Papers presented by Gavin Benke since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

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2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"“We are all prisoners of our perceptions” – The Institute for the Future and Monsanto Contemplate Environmentalism in the 1970s"

Abstract:

Throughout the 1970s, the Silicon Valley consulting firm the Institute for the Future (IFF) produced reports about changing the social and regulatory climate their clients would likely face in the coming decades. For the executives at Monsanto, IFF’s most significant client, environmental regulation was a top concern. Drawing on documents from the Institute for the Future archives at Stanford University, this paper examines IFF’s work for Monsanto in the 1970s to chart changing corporate attitudes towards environmental regulation during that decade. While IFF reports on the environment from the early 1970s focused the need for corporate leaders to rethink their organizations’ relationship to the natural world, later work for Monsanto as part of Project Aware, a major IFF study, was intended to help corporate clients anticipate (and influence) changing public sentiment about the environment and mitigate the threat of environmental regulation. This shifting stance on the part of IFF and its clients, though, was fraught. For instance, a 1975 IFF report for Monsanto’s New Ventures Division (which evaluated business proposals) took the form a religious narrative. Titled “The Conservation-Minded World of 1990,” the report offers a fictional narrative about an ex-pat Jesuit priest who returns to the United States in 1990 and sees changes in attitudes towards the environment. Mirroring the concerns of executives during the 1970s, this report, (along with others that IFF created for Monsanto), reveals an ambivalence on the part of the report’s authors in trying to locate a balance between corporate social responsibility towards and environment and fending off looming environmental regulation in the name of corporate autonomy.

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2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

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2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

"Multinational Corporations and Post-national Thinking in the 1970s"

Abstract:

In 1975, Lee L. Morgan, the President and Chief Operating Officer of Caterpillar Tractor, remarked that “In the 1970s there has been a virtual explosion in the publication of material on the multinational corporation.” Indeed, as big businesses increasingly transcended national boundaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of intellectuals and writers, such Raymond Vernon, Richard Barnet and Ronald Muller, began to raise alarm bells over what they saw as a troubling amount of power that these corporations possessed. However, for other observers of contemporary business, the multinational corporation was a positive development. Representing sometimes vastly different political and ideological sensibilities, this diverse group of economists, consultants and business school professors (most of whom identified as “futurists”) concluded that multinational corporations, if properly managed, could be accountable to multiple stakeholders and operate as pivotal institutions in a world where nation-states seemed to be less important than they had been. Indeed, speaking at the same event as Morgan in the middle of the decade, the Chamber of Commerce’s lead economist, Carl Madden, remarked that in a world marked by “virulent nationalism,” multinational corporations had the potential to “promote peace and understanding.” A year later, the Stanford Research Institute researcher Willis Harman would write that in the future, “new forms of world corporations” would play a role that would be “at least as important as national governments and international agencies” in securing global stability and prosperity. Such ideas moved beyond the era’s calls for corporate social responsibility. Instead, these various thinkers saw multinational corporations as harbingers of a new, emerging enlightened age. Over the course of the decade, these different futurists continued to refine and promote their understandings of the multinational corporation.

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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

"How Imagining “the Future” Blurred the Lines between Business and Government in the 1960s and 1970s"

Abstract:

This paper explores how a wide-ranging dialogue about “the future” helped American business managers rethink the relationship between businesses, government, and consumers in the 1960s and 1970s. During these decades, both politicians and business executives became concerned about managing a world that seemed to be changing in dramatic ways. As a 1968 General Electric report put it, the world was in a period of “accelerating change” that would “hasten the obsolescence of traditional political, economic, and ideological boundaries.” For business executives, the emerging future was presenting businesses with both new opportunities and challenges. As leaders in both business and government contributed to publications such as The Futurist and attended events like Stanford Research Institute’s International Industrial Conferences, they concluded that new demands being placed on corporations were blurring the lines between business and government. Drawing on archival material from the Institute for the Future, the Stanford Research Institute, the Nixon Administration, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, I argue that this preoccupation with the “the future” influenced both policy debates and a broader public’s understanding of the corporation’s role in the world economy.

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