RRBW CFP 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Past & Present of Work: Histories of Labor and Its Place in Business
6th Biennial Richard Robinson Business History Workshop
Portland State University, Portland OR
April 30–May 2, 2026

Ever since Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations described labor as ”the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things, "economic thinkers have been theorizing the connection between business and the productive forces necessary for its operation. Marx’s critique of capitalism famously drew upon the labor theory of value to argue that capital consisted of congealed labor alienated from exploited workers. For Max Weber, the development of systems of rationalized and bureaucratized work where agents internalized market incentives was essential to modern capitalism. More recent theorists have continued to expand and complicate these frameworks. Feminist scholars such as Arlie Hochschild and Silvia Federici have foregrounded forms of invisible labor—including emotional labor and reproductive labor—that are essential to economic life but historically excluded from accounts of production. David Graeber critiqued the moral elevation of labor itself through his analysis of “bullshit jobs,” which, while compensated, serve no meaningful purpose. Historians, meanwhile, have disrupted binary distinctions between “free” and “unfree” labor, exposing a spectrum of coercion, obligation, and seeming choice built into labor-procuring practices across time and space.

Yet not all theorists have interpreted the use of labor as innately exploitative, and they have instead focused on the primacy of managerial decision making, organization, coordination, over the performance of labor and its effect on the worker. Suggesting the need for entrepreneurial acumen in anticipating demand, marginal utility theory shifts the producer of value from the laborer to the consumer by tying the value of labor’s product to its “utility,” that is, to the consumer’s desire for the product. More recently, pointing out the externalities associated with labor and often neglected dimensions of work, theorists working in animal studies and actor-network theory have further decentered the human worker At the same time, automation has allowed for reimagining human labor as superfluous, while the rise of artificial intelligence compels us to rethink what counts as labor—and who or what performs it—in the present.

Given the rich theoretical and historical literature on labor and arguments over its centrality in creating value, this workshop will focus on the relationship between business and labor through the lens of extraction or procurement. It asks the question: How have individuals, experts, and firms across time and regions managed to locate, acquire, train, retain, discipline, incentivize, and maximize productive forces essential to the needs of an enterprise? In asking this question, this workshop hopes to bring together business history and labor history, which, despite their shared focus on economic institutions, agents, and processes, often appear as independent and even mutually exclusive historiographical domains. We especially encourage proposals from scholars working on periods before 1800 and in areas outside of Europe and the United States.

Topics of particular interest may touch on (but are not limited to):

Invisible and unacknowledged labor: familial, emotional, psychological labor; social construction of productive and unproductive labor; and work hidden in the performance of social identity (e.g. of gender).
Management techniques: Fordism/Taylorism; labor surveillance and discipline;
techniques of coercion; and incentive structures.
Cross-regional/continental labor recruitment and labor migration: colonial business and plantation labor; strategies for sourcing labor from colonial, peripheral, or enslaved populations, such as indentureship, bond servitude, sharecropping, and contract labor.
Labor and ethical norms: business justification of labor practices that contravene cultural mores and company self-presentation—e.g. sweatshops, child labor, enslaved labor, the slave trade—and, inversely, the use of “good” labor practices for publicity and competitive edge (i.e. fair trade, “not made by slaves.” etc.).
Skills and expertise in business: systems of job training, including guild-based apprenticeship, on-the-job training, public and private primary schooling, and vocational schools; and historical analyses influenced by HCE (Human-Capital Externalities).
Unskilled, casual, and freelance labor: from the “independent” contractor (e.g. the putting-out system) to the gig economy.
Work environment and company culture: company towns; corporate retreats; and the invention of leisure as fuel for labor productivity.
Non-human labor: animal labor; non-biological and mechanized work forces; actor-network theory and institutional agency; and AI & automation.
Representations of labor in relation to business: e.g. the salaryman, “the organization man,” and “the man in the gray flannel suit,” as well as their blue-collar analogues.

The Richard Robinson Business History Workshop has held small workshops on particular themes in business history since 2012. The keynote address of the sixth biennial Richard Robinson Workshop will be given by Professor Stefano Bellucci (University of Leiden, Netherlands) on the evening of Thursday, April 30. Papers selected for the workshop will be pre-circulated and discussed in plenary sessions on Friday, May 1, and Saturday, May 2.

Paper proposals, consisting of a one-page CV and a 500-word abstract, should be sent to the workshop organizers, Thomas Luckett (Portland State University), Chia Yin Hsu (Portland State University), and Erika Vause (St. John’s University), at psu.business.history.workshop@gmail.com by December 1, 2025. Accepted proposals will be notified by January 15, 2025.

Presentations will be in person at Portland State University. Presenters will receive lodging for three nights and meals, as well as air travel or other comparable travel to and from the Workshop. There will be no charge for conference registration.