CFP: Richard Robinson Workshop in Business History 2018

The 3rd biennial Richard Robinson Workshop on Business History will take place at Portland State University on May 24-26, 2018. The theme for the meeting will be "Risk, Honor & Innovation: Imagining New Markets." According to the call for papers:

The market, market-relations, and the marketplace, have become key markers of what is forward-looking and progress-oriented in modern societies. These markers delineated an impersonal sphere of scientific, technical and agentless activities whose workings seemingly lay outside the realm of desires and emotions. Our workshop seeks to break down the divide between the impersonal (effects of technical limits and aggregations of large numbers) and the subjective (articulations of perceptions, fears, and self-regard) in the ways “the market” and “the economy” are conceived. We aim to reconsider market and business activities in light of both the techniques and the emotional vectors that infuse them.

The organizers are looking for "business histories (broadly construed) that tackle this intersection of desire, norms and markets in a variety of ways from all time periods and places," and they particularly encourage "proposals on global, transnational, and non-Western topics and on developments before the twentieth century." For a much fuller discussion of possible topics, please see the full call for papers.
    Paper proposals, consisting of a one-page CV and a 500-word abstract, should be sent to the workshop organizers, Thomas Luckett (Portland State University), Chia Yin Hsu (Portland State University), and Erika Vause (Florida Southern College), at psu.business.history. workshop@gmail.com by November December 15, 2017.