Papers presented by Eric John Abrahamson since 2019
2025 Atlanta, Georgia
"From Lab Rats to Entrepreneurs: Science, Philanthropy, and the Entrepreneurial University, 1980-2024"
Eric John Abrahamson, Vantage Point History / Johns Hopkins University
Abstract:
In the 1980s, as research universities embraced a new role as engines of economic development, business incubators helped transform graduate students in science and engineering into entrepreneurs. Over time, these new nonprofit entities evolved to play a critical role in connecting students with venture capitalists/philanthropists, many of whom were also major donors to universities. Focusing on business incubators in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cambridge/Boston, and San Diego from the mid-1980s to the present, this paper looks at the evolving model of the business incubator over more than four decades and its influence on the culture of academic science.
2024 Providence, Rhode Island
"From Shareholder Activists to ESG: the Ford Foundation’s Role in the Birth of Sustainable Investing "
Eric John Abrahamson, Vantage Point History and Johns Hopkins University
Abstract:
As activists took to the streets to protest war, discrimination, and pollution, a handful of investors and entrepreneurs sought to repurpose the tools of capitalism for social good. Some bought shares to lobby corporations from inside. Others created social purpose banks or established community development loan funds to provide capital to disadvantaged neighborhoods or rural communities. A scattered handful of innovators launched mutual funds designed to deliver social, as well as financial, returns. Another group created services to assess and rate the performance of environmental, social, and governance impacts of major corporations. In the early days of this movement in the 1970s, mainstream capitalists derided all of these efforts. One organization—the Ford Foundation—played a significant role in nurturing them. Drawing on the foundation’s archives and interviews with pioneers in the movement, this paper provides an overview of the foundation’s pivotal role in community development finance and socially responsible investment from the 1960s to the early 2000s. It shows how this work set the stage for the adoption of the United Nation’s Principles for Responsible Investing in 2006, a move that led to the takeoff of ESG investing strategies. The impact of this work exceeded the foundation’s strategic vision and came despite an organizational culture that was suspicious of, if not hostile toward, the mainstream of global capitalism. It came despite an investment culture that resisted deploying the foundation’s own corpus for what is today known as mission-related investing. As the paper shows, the foundation’s success in this arena came in large part as a result of the influence of grantees, many of whom shared the foundation’s social values, but also believed that the invisible hand of the market could be guided toward social good.
Keywords:
banking
capital markets
corporate governance
economic development
finance
2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"Reputation, Social Capital, and the Industrialization of Credit: The Experience of One Mid-American City"
Eric John Abrahamson, Vantage Point History
Abstract:
In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam famously documented the decline of membership-based, civil society institutions, which he asserted represented a concomitant loss of social capital in the United States. A variety of factors had contributed to this decline, he wrote, including generational change, the rise of the two-income household, suburban sprawl, and the privatization of entertainment via television. He ruled out other factors including changes in family structure, racial integration, and the rise of big government. He left open the question of whether the “accelerating nationalization and globalization of our economic structures” had some role to play and suggested “delocalization” of business had diminished the role of business elites in local communities. A more interesting question asks how the market economy of postindustrial capitalism invaded the social economy to undermine local institutions and diminish social bonding. This paper focuses on the role civil society institutions played in the social construction of reputations and the resulting patterns of bank lending in one small Midwestern city (Rapid City, South Dakota). It shows that loan officers and managers, as well as customers, participated heavily in civil society organizations to gauge and establish bankable reputations. The development of industrialized credit scoring, like many new information technologies of the Third Industrial Revolution, diminished the importance of the banker’s personal knowledge of an individual’s character or social connections in favor of quantified calculations of risk. Using social network analysis, this paper looks at bank officer involvement in service clubs, churches, and other civil society institutions before and after the banks embraced credit scoring to assess whether the decreased utility of these civil society institutions, for both bankers and customers, contributed to the decline of these institutions and the supply of social capital.