies

In emerging economies, where rapid industrialisation has come relatively recently,² fed by globalisation, low-cost efficient shipping of containers and bulk commodities as well as access to cheap labour and technology, the lessons of the West’s industrial revolutions cannot be ignored. The example of China’s dramatic industrialisation and positioning as an economic powerhouse is tempered by the suffocation of its urban populations by toxic air pollution and the unremitting news stories in China Daily³ of mining tragedies, food scandals, land degradation and climate change. The ubiquitous ‘Made in China’ product may be cheap, but comes at a high cost to the country and its hard-working population. Its government faces challenges so great, not least its handling of the capitalist/communist dichotomy, that the rest of the world can only spectate and hope for success and the ‘best possible’⁴ outcome.

Globalisation of trade

A truly global economy is becoming a reality as business, profoundly impacted by evermore sophisticated technology and improved infrastructure, connects diverse corners of the globe. ‘Third world’ economies demonstrate industrialisation at unprecedented speed. Change is palpable, and as global citizens connected by the internet struggle to understand the changing world order, business and capitalism are perceived as a global panacea and global curse. Unable to imagine the technological future the information technology (IT) gurus are designing, today’s global population is striving to learn how to progress without descending into chaotic environmental disaster, war, political meltdown and human exploitation.

Twenty-first century connectivity

Of course global trade is not a new activity. But the inter-connectedness of countries geographically separated is now a given, and as business models and cultures converge so too does the education of the political and business elite. The bureaucrats running China’s civil service are as likely to have an MBA from Harvard as from Beijing, while Asian MBA schools are attracting increasing numbers of European and North American graduates.⁵ Similarly the legal and regulatory framework in which business operates is becoming, paradoxically, both simplified and more complex as businesses trade across markets and economic zones, sharing common supply chains and manufacturing. The volume of regulation increases, but it is becoming more standardised globally. For example, regulations created by the European Union are adapted and implemented by the emerging economies as a cheap, ‘ready-made’ solution to making products and services compatible and competitive with European and North American markets.⁶

Internet and communications revolution

As participants in contemporary business we forget, or sometimes cannot see, the unprecedented changes happening around us. Office workers in the 1990s witnessed the installation of the first desktop computers in a rather more orderly manner than eighteenth-century weavers accepted the mechanisation of hand-looms.⁷ Yet the impact of this step change in office technology was to make companies, office environments and working relationships almost unrecognisable. Business computers with the capacity to transform world trade are now igniting the civil liberties debate as electronic surveillance, cyber-security and corporate hacking scandals⁸ counter the democratic trending towards transparency and freedom of information.

Box 1.1 Restoring the first internet page

Sometimes it is difficult to know what will have historical value in the future. Years after the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, the team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) have kept the computer of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, and in 2013 restored the world’s first website to its original address – thereby preserving some of the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. The earliest existing internet page is available online at http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/birth-web [Accessed 3 September 2016].

Business leadership

In an exciting and unexpected development the new role models of business – multimillion dollar teenage internet entrepreneurs – are providing significant inspiration to the next generation of would-be business leaders. The combination of immediate financial success, the ‘dressed down’ accessibility of young entrepreneurs, and the ingenuity and desirability of tech products and ideas has made a career in business unexpectedly ‘cool’. The best-selling autobiography, and subsequent Oscar-winning film about Apple entrepreneur Steve Jobs, and The social network, the film of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook, demonstrate an alignment of the business world with youth and popular culture.

Understanding business through academic research

Facts and context

Across continents as business takes a more central position in everyday life, there is an academic, socio-cultural and economic need to learn more about it, and a key way to do that effectively is to study performance over time through the investigation and analysis of primary and secondary source material, that is business records. Published and unpublished business data is ‘past’ data, literally historical data. Records of business activity are necessary to understand and communicate business change and development and business’s impact on societal change. However much business commentators and investors talk about the here and now of ‘bottom line’ performance; there has to be a line, a computation, an explanatory context. Facts and context are the essential components of business archives.

Transparency and accountability

The efficient management of business records and archives enables business to become transparent and accountable, a prerequisite to gain trust in an era of public scrutiny of business ethics and product safety. Newly-empowered and vocal consumers discuss through social media the actions or inactions of major corporations that in turn monitor and increasingly utilise social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Weibo.⁹ While consumer choice used to be a key driver of better business, consumer voice can now seriously impact a commercial activity for better or worse; in sectors ranging from luxury goods and pharmaceutical companies focusing on counterfeit product, to clothing retailers drawn into the scandal of third world factory conditions,¹⁰ businesses seek to know and make public aspects of their supply chain from ethical sourcing to product manufacture, packaging and even advertising.¹¹

Business and economic history

Current business leaders and business historians alike need to understand business success and failure whether their goal is to educate, theorise and publish papers, or to ‘copycat’ format or strategy in creating new businesses. Journalist Chris Cobb writing in Ottawa Citizen encapsulates the value of archival research: ‘Researchers and writers … do the work for the rest of us’ (Cobb, 2013). Cobb also cites the work of Canadian television broadcasters in creating accessible histories for mass audiences. Likewise European broadcasters are finding a global market for populist business and economic history. For example, historian Niall Ferguson’s published economic histories of China, Europe and the United States make successful television programmes that are syndicated worldwide.¹² Today business journalists make careers of studying individual corporations, business trends and sectors, but behind contemporary analysis and research lies a body of disciplined historical research. As Terry Cook, Canadian archivist and academic, wrote ‘You may have 100 people who read an academic historian’s book, but those academic books of scholarship fuel the bestselling authors who write books that tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands … read’ (Cobb, 2013).

Box 1.2 Transparency in history

In 1944, almost half of Daimler-Benz’s 63,610 employees were civilian forced labourers, prisoners of war or concentration camp detainees ‘loaned out’ by the Nazi regime in exchange for money. After the war, Daimler-Benz admitted its links with the Nazis, and also became involved in the German Industry Foundation’s initiative ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’, the work of which included the provision of humanitarian aid for former forced labourers.

Source: Daimler-Benz in the Nazi Era (1933–1945) at www.daimler.com [Accessed 3 September 2016].

Box 1.3 Chandler’s legacy

American historian Alfred Chandler (1977) disputed Adam Smith’s interpretation of the free economy dictating economic development and replaced it with the notion that corporate management of companies directly stimulated a company’s growth or decline, citing the United States giants Du Pont, General Motors, Sears Roebuck and Standard Oil as templates for universal economic success. His writing excited a generation of industrialists and historians alike.

Historical research

Historians have been investigating business and economic history since the 1920s and 1930s when universities started to acknowledge and support these new disciplines.¹³ As the world’s first industrial nation (Mathias, 1969) the history of the United Kingdom’s industrial revolution and its business leaders captured the imagination of academics. Business histories written in the early nineteenth century tended to focus on business biography or discrete business initiatives, but the academic discipline now attracts historians interested in the comparative nature of businesses – how sectors are developing and how principles and practice differ and coalesce in international markets. The pressure on academics to provide explanation and de-mystify successful business practice is increasing as projected population growth demands that the energy, agriculture and water industries in particular continue to innovate and develop in order to sustain global populations. Academic journals such as Business History, Business History Review, Enterprise and Society, Management and Organisational History and Accounting History Review provide a body of knowledge and research on many key business challenges.

Development of the business archives sector

In tandem with the development of economic and business history, pioneering archivists have sought to collect business papers and archives in public institutions, recognising that business enterprise is a formidable part of economic and cultural life that should be preserved as part of the national record. Canada’s first archivist, Douglas Brymner, acquired business archives from the outset for what became the Public Archives of Canada, and as early as 1926 his successor procured relevant records from the finance house Baring Brothers & Company, joint London agent to the government of Canada (and the predecessor Province of Canada) in the nineteenth century (Salmon, 2003). In the private sector archivists began to ‘infiltrate’ corporations in significant numbers in the 1980s as the expansion of regulation as well as the volume of records created in the digital age had companies looking for record-keeping expertise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• PART 1 Business archives in context
• PART 2 The nature of business records
• PART 3 Managing business archives
• PART 4 Using business archives
• Index