"The Virtues and Vices of Business—A Historical Perspective"

[Via Legal Scholarship Blog, we have the following announcement:]

The 2014 Business History Conference annual meeting will be held on March 13-15 in Frankfurt, Germany.  The Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte (GUG, Society for Business History) is handling local arrangements for the 2014 meeting. All sessions will take place at Goethe University in Frankfurt, and lodging will be in a number of area hotels.

The theme for the meeting will be "The Virtues and Vices of Business — A Historical Perspective." The organizers invite papers and session proposals that address both the micro and macro levels of the virtues and vices of business in historical perspective. In keeping with longstanding BHC policy, submissions need not be directly related to the conference theme. The 2014 Program Committee consists of: Ed Balleisen, Duke University (chair); Chris McKenna, University of Oxford; Andrea Schneider, Goethe University; Per Hansen, Copenhagen Business School (BHC President), and Jan-Otmar Hesse, University of Bielefeld. GUG members are encouraged to propose papers; the language of the conference will be English.

[From the Call for Papers:]

Is business good or bad, or both? Does business serve private or public interests, or both? A variety of theories from the social sciences furnish different answers to these questions and, by implication, different ideas about the role of the state in creating the good society. The 2014 BHC annual meeting aims to address these issues from a historical and empirical perspective by exploring the virtues and vices of business across societies from the early modern period to the present.

More.