Richard Robinson Business History Workshops

2024 RRBHW

5th Biennial Richard Robinson Business History Workshop

5th BIENNIAL

RICHARD ROBINSON BUSINESS HISTORY WORKSHOP

Affective Bonds, Intimate Exchanges:
Family, Kinship, & Gender in Business History

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

May 23 - May 25, 2022 | Portland OR

Richard Joseph Robinson
(credit: PSU Archives Digital Gallery)

The Richard Robinson Business History Workshop at Portland State University has been made possible by a bequest from Richard Robinson.

Richard Joseph Robinson, who passed away in May 2014, was Professor Emeritus of Management and former Chair of Management in the School of Business Administration at Portland State University. He received the BS from Indiana University-Bloomington in 1949 and the MBA from the same institution the following year. In 1965 he earned the Doctorate of Business Administration from the University of Washington. Hired by Portland State University in 1962, he retired at the end of 1989. His publications include:

Co-authored with Wendell L. French, "Collective Bargaining by Nurses and Other Professionals: Anomaly or Trend?" Labor Law Journal, vol. 11, no. 10 (Oct. 1960), pp. 903-910, 944.
"How Should Business Behave?" in McGuire, Joseph William, ed., Interdisciplinary Studies in Business Behavior (Cincinnati: South-Western Pub Co, 1962), pp. 207-224.
"Personnel Practices in Denmark and Holland: An Environmental Analysis," DBA diss., University of Washington, 1966.
United States Business History, 1602-1988: A Chronology (Westport, Conn: Greenwood P, 1990).
Business History of the World: A Chronology (Westport, Conn: Greenwood P, 1993).

The Richard Robinson Business History Workshop has held small workshops on particular themes in business history since 2012.

THU 5.23.2024 | Keynote Address | 6:30pm

Preceded by Reception, 6:00pm

Smith Memorial Student Union
SMSU RM 294
1825 SW Broadway

Mansion of a Prominent Business Family at town of Churu, Rajasthan, India, c. late nineteenth century | credit: quirkywanderer.com

Kinship, Uncertainty and Profit: Speculation Across “Culture” and “Economy”

Business history’s attention to kinship, informed especially by global research, offers a tool to crack the encryption of society as market wrought by a half-century of neoliberal policy- making. Addressing kinship as networks of valuation across calculative and affective registers, this lecture connects business history with new interdisciplinary histories of capitalism that have emerged since 2008. Business history’s fine-grained attention to “embeddedness” has challenged the abstractions of economics, from rational homo economicus to money’s universal equivalence. Between embedded worlds and such abstraction is the problem of governing, a defining focus of recent histories of capitalism that have detailed gendered processes of economization, financialization and the neoliberal framing of the family as investment vehicle, site of debt and human capital. Opening contemporary-relevant questions from the governing of debt and speculation in colonial and postcolonial India, I consider kinship as an analytical framework attentive to time- space imaginaries that challenge those of neoliberal financialization and complicate ongoing reductive iterations of the culture/economy distinction.

Ritu Birla is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto and former Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs. Weaving empirical expertise on India with social and political theory, Professor Birla’s broad range of interdisciplinary historical writing has built conversations on global approaches to capitalism and its gendered forms of governing self and society. Her analyses foreground the legal fictions that animate economic modernity—from the family, to the trust to the corporation—and their dynamics with the on-the-ground conventions of what she has called “vernacular” capitalism. A senior editor at the journal Public Culture, and author of the groundbreaking Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, she is currently working on a manuscript solicited by Duke University Press on imperialism, financialization and the emergence of neoliberalism.

(All times listed are Pacific Daylight Time)

PROGRAM

Smith Memorial Student Union
SMSU RM 294
1825 SW Broadway

THURSDAY, 23 MAY 2024

Reception, 6:00pm
Keynote address, 6:30 PM

Professor Ritu Birla (University of Toronto), Keynote | Kinship, Uncertainty and Profit: Speculation Across “Culture” and “Economy”

Karl Miller Center
KMC Room TBA
615 SW Harrison St

FRIDAY, 24 MAY 2024

Panel 1, 8:30–10:45: Family Firms: Honor, Succession, and Legacies

Discussant: TBA

Matthew Hollow (University of York), “O Father, Where Art Thou? Reevaluating the
Impact of Distance and Absence on Family Succession in Entrepreneurial Firms”
Isabel Robinson (Liverpool John Moores University) and Dexnell Peters (University of
the West Indies-Mona), “‘Debts of Honor’: The Silent Partners in the Firm of Antony Gibbs and Sons”
Andy Urban (Rutgers University), “‘Is Elizabeth Seabrook the Right Name?’: Frozen Foods and the Family Struggle over Seabrook Farms as a Brand, Product, and Concept, 1951–1959”

Panel 2, 11:15–1:00: Family as Agents and Clients: The Normative and the Imagined

Discussant: TBA

Elena F. Hoffenberg (University of Chicago), “A Family of Credit or Credit for the Family? Kinship and Jewish Credit Cooperatives in Poland, 1914–1939”
Ryan Moran (University of Utah), “Responsibility as an Imperial Commodity: Postal Life Insurance in Colonial Korea”
Patricia Schechter (Portland State University), “Gender, Cooperatives, and Worker Housing in Spain: The Casas Baratas in Córdoba Province in the 1920s”

Panel 3, 2:45–5:00: Close Kins, Distant Kins: Informal Ties and Legal Infrastructures

Discussant: TBA

Shalin Jain (University of Delhi), “Business within Family and Kinship: The Jain Merchants in Early Modern South Asia”
Rachel T. Van (California State Polytechnic University-Pomona), “Crossing Oceans,
Crossing Cultures: Kinship as a Capitalist Repertoire, 1800–1880s”
Luman Wang (Shanghai Tech University), “An Informal Business Coalition of Private
Banking Firms in Nineteenth-Century China”
Justin Simard (Michigan State University College of Law), “Commerce as Calling: Lawyers, Kinship, and the Development of Economic Trust in Nineteenth-Century NewYork””

SATURDAY, 25 MAY 2024

Panel 4, 9:00–10:40: Small Business, Microcredit, Shared Interest, and Gender

Discussant: TBA

Donica Belisle (University of Regina), “Bonds of Extraction: Canadian Business Wives in the British Trans-Pacific”
Tara A. Bynum (University of Iowa), “Lists, Ledgers, and Friends: Or, Accounting for Eighteenth-Century Black Communities in Rhode Island”
Qiuyang Chen (University of Warwick), “Rural Women and Private Credit: Microcredit Crises in Southeast Coastal China, 1987–1992”

Panel 5, 11:15–1:00: Business-Women: Marital Status, Motherliness, and Making Money

Discussant: TBA

Amy M. Froide (University of Maryland-Baltimore County), “What Happens to the Household Trade when the Spouses Break up? Marital Separation and Family Businesses in Eighteenth-Century London”
Bryna Goodman (University of Oregon), “‘Mother-wealth’ and the Governance of Leaky Capital: Gender, Financial Imagination, and the Stock Exchange in Early Twentieth-Century China”
Sara Pinto (University of Porto), “‘And in This, She Was Exposed and Earned Her Living’: Women and Moneylending in a Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Seaport”

Panel 6, 2:45–5:00: Spousal Ties, Colonial Marriages, and Blended Families

Discussant: TBA

Jiwon Han (City University of New York), “A Credit to Their Families: Family Ties, Dutch Merchants, and Financial Networks in Eighteenth-Century Britain”
Aleksandr Turbin (University of Illinois-Chicago), “Family, Kinship, and Gender in Commercial Relations in the Russian Far East in the Late Imperial Period”
Ivan Sicca Gonçalves (University of Campinas), “Making Families, Fortunes, and Caravans: Portuguese Settlers in Central Angola, Nineteenth Century”
Sophie Rose (University of Tübingen), “The Dutch West India Company and Eurafrican Family Life on the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast”