Dr Christopher McKenna
I am currently University Reader in Business History and Strategy at the Said Business School, a Fellow of Brasenose College, and Co-Director of the Global History of Capitalism Project in the Oxford Centre for Global History within the History Faculty. I am particularly interested in the historical development and strategy of professional firms, and their role in shaping global business over the last two centuries. My current book project is a global history of white-collar crime from the South Sea Bubble to the present, tentatively titled Partners in Crime. In my teaching, I am piloting a series of historical business case studies, linked to the material culture of global trade, to be distributed freely online. Before coming to Oxford, I did my undergraduate degree in economics at Amherst College, my doctorate in History at Johns Hopkins, and I have held research fellowships at Yale, Georgetown, and Harvard.
Research Interests
- Global History of Capitalism
- Professionals and White Collar Crime
- Industrial and Corporate Technology
My research in on the global history of capitalism but starts with my training in the history of business and technology. Having first worked on Wall Street and taught in a business school for many years, my research is generally informed by the pragmatic concerns of managers and long-run the strategy of institutions. My eclecticism, channelled through business history, means that I have studied industrial accidents, management consultants, corporate ghost-writing, the historical transmission of managerial models, the development of the non-profit sector, and the bankruptcy of a leading newspaper among other topics.
My current research is on the global history of white-collar crime, including industrial espionage by the French in textiles, Ivar Kreuger’s Ponzi scheme based in Sweden, the development of tax havens in the Caribbean, British counterfeiting in the 18th century, nepotism and co-mingling of funds in American universities, and the ascendance of cybercrime in the 21st century global economy. My purpose is to show how successive institutional scandals led to the historical development of our system of corporate governance and the creation of new markets by professional firms.
I am also interested in pedagogical innovation, particularly embedding material culture, generally associated with museums, and (historical) case studies, generally associated with business schools, in the teaching of business and technological history. To this end, I am editing a new textbook on the global history of capitalism that will bring together the skills of graduate students from the Said Business School and Oxford’s Humanities Division via the Global History of Capitalism project. We intend to distribute these case studies online for the benefit of scholars and students around the world.
https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/community/people/chris-mckenna
Featured Publication
Projects
Publications
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The historical role of the corporation in society
December 2018|Journal article|Journal of the British Academy -
Roundtable on management theory after organization man: Creativity, burnout, intuition, heterarchy
January 2016|Journal article|Business History Review -
Introduction: Corporate reputation in historical perspective
December 2013|Journal article|Business History ReviewCorporate reputation is a term that on the face of it hardly needs explanation. Historians have long used it in an unproblematic fashion to refer to the way a firm is perceived by others. Yet as with many such terms, corporate reputation can be theorized or at least formally defined. Scholars in the fields of marketing and organization increasingly are doing both; since the 1980s they have attempted to distinguish reputation from the related constructs of image, identity, status, legitimacy, celebrity, and brand equity. The project is ongoing, and a strong consensus has not yet been reached on how to define corporate reputation. Charles Fombrun, whose definitions have been perhaps the most widely used, suggests the following: a collective assessment of a company's attractiveness to a specific group of stakeholders relative to a reference group of companies with which the company competes for resources. Fombrun's definition contains three core ideas: firms have multiple reputations, depending on which stakeholders are being considered; corporate reputation is a comparative construct, because a firm is always judged in relation to something else -in this case, the firm's competitors; and firms' reputations are a source of competitive advantage or disadvantage. Historians, who for valid intellectual reasons rarely attempt the formal definition of terms, have not participated in the theorizing of corporate reputation. Yet the peculiar skills of historians are much needed; for if the study of corporate reputation has underemphasized the role of institutional phenomena such as rules, norms, processes, and structures, it has all but ignored historical context and historical processes. Copyright © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. -
Strategy Followed Structure: Management Consulting and the Creation of a Market for “Strategy,” 1950–2000
September 2012|Chapter|History and StrategyPurpose – This chapter traces the creation of a market for strategy by management consulting firms during the second half of the twentieth century in order to demonstrate their impact in shaping debates in the subject and demand for their services by corporate executives. Design/methodology/approach – Using historical analysis, the chapter draws on institutional theory, including institutional isomorphism. It uses both primary and secondary data from the leading consulting firms to describe how consultants shifted from offering advice on organizational structure to corporate strategy and eventually to corporate legitimacy as a result of the changing economic and regulatory environment of the time. Findings/originality/value – This study provides a historical context for the emergence of corporate and competitive strategy as an institutional practice in both the United States and around the world, and provides insights into how important this history can be in understanding the debates among consultants and academics during strategy’s emergence as an academic subject and practical application.corporate strategy -
Corporate Reputation and Regulation in Historical Perspective
July 2012|Chapter|The Oxford Handbook of Corporate ReputationThis article reviews the four areas where a significant or growing body of historical works exist: reputation mechanisms and self-regulation, the reputation of the corporate form, the reputation of regulatory bodies, and reputational capital within markets and hierarchies. Reputation mechanisms are an integral part of the phenomenon referred to as private ordering. The state increasingly replaced the regulatory power of reputation by acting out industry regulations to control corporations. Technology and regulation decreased the role of reputation in finance and confined it to the private guarantee of only a few small intermediaries. The shortcomings of the historical literature on corporate reputation are addressed. Reputation intermediaries and corporations' multiple reputations with different groups hold the promise of developing exciting new research in the history of corporate reputation.corporate regulation; history