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DTSTAMP:20210520T065156Z
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SUMMARY:[Historikertag 2021] Who is in Charge of Business History? Conflicting Interpretations between Historical Research and History Marketing
DESCRIPTION:Companies are profit-oriented organizations whose activities shape society and culture at many levels. Entrepreneurial success stories are gladly told; the reference to a long-standing tradition is increasingly used by in-house communications departments as an exploitable marketing asset and image factor. There is no doubt that the economic history sub-discipline “corporate history”, which originated from an originally rather hagiographical tradition, has gained in scientific format since the 1980s. This development has been aided by fierce battles of interpretation, which initially focused on the role of companies in the First World War (war target discussion), but soon mainly on their entanglements with the Nazi regime. At times, these conflicts of interpretation could even lead all the way to the courtrooms, for instance when Deutsche Bank in 1972 defended itself against the portrayal of the role of Hermann Josef Abs by the GDR historian Eberhard Czichon. Meanwhile, corporate history offers an ambivalent picture: positive trends of a growing willingness on the part of entrepreneurs to deal with the past have recently been countered by negative signals that speak of a revival of the struggles for interpretation between science and business. While the analysis of Nazi history has met with broad acceptance among companies, it is difficult to expand the range of topics to include other socio-politically and culturally relevant objects of analysis. Thus, the companies hardly show themselves to be prompted to problematize their handling of human rights in colonial and especially post-colonial contexts. Cooperation with dictatorships, the problem of corruption, the labour or environmental conditions of their manufacturing operations abroad, but also the social collateral damage of crises and structural adjustments seem to be unwelcome topics. Therefore, the question “to whom does corporate history belong” remains pressing.
Der Beitrag Who is in Charge of Business History? Conflicting Interpretations between Historical Research and History Marketing erschien zuerst auf Historikertag 2021.
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