5th Biennial Richard Robinson Workshop on Business History (Web)
Time: 23.-25.05.2024
Venue: Portland State University
Proposals by: 15.12.2023
The modern economy is often conceived as a realm of anonymity, where strangers, motivated by rational and individual objectives, exchange goods and services with „no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‚cash payment'“ (as famously described in The Communist Manifesto). Yet actual business practices, in both the past and present, reveal the „embeddedness“ of economic actions in social relations (as Granovetter and others have shown), most glaringly, in the affective and familial ties that are inextricable from economic strategies. This conference will explore the enduring imbrication of commercial practices with family, kinship, gender (which structures family and household bonds), and women (whose appearance as a social category troubled the notion of the autonomous, genderless, individual). It seeks to bring together scholars working on a broad array of topics related to the intimate and familial aspects of economic life from various regions across the globe and various historical periods (modern, pre-modern, & others). Questions this conference will investigate include, but are not limited to: How have family and kinship networks fostered trust, provided for credit and investment, shielded economic actors from uncertainty, and been leveraged as collateral? How have intimate relations, both legal and extra-legal, acted to forge commercial alliances, transfer and create capital, and facilitate the circulation of commercial information? How have kinship, marriage, and intimate relations permitted business exchanges in colonial and diasporic contexts? How have kinship and marital ties allowed for long-term investment and long-distance (e.g. transoceanic and transcontinental) trades? How have gender roles and gender performances in the familial context enabled or undermined business activities? For instance, how have economic actors mobilized masculinity and femininity in their business practices? And how have women, as key actors in intimate economies, leveraged their position to participate in commercial affairs?
In envisioning this workshop, the organizers take a broad view of the notion of family and kinship, defining both as an association of people who Continue reading

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