|
CONFERENCES
14th Annual Conference of the European Business History Association 2010 The Centre for Business History in Scotland and the University of Glasgow invites you to the 14th Annual Conference of the European Business History Association, which will be held in various committee rooms at the University of Glasgow, 26-28th August 2010. The theme for the conference will be "Business Beyond the Firm". The deadline for early registrations with a reduced conference fee is 11.06.10.
Fashions: Business Practices in Historical Perspective The second joint annual meeting of the Business History Conference and the European Business History Association took place at The event was probably the largest conference organized to this date in the field of business history: almost 500 participants coming from all five continents, more than 80 parallel sessions and almost 200 papers presented! A huge thank-you goes to all participants for this great success! The conference opened on Thursday morning with the first set of concurrent sessions. On Thursday evening there was the “Grand Opening” ceremony that featured brief welcoming remarks by the rector of Bocconi University, Prof. Guido Tabellini, the director of Bocconi’s Economic History Institute, Prof. Franco Amatori, the program chairs, Regina Blaszczyk and Francesca Polese. The heart of the event was the speech of Alessandro Benetton, Deputy Executive Chairman of Benetton Group, who talked about the development and success of the Italian clothing and garment industry starting from the post WW2 period ascribing the positive performance especially to the creativity of Italian tailors, the simplicity of cut coupled with the use of refined materials and, especially, the low cost. After half a century of international success, according to Mr Benetton, today Italian fashion can’t ground its success only on the “Made in Friday featured several plenary events, in addition to engaging 3 blocks of parallel sessions. Immediately before lunch, there was the Krooss Prize Dissertation Session, that awarded the prize for the best BHC dissertation. That same day the “Business Historians at Business Schools Lunch”, which took place concurrently with the general buffet lunch, featured over 150 participants! During the afternoon the EBHA plenary session was held. Under the title “Fashion and Fashions between Business and Creativity”, three leading Italian entrepreneurs of the fashion and design sector (Maurizio Borletti, Chairman of La Rinascente and Upim; Giancarlo Iliprandi, Iliprandi Associati and Carlo Rivetti, Sportswear Company) confronted themselves in an animated roundtable chaired by Guido Corbetta, Professor of Strategic Management and Dean of Bocconi’s Graduate school, focusing on the difficulties of combining creativity and imagination with entrepreneurship and sound managerial skills. After such a hard day of work, participants relaxed at the Emerging Scholars Reception, a typically Milanese-style aperitivo, held in the charming gardens of bar-restaurant Volo, sponsored by the Fashion Institute of Technology. In such a welcoming setting, first-time participants to EBHA and BHC events were able to mingle with old-timers building the first blocks of what will surely be long-lasting relations. After a morning devoted to parallel sessions, Saturday at lunchtime some 100 persons participated at the “Women in Business History” lunch. After the conclusion of the book auction and the general meetings of both BHC and EBHA, the clue event of the afternoon program was the BHC presidential address by Mark Rose, that took place in the auditorium of the newly inaugurated Bocconi faculty building (named the World Building of the Year at the inaugural World Architecture Festival in Barcelona in 2008). Under the title “The politics of Rescuing Financial Institutions, 2008-2009), the BHC president gave an enlightening and entertaining talk on the crisis that struck the world economies in the past months. The conference ended with the Chandler Reception, where, among the awards that were announced, there was the EBHA prize for the best paper on European Business History, won by Paloma Fernández Pérez (Universitat de Barcelona) and Patricio Sáiz (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) with a paper on “Intangible Assets and Competitiveness in Spain: An Approach through Trademark Registration Data in Catalonia, 1850-1946”. Congratulations! The gala dinner, in the grand foyer of Bocconi’s new
|
||||