Skip to main content

HBS Conference: “Roadblocks to Sustainability”

Harvard Business School is holding a conference on "Understanding and Overcoming the Roadblocks to Sustainability" that will meet on June 14, 2018. The meeting organizers write:
Over the past several decades, a vibrant scholarly community has generated thousands of empirical and conceptual studies on the complex relationship between business and the natural environment. At the same time, many large corporations have created positions of Corporate Sustainability Officer with the goal of achieving steady improvements in their sustainability performance. Despite substantial academic research and management attention, complex ecological challenges continue to grow. This unfortunate disconnect between aspirations and reality has begun to provoke some self-reflection in the business and natural environment literature concerning its impact and relevance. .  . . Recent empirical business history research appears to show that profits and sustainability have been hard to reconcile throughout history. . . . This conference will focus on the roadblocks to sustainability since the 1960s and develop a research agenda for scholars seeking to overcome those roadblocks. In addition to offering a retrospective analysis of where corporate sustainability has fallen short, the conference will explore the incentives, organizational designs, and institutional systems that would allow sustainability to take hold.
The list of speakers and schedule are now available on the conference website, as well as information about lodging and registration. Note that the registration deadline is June 5, 2018.

Popular posts from this blog

The Exchange has moved to the BHC's website

  Dear members subscribers of The Exchange   The Exchange, the weblog of the BHC, is now part of our website ( https://thebhc.org ). We migrated the blog to serve our membership and interested parties best since Blogger is discontinuing its email service.   Note that this will be the last message we will send from Blogger .   The Exchange was founded by Pat Denault over a decade ago, and it has become an essential channel for announcements from and about the BHC and from our subscribers and members. Announcements from The Exchange will come up on the News section of our website as they did before. However, if you wish to receive these announcements via email, and you have not done so yet, please subscribe to The Exchange by: Going to our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org ), s crolling down to the end of the page, and clicking on "Subscribe to the Latest BHC News." Or go to the “News” section of our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org/ ),   and click on “The

Regina Blaszczyk on the Business of Color

In September, MIT Press published Regina Lee Blaszczyk 's book, The Color Revolution , in which she "traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture." Readers can see some of the 121 color illustrations featured in the book at the MIT PressLog here and here . The author has recently written an essay on her research for the book in the Hagley Archives for the Hagley Library and Archives newsletter.    Reviews can be found in the New York Times , The Atlantic , Leonardo , and Imprint ; one can listen to an audio interview with Reggie Blaszczyk, and read her posts, "How Auto Shows Sparked a Color Revolution" on the Echoes blog and "True Blue: DuPont and the Color Revolution" on the Chemical Heritage Foundation website . Also available is a CHF video of the author discussing another excerpt from her rese

New resource available: Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography

Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography The Business History Conference is working to facilitate the creation of a bibliography of scholarly work on race and business history. We hope that the bibliography will serve as a resource for those seeking to create more inclusive syllabi and understand the historical context for our present moment of reckoning with structural racism in the United States and across the globe. The bibliography is crowdsourced and draws on the collective expertise of the BHC membership. The BHC wishes to expand the list of references already curated and invites your contributions to the bibliography (The current list of references contains 154 titles). Submit your suggestions by (a) emailing additional references to Anne Fleming of the BHC Electronic Media Oversight Committee <acf80 at law.georgetown.ed> or BHC Web Editor Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez <padelacruzf at gmail.com>, (b) tweeting titles to @TheBHCNews or (c) adding it