Baker Library Research Articles

From Allston to Ahmedabad: American hegemony in management education reexamined

Purpose This paper aims to study the origin story of Harvard Business School’s involvement with the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad to study the reasons for the spread of American management education. It introduces both the explicit influence of Cold War politics and Indian development imaginaries to the export of American management thought in the early 1960s. Design/methodology/approach This paper relies on archival research for its primary source material, drawing upon rich archives of documents found at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School. Findings Harvard’s role in Ahmedabad was explicitly influenced by the Cold War anti-communist foreign policy of the USA, but did so opportunistically and contrary to the Ford Foundation’s (FF) original plans. Vikram Sarabhai, who was a key player in the Indian national imaginary of development, invited Harvard on his own initiative and forced the foundation to follow his interests rather than being a mere “subaltern.” Research limitations/implications This paper could additionally add to the historical debate about the scope and periodization of the Cold War and the role of non-state actors. Originality/value This paper covers new ground in exploring the early connection between the Indian development imaginary and business education. It concludes that the export of hegemonic US management education was not successful during Cold War, and the FF was not as dominant as it was made out to be.

Stanley J. Stein (1920–2019)

Stanley J. Stein (1920–2019)

Language Matters: How Baker Library is Working Towards Conscious and Inclusive Description

Inclusive and conscious archival description can support consistency in researching and describing marginalized groups and can serve to provide context and a counter-narrative reflecting the perspective of the documented community. It can also help to address the power imbalances between creators and subjects of records. In this article, the authors describe efforts to prepare best practice guidelines for inclusive description and for revising descriptions to remediate outdated, problematic, or offensive language and meet modern standards. They also share how the project team is working together to create meaningful and enduring changes that both provide a better experience for staff and users and support Harvard Business School’s Action Plan for Racial Equality.

Advertising and marketing archives and ephemera at the Harvard libraries: discovery and opportunity

Purpose A series of online searches of the Harvard University Library System – which includes the Baker Library, Houghton Library and the Radcliffe Institute’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library – on the History of Women in America revealed nearly 1,000 archive and manuscript holdings on advertising and related topics. This paper aims to investigate the extent of these holdings, to assess their value to advertising and marketing historians and to explore their potential for encouraging future research on under-investigated topics and questions. Design/methodology/approach Described are the extensive and valuable special collections and other holdings related to advertising, business and marketing of the Harvard Library System. Also described are the availability of the holdings and recommendations for accessing and studying the collections and artifacts. Findings The research reported here supports an overall conclusion that the Harvard Library System holds an important place among the world’s repositories of valuable historical advertisements and marketing ephemera. The research also supports four specific conclusions regarding the historical value of Harvard’s collections and archives. First, some of the collections offer access to artifacts and items from an under-investigated period – the first half of the 19th century. Second, many of the collections are international in scope. Third, the collections represent a wide array of 19th century non-periodical advertisements and ephemera, such as trade cards, posters and theatrical playbills. Fourth, and most important, the collections offer significant potential for addressing, among other under-investigated topics, the important role of women in the development of modern advertising theory and professional practices. Originality/value A prior search for the world’s largest and most historically significant archives and collections of advertisements and marketing ephemera (promotional objects or media executions created for a one-time, limited purpose) revealed a handful of library and museum collections of exceptional size or topical importance meriting further investigation. This paper adds to an extensive line of research published in the marketing and advertising historical literature exploring and describing the breadth, depth and historical value of the world’s important collections of historical advertisements and ephemera.

The South Sea Bubble Collection at Baker Library, Harvard Business School

The South Sea Bubble Collection at Baker Library, Harvard Business School

Framework for Sustaining Innovation at Baker Library, Harvard Business School

ABSTRACTBaker Library at Harvard Business School is increasingly asked by the school's faculty to create custom digital information products to enhance course assignments and to find novel ways of electronically disseminating faculty research. In order to prioritize these requests, as well as facilitate, manage, and track the resulting projects, the library staff developed the Research Innovation Framework. Informed by design thinking techniques and recent research on building innovation strategies and innovative cultures, the Research Innovation Framework has been particularly impactful to Baker's intra-organizational communication, allowing for more robust collaboration across the entire library. Tools and resources contained within the Framework have allowed Baker to adapt to the diverse and evolving needs of its customers.

The Education of Lincoln Kirstein: “One Can't Refuse What One Knows Will Go So Far”

This article offers new perspectives on the relationship of Lincoln Kirstein to his father Louis and Louis's secretary, E. R. “Effie” Beverley, through a close examination of correspondence in the Louis E. Kirstein Papers at Harvard Business School's Baker Library. With a special focus on correspondence from 1934 (the year in which Kirstein's ballet enterprise with George Balanchine began in earnest), this discussion reveals the active role that Louis Kirstein and Effie Beverley took in supporting Kirstein's enterprises, managing his affairs, and contributing to his professional development as an arts impresario.

Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964

Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964

Stepping From Belgium to the United States and Back: The Conceptualization and Impact of the Harvard Step Test, 1942–2012

Purpose: This article examines the contribution of the Belgian-American exercise physiologist Lucien Brouha in developing the Harvard Step Test (HST) at the pioneering Harvard Fatigue Laboratory (HFL) during the Second World War and provides a better understanding of the importance of transnational relations concerning scientific progress. Method: Analysis of sources in the University Archives of the State University in Liège (Belgium), the Archives and Documentation Centre of the Sportimonium at Hofstade (Belgium), the Harvard Business School Archives at Baker Library (Cambridge, MA), the Harvard Medical School Archives at Countway Library (Cambridge, MA), and the Brouha and Shaler private family archives (Sutton, VT). Results: The outbreak of the Second World War shifted research at the interdisciplinary HFL toward the field of military physiology and resulted in the transfer of Brouha from Belgium to the HFL. Brouha's personal and academic experiences made him the right man in the right place to develop the HST in 1942. The HST—which has celebrated its 70th anniversary—was of immediate academic and practical significance during and after the war. Conclusions: Brouha's case demonstrates the importance of personal experiences, transnational relations, and interdisciplinary research settings for the establishment of scientific (sub)disciplines. Studying internal scientific evolutions in relation to personal and work experiences of “mobile” and therefore often “forgotten” researchers like Brouha is necessary to better understand and interpret evolutions in science and corresponding processes of academic and social mobility.

Jay Cooke’s Memoir and Wartime Finance

Better known to American history as the gambling robber baron whose failed Northern Pacific Railroad triggered the Panic of 1873, Jay C. Cooke (1821–1905) was the father of modern war finance and a brilliant salesman of the fiscal obligations of citizenship. The son of an Ohio congressman, Cooke moved to Philadelphia in 1839, whetted his appetite for bond sales during the Mexican War, and “on the 1st day of January 1861 in one of the darkest hours of our country” established Jay Cooke & Co. in the heart of Philadelphia’s Third Street financial district. Cooke reflected on his wartime experiences a generation later in an unpublished memoir. Composed in the 1890s with the aid of his granddaughter and now on deposit at the Baker Library Historical Collections of the Harvard Business School, Cooke’s memoir offers invaluable insights into the history of Civil War Pennsylvania.

Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936–2005

We analyze the long-run trends in executive compensation using a new dataset of top officers of large firms from 1936 to 2005. The median real value of compensation was remarkably flat from the late 1940s to the 1970s, revealing a weak relationship between pay and aggregate firm growth. By contrast, this correlation was much stronger in the past thirty years. This historical perspective also suggests that compensation arrangements have often helped to align managerial incentives with those of shareholders because executive wealth was sensitive to firm performance for most of our sample. These new facts pose a challenge to several common explanations for the rise in executive pay since the 1980s. (JEL G30, J33, M52, N32) The compensation paid to CEOs of large publicly traded corporations rose dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, stimulating much debate on the determinants of managerial pay (Murphy 1999; Hall and Murphy 2003). The discussion has been largely inconclusive, in part because readily available data only exist for the time period after 1970. By constructing a new long-run time series on executive pay, we are able to consistently document the trends in the level and structure of pay over most of the twentieth century. This historical perspective reveals several new facts that contrast sharply with data from recent decades, allowing us to reassess some of the most popular explanations for the recent surge in compensation. Although the stylized facts on executive pay since the 1970s are well established, only a handful of studies analyzed managerial compensation prior to We would like to thank George Baker, Edward Glaeser, Claudia Goldin, Caroline Hoxby, Lawrence Katz, and Robert Margo for their advice and encouragement throughout this project. Very helpful comments have also been received from Doug Elmendorf, Eric Hilt, Antoinette Schoar, Dan Sichel, Laura Starks, and seminar participants at the DAE NBER meetings, AEA meetings, AFA meetings, and EHA meetings. We also thank Michael Weisbach (our editor) and two anonymous referees. We thank the staff at the Historical Collections and Danielle Barney of Baker Library for making the data collection possible and Brian Hall and Jeff Liebman for providing us with their data. Yoon Chang, Yao Huang, Michele McAteer, Timothy Schwuchow, James Sigel, and Athanasios Vorvis provided outstanding research assistance. The views in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or its staff. This work was supported by the Economic

Polaroid, Aperture and Ansel Adams: Rethinking the Industry-Aesthetics Divide

This article takes the history of Polaroid photography as an opportunity to question a presupposition that underpins much thinking on photography: the split between industrial (i.e. useful) applications of photography and its fine art (i.e. aesthetic) manifestations. Critics as ideologically opposed as Peter Bunnell and Abigail Solomon-Godeau steadfastly maintain the existence of this separation of utility and aesthetics in photography, even if they take contrasting views on its meaning and desirability. However, Polaroid, at one time the second largest company in the photo industry, not only enjoyed close relations with those key representatives of fine art photography, Ansel Adams and the magazine Aperture, but it also intermittently asserted the ‘essentially aesthetic’ nature of its commercial and industrial activities in its own internal publications. The divide between industry and aesthetics is untenable, then, but this does not mean that the two poles were reconciled at Polaroid. While Aperture may have underplayed its commercial connections and Polaroid may have retrospectively exaggerated its own contributions to the development of fine art photography, most interesting are the contradictions and tensions that arise when the industrial and the aesthetic come together. The present article draws on original research undertaken at the Polaroid Corporation archives held at the Baker Library, Harvard, as well as with the Ansel Adams correspondence with Polaroid, held at the Polaroid Collections in Concord, Massachusetts.

Innovation, Creativity, and Meaning: Leading in the Information Age

Today's fast paced global environment requires information professionals to be leaders keeping pace with user needs. Two academic research libraries share their work seeking to ensure and leverage the creativity in their organizations focusing on the most meaningful innovative opportunities. The premise is that usefulness and appropriateness is achieved through strategic alignment, thereby opening the door of opportunity for innovative products and services. The ability to seize the opportunity each group seeks to meet is due to the recognition by the organization of that alignment. And so, organizational perception, awareness, and value all affect the successful implementation of creativity. The products and services presented in this article, Harvard's Baker Library Historical Collections Online and Purdue University's career wiki, stem from organizational alignment, and the work of the leadership teams to influence perception, create awareness, and demonstrate value.

The Return of a Lost Ledger to the Selfridge Collection of Medici Manuscripts at Baker Library

The Selfridge Collection of Medici manuscripts at Harvard Business School's Baker Library is the largest collection of Renaissance Florentine account books outside Italy. This collection documents both the business and personal economic activities of one branch of the Medici family through six generations, extending from the early fifteenth century through the end of the sixteenth century. It would be difficult to find, even in Florence, another family whose economic activities are so well documented over such a long span of time, a period we know as the Renaissance. This patrimony of family documents was sold by the Medici heirs through an auction at Christie's of London in 1918; and in 1927 the buyer, H. Gordon Selfridge, deposited the ledgers at the Harvard School of Business Administration. Around one hundred ledgers arrived at Harvard at that time, but one item in the Christie's inventory was missing. In 2007, I found this missing item in the catalogue of a Munich antiquarian book dealer, but it had already been sold to a private collector in Germany. When informed of its importance for the Harvard collection, the new owner of the ledger kindly permitted Laura Linard, director of Historical Collections at Baker Library, to have it microfilmed; and so finally, after eighty years, the missing item has returned, at least in a photographic version, to its original home, thereby completing the Selfridge Collection. This event could be the occasion for a reevaluation of a major collection of business documents too long ignored by historians.

The Contribution of the Harvard Business School to Management Control, 1908–1980

ABSTRACT: This paper documents and discusses the evolution of management control, which includes management and financial accounting, in the Harvard Business School (HBS) from 1908 to 1980. Primary emphasis is placed on the roles of the key movers, Ross G. Walker and Robert N. Anthony. The successive alterations in the configuration and content of the MBA courses in the Business School, based on a reading of the course catalogues, faculty papers and other documents on file in Baker Library, and interviews and correspondence with many of the principals, together with an examination of the series of text- and casebooks published by HBS accounting faculty, are the factual basis for this historical study. Concomitant developments at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago are also brought into the analysis. An appendix contains a complete list of the HBS accounting faculty during the time span under study.

Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Papers and Library at Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School

Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Papers and Library at Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School

Women, enterprise & society: a guide to resources in the business manuscripts collection at Baker Library

Women, enterprise & society: a guide to resources in the business manuscripts collection at Baker Library

For Gloria Anzaldúa: Collecting America, Performing Friendship

It was an unexpectedly chilly day in May 2004 when the news flashed across various electronic mailing lists that Gloria Anzaldúa had died from complications related to diabetes. I was in the midst of teaching a course on contemporary issues in feminism to a formidable group of undergraduate women and men, in which we were reading “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” and “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” These are my favorite essays from Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a text published in 1987 and still crucial to any understanding of identity and politics in feminism today. The announcement, made by Anzaldúa's coeditor and compañera, Cherrie Moraga, requested that we construct homemade shrines to honor Anzaldúa's presence and aid her passing. My classroom was in Dartmouth Hall, a venerable eighteenth-century building only a stone's throw from Baker Library, whose tower sports a weathervane with the image of Dartmouth's founder, Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, teaching a crosslegged, befeathered, and pipe-smoking Indian, Samson Occom, his most famous student, beneath the symbolic lone pine. Into the graywalled room, I brought objects that seemed out of place there and incendiary: candles, flowers, incense, and books—an armful of wellthumbed volumes containing the nearly talismanic words, her own and those of others, that Anzaldúa struggled to bring into print.

Women, enterprise & society: a guide to resources in the business manuscripts collection at Baker Library

Women, enterprise & society: a guide to resources in the business manuscripts collection at Baker Library

From the Archives: Women's History in Baker Library's Business Manuscripts Collection

“[O]ur ladies know nothing of the sober certainties which relate to money and they cannot be taught,” wrote Frederic Tudor in 1820, in a sweeping indictment of women's financial abilities that was common for the period. Despite such stereotypes, many women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries participated in commerce, both as merchants and as manufacturers. Because they mainly oversaw small and shortlived concerns, however, their enterprises did not fit into traditional understandings of successful business, either in their own time or later, when the field of business history developed in the twentieth century. As a consequence, when Harvard Business School's Baker Library began amassing business manuscripts, curators generally concentrated on collecting the records of large firms and well-known industrialists. Their big-business bias not only affected what was collected, but also how manuscripts were processed. Search aids and cataloging records did not distinguish materials made by or about women because gender was not a compelling issue for early twentieth-century historians.