scholarly journals Reframing Chinese Business History

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Adam K. Frost
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Business History ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Chinese Business ◽  
The Future

Business history is expanding to include a greater plurality of contexts, with the study of Chinese business representing a key area of growth. However, despite efforts to bring China into the fold, much of Chinese business history remains stubbornly distal to the discipline. One reason is that business historians have not yet reconciled with the field's unique origins and intellectual tradition. This article develops a revisionist historiography of Chinese business history that retraces the field's development from its Cold War roots to the present day, showing how it has been shaped by the particular questions and concerns of “area studies.” It then goes on to explore five recent areas of novel inquiry, namely: the study of indigenous business institutions, business and semi-colonial context, business at the periphery of empire, business during socialist transition, and business under Chinese socialism. Through this mapping of past and present trajectories, the article aims to provide greater coherence to the burgeoning field and shows how, by taking Chinese business history seriously, we are afforded a unique opportunity to reimagine the future of business history as a whole.

Chinese Business History: Interpretive Trends and Priorities for the Future

2000 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 278
Author(s):  
Greg Lewis ◽  
Robert Gardella ◽  
Jane K. Leonard ◽  
Andrea McElderry
Keyword(s):  
Business History ◽  
Chinese Business ◽  
The Future

Comparative Area Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ivory Coast ◽  
Qualitative Comparative Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
International Context ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Cross Area Studies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Analytical Approaches

Area studies have undergone significant changes over the last two decades. They have been transformed from mostly descriptive accounts in the international context of the Cold War to theory-oriented and methodological analytical approaches. More recent comparative methods such as “Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (QCA) and related approaches, which are particularly suitable for medium N studies, have significantly contributed to this development. This essay discusses the epistemological background of this approach as well as recent developments. It provides two examples of current “cross area studies,” one concerned with successful democratic transformations across four regions (Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia), the other with political participation in marginalized settlements in four countries (Brazil, Chile, Ivory Coast, Kenya) in a multilevel analysis. The conclusion points to the theoretical promises of this approach and its practical-political relevance.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Systems Thinking ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Visions

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.

Differences in temporal reasoning

Focaal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (66) ◽  
pp. 25-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Ringel
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Temporal Reasoning ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Temporal Complexity ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Flexibility ◽  
Shrinking City

Hoyerswerda, Germany's fastest-shrinking city, faces problems with the future that seem initially unrelated to the past and yet excite manifold conflicting accounts of it. The multiple and conflicting temporal references employed by Hoyerswerdians indicate that the temporal regime of postsocialism is accompanied, if not overcome, by the temporal framework of shrinkage. By reintroducing the analytical domain of the future, I show that local temporal knowledge practices are not historically predetermined by a homogenous postsocialist culture or by particular generational experiences. Rather, they exhibit what I call temporal complexity and temporal flexibility-creative uses of a variety of coexisting temporal references. My ethnographic material illustrates how such expressions of different forms of temporal reasoning structure social relations within and between different generations. Corresponding social groups are not simply divided by age, but are united through shared and heavily disputed negotiations of the post-Cold War era's contemporary crisis.

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