School of Social & Political Sciences

The School welcomes Professor Jeffrey (Jeff) Fear, Professor of International Business History (Economic & Social History), from mid-April 2013

Jeff comes to us after teaching for the Huntsman International Studies and Business Program and the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, the Harvard Business School and the department of Business Administration at the University of Redlands. He recently was a DAAD visiting professor at the University of Marburg and the Max Kade Institute of the University of Southern California. He graduated from Stanford with a degree in European history.

He is the author of Organizing Control: August Thyssen and the Construction of German Corporate Management (2005) and an editor on a forthcoming book on Family Multinationals: Entrepreneurial Pathways to Internationalization (2013) as well as editor of the ongoing fourth volume and website on German-American Immigrant Entrepreneurship between the two world wars. His research interests include German corporate and management history, the dynamics of international cartels, organizational learning, immigrant entrepreneurship, and understanding the development of varieties of capitalism and institutional change within those business systems.

At present his main research project focuses on “Mittelstand Multinationals”, which are small to midsize, mostly family-owned companies that are world market leaders with significant overseas presence, a type of emerging multinational from wealthier countries instead of emerging markets. How such companies internationalized since the 1970s and why central Europe has a disproportionate number of these so-called “hidden champions” are the central questions driving this research agenda. The project should help answer the question how wealthier economies confronted the deep structural changes and deindustrialization since the 1970s and how certain businesses managed to globalize in the face of considerable globalization pressures. At present the research concentrates mostly on the German context, but he is expanding the project to encompass a broad array of international comparisons in global perspective. The project combines history with strategic management, international business, small- and medium-sized business, and family business literature.

Jeff arrives in Glasgow in mid-April 2013 in the Centre for Business History in Scotland.

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First published: 8 April 2013