Identities – race, gender, nation, and class

This panel has been created by the Program Committee so does not need a rationale.

This panel has been created by the Program Committee so does not need a rationale.

This panel examines how sailors, citizens, and ship masters used labor practices, both their own and their perceptions of others, to forge gendered, classed, and national identities in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Recent work in business history has explored how business models with their own core values shift existing modes of identity. These business values challenge some identities while validating others. In the Atlantic world, as mercantile men and women expanded trade, they created a set of new tensions around laboring identities.

From grocery stores, to private homes, and oil fields, Black workers battled against racially discriminatory employment practices and exploitative labor conditions in the twentieth century United States. Our panel considers how Black workers sought to lay claim to better jobs, wages, and working conditions. Geographically, we are focused on the South, with a particular emphasis on the city of Atlanta. Chronologically, our work tracks how Black workers responded to economic dislocations from the Great Depression to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

The relationship between Jews and finance has a long and troubled history. Antisemitic conspiracy theories of Jews controlling the banking system and caricatures of unscrupulous Jewish moneylenders have been a persistent fixture of Western discourse on finance and capitalism for centuries. In response, it has been tempting for historians to avoid the topic altogether. But that is a mistake.

Oral business history is a critical yet underexplored methodology among business historians. It provides nuanced insights into the lived experiences of business actors that traditional archival research often overlooks. It also allows researchers to examine business forms and experiences poorly documented or absent from the archival record.

Emotional labor, defined as the management of inner feelings at work (Hochschild, 1983), highlights the complexities of gender, social hierarchies, and work in service- and hospitality-related industries globally. Business historians have not fully engaged with the concept. Yet the use of emotional labor as an analytical framework helps revisit the logic of “rationality” in business management and illuminates the dynamics of social relations.

This panel has been created by the Program Committee so does not need a rationale.

This panel has been created by the Program Committee so does not need a rationale.

This panel has been created by the Program Committee so does not need a rationale.