Affiliation: Harvard Business School
Bio: Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History and Faculty Chair of the Business History Initiative at the Harvard Business School. Professor Jones earned his B.A. and Ph.D degrees in History at Cambridge University, and holds an honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School and an honorary Ph.D degree from the University of Helsinki. He held faculty positions at Cambridge University, the London School of Economics and Reading University in Britain, and Erasmus University in the Netherlands, before joining the Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty in 2002.
Professor Jones’s current research and teaching focus on the history of globalization, the multinational enterprise, business in emerging markets and green business. Among his books are British Multinational Banking 1830-1990 (1993), Merchants to Multinationals (2000), Renewing Unilever (2005), Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (2005), and Beauty Imagined. A History of the Global Beauty Industry (2010). Recently his research has focused on business in emerging markets and the history of green business. He co-directs the Creating Emerging Markets oral history project at the Harvard Business School, which explores business leadership in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East over recent decades. His recent books on business and sustainability include Profits and Sustainability. A History of Green Entrepreneurship (2017) and Varieties of Green Business (2018). Professor Jones is the co-author with Tarun Khanna of “Bringing History (Back) into International Business” published in JIBS in 2006, which makes the case for integrating historical research into the research agenda of International Business. He has published in journals such as Economic History Review, Business History Review, and Strategic Management Journal.
Professor Jones has developed a 28-session MBA course at HBS on the role of entrepreneurship in the global economy between the nineteenth century and the present day. It deals extensively with the political, social and environmental responsibility of business. He has been President of the Business History Conference of the United States, the European Business History Association, and the Association of Business History in Great Britain, and is co-editor of the journal Business History Review.
Last Updated: March 2019