Old Paternalism, New Paternalism, Post-Paternalism: (19th-21st Centuries)

The aim of this book is to explore and compare the welfare strategies of businesses, including the various forms of paternalism , over two centuries and across a number of countries. Specifically, the book examines differentiation and variation among the social mindsets of companies. Business history inevitably involves the study of social policies, including analysis of the societal influence of companies and their response to workforce demands concerning living conditions. In this book, historical forms of patronage are considered (old paternalism), as well as structured social policies aimed at stabilizing and appeasing labour relations (new paternalism). Issues of post-paternalism are then studied, opening the door to an assessment of the differences between the various types of paternalism and an exploration of the fad of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or corporate social entrepreneurship (CSE). This concept, which gained prominence among transnational companies around the turn of the 1980s and the beginning of the third industrial revolution, involved the design of an entrepreneurial strategy to identify, analyse, organise, create and manage a venture to initiate sustainable and systematic socio-economic change.

Hubert Bonin is Professor in Modern Economic History at Sciences Po Bordeaux and a member of the GRETHA research centre at Bordeaux University. He is a specialist in the history of service companies (in particular the Suez Canal Company, colonial and overseas trading houses and their maritime affiliates), in the strategic and cultural management of the organisation of firms, and in French banking history.
Paul Thomes has been a Professor at RWTH Aachen University School of Business and Economics since 1995. His research areas are economic and social history and the history of technology, in particular structural change and change management in regional and transnational perspective, business history, the history of mobility and financial services. He is Executive Editor of Bankhistorisches Archiv. Banking and Finance in History.