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Wife Swap was a US reality TV series which aired for the first time in 2004 on ABC. Christina Lubinski, Associate Professor at MPP, and Anna Spadavecchia, Associate Professor at Henley Business School in Reading, UK, decided to transfer the concept and “swap” their academic lives for three months in the spring of 2017.

The relationship between nation states and the companies based in their respective territories is often ambiguous. Companies provide employment and they pay taxes, they contribute to national income and frequently to “national identity” (Disney, Dior, Daimler). Companies and businessmen engage in bilateral and international diplomacy, e.g. as door-openers for new relationships of the West to the Soviet Union in the 1950s or to China in the late 1970s. At other times, companies supported national policies of war and crimes against humanity. The histories of Chrysler, Krupp, or Rolls-Royce – to name just a few examples – pro-vide abundant evidence of embeddedness and dependence on state capacity. Time and again, even companies describing themselves as multi- or trans-national seem to appreciate the security net of a nation state with its government and constituency of taxpayers, who act as lenders of last resort. In times of financial crisis there is no dearth of companies that claim to be citizens of a nation state for the sake of access to the respective state’s resources. At the same time the modern state has developed towards a ‘competition state’ acting like a company in a market of countries vying for investments. Nation states brand themselves; they try to attract customers and to ser-vice international markets.

The purpose of this workshop is to provide scholars with developmental feedback on work-in-progress related to historical approaches to entrepreneurship and strategy, broadly construed. Our aim is to support the development of historical research on entrepreneurship for publication in leading journals, including for the special issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (see, http://sej.strategicmanagement.net/conf-dl/sej-historical-approaches-to-entrepreneurship-research.pdf). In addition to providing feedback and suggestions for specific topics, the workshop will address the commonly faced challenges of writing for a double-audience of historians and entrepreneurship/management scholars, engaging entrepreneurship theory and constructs, and identifying the most valuable historical sources and methods in studying entrepreneurial phenomena. We welcome work-in-progress at all stages of development. Interested scholars may submit two types of submissions for discussion: full research papers (8,000 words) or paper ideas (1,000 to 3,000 words).

The seminar brings together scholars from history, organization studies and management, with interest in narrative construction of history and memory and organizations. For details see the invitation below