The 54th Congress of the Business History Society of Japan (BHSJ) will be held in Kyoto on September 29-30, 2018. The theme of the meeting will be "Merging Methods and Approaches: History, Social Science and Business Historians." To further enhance international exchange, the BHSJ organizes English sessions every two years, which will take place concurrently with the regularly scheduled Japanese sessions at the annual meeting. According to the call for papers:
In Japan, business history was institutionalized at faculties of social science, and so the use of social scientific concepts and inquiries became an essential element of the discipline, fostering a rich tradition of detailed empirical studies in business and industrial history. However, in recent decades, as a result of the institutionalization of business history as its own discipline, the dialog with social scientists has subsided somewhat. The 2018 international session offers the opportunity to consider the current use of methods and approaches that are applied in our discipline across the globe, and to contemplate the future prospects and direction of our field. By bringing together the latest research on various topics within business history we hope to generate a fruitful discussion on the significance and limitations of social scientific methodologies and concepts.The BHSJ welcomes papers on a range of topics, geographical regions, and time periods; both individual papers and full panel proposals are solicited. The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2018. Please consult the meeting website for additional information. Please direct any inquiries to BHSJ2018@econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp. When posted, the conference website will be http://bhs.ssoj.info/bhsj/eng/top2018.html.