Shane Hamilton

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

Abstract: Historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell have recently articulated calls for research on maintenance as an important phase of technological innovation. Although maintaining a technology’s ability to create and capture value in a competitive environment would seem essential for any technology-based firm, neither business historians nor management scholars have devoted much attention to the concept of technological maintenance. There is, however, a robust literature on “institutional maintenance” in organizational studies that offers some insights on the processes by which firms are able to maintain their technology. This paper focuses on the case of Monsanto’s Roundup technology over a nearly five-decade time span to illustrate how a company may deploy different modes of technological maintenance to preserve value, benefit from efficiency gains, and create and capture new value. Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller provides an especially interesting case study. Since its introduction in 1972, it has consistently been the most valuable technological resource for Monsanto, holding onto the top spot in global sales of herbicides over a remarkable span of time unmatched by any other firm or product in the agribusiness sector. Especially intriguing are the multiple ways in which, over half a century, Monsanto successfully fended off attacks on Roundup’s potential health hazards, environmental impacts, and effectiveness as an herbicide. Our paper, drawing on a robust set of archival documents from the Monsanto collections at Washington University, will explore this historical case to offer some preliminary contributions to how business historians and management scholars might conceptualize and build a future research agenda on technological maintenance.

2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

Abstract: Over the past decade, major multinational agribusiness firms including Bayer/Monsanto and Syngenta, along with dozens of tech startups, have dramatically increased investments in digital farming technologies. Building on GPS satellite data, climate modeling, and mobile data harvesting, the new suite of digital farming technologies is routinely marketed to farmers as a form of ‘risk management.’ Big-data algorithms enable private micro-insurance policies, farm implement sensors promise to reduce reliance on agrochemicals, and in-tractor mobile computers use real-time commodity pricing data to advise farmers on the most profitable micro-timing of harvests. Commercial agriculture, by its nature, is an enterprise fraught with profound uncertainty and risk. Yet technology, policy choices, and business practices have fundamentally transformed the ways in which farmers have confronted risk and uncertainty since the mid-twentieth century. From the early twentieth century to the 1990s, large-scale institutions were the essential mode for confronting risk and uncertainty. Vertically integrated agribusinesses used their oligopoly and oligopsony power to internalize many of the costs of unpredictable agriculture, while national governments spent controversially large sums to subsidize commercial farmers. Yet by the end of the century, the development of new technologies and discourses of financialization enabled both government policymakers and agribusinesses to pursue strategies that have increasingly individualized risk as something to be “managed” by farmers. This short presentation will explore the broader social and environmental consequences of this shift.

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: Although paradox studies has been influential in recent work in management and organization studies, it has not been a core theme business history. Paradoxes are situational and contingent, suggesting the value of historical methodologies for understanding why some strategic contexts are more prone to paradox than others. Agrifood standards provide a particularly rich context for exploring the historical development of strategic paradoxes. Agrifood standards—for quality, safety, and socio-ecological sustainability—are exemplars of the sorts of “grand challenges” to which paradox studies are particularly well suited, as they are products of complex multistakeholder initiatives that seek to combine both market and social goals. Quality and food safety standards were first introduced to mass markets in the early twentieth century to smooth market transactions. Standards reduced market uncertainties by establishing clear (and increasingly, government-mandated) standards to minimize costly debates over pricing. By the end of the twentieth century, new non-governmental forms of voluntary, private standards (e.g., GlobalGAP, Sedex, Fairtrade) increasingly structured the agrifood marketplace, creating paradoxical tensions between competitive and collaborative strategies within the industry. Sustainability standards such as Fairtrade or GlobalGAP certification, for instance, produce irresolvable, illogical, and persistent tensions between farmers, food processors, retailers, and consumers. Various stakeholders often perceive the standards as lacking in credibility, as contradictory definitions of “quality,” “fairness,” and “sustainability” are often fundamentally irreconcilable. Our paper will draw on a range of primary and secondary sources to comparatively explore three case studies in agrifood standards implementation: government-enforced fresh fruit and vegetable standards in the 1920s United States, private industry-led poultry standards in 1960s Great Britain, and global multistakeholder sustainability standards under GlobalGAP in the 1990s-2000s.

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: Business historians have produced wide-ranging insights into the transformations of the meatpacking industry since the early 19th century, yet there has been almost no exploration of the radical shifts in the industry since the turn of the 21st century. This paper situates the contemporary global beef complex in what John McNeill and Peter Engelke have termed The Great Acceleration. The period since 1945 has witnessed a profound, rapid, and—in a world-historic sense—anomalous increase in fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas emissions, and quantities of nitrogen synthesized. For the meat industry, the great acceleration entailed a host of changes centering on the intensification of animal production on one hand, and on the other hand, the intensification of production of animal feedstuffs. Using a case study of the Brazilian-based multinational agribusiness JBS (currently the world’s largest meatpacker), this paper will consider how governments and businesses strategically responded to the Great Acceleration in ways that have produced a structural “inertia” in the industry, limiting the power of individual firms to address the greenhouse gas emissions associated with modern meat.