Gendering the Company: A Critical Perspective on German Business History

In this short essay, we discuss the opportunities for German business history if it takes gender seriously as a category of inquiry and point out why historical gender research should focus more on the company as a social arena. We argue that business history should integrate gender as an analytical category and draw on methods of social and cultural history. We seek to encourage innovative research projects that explore the potential of gender – produced by social practices, values, norms and moral concepts – as an analytical category for business history. Likewise we are interested in exploring how historical gender studies might develop when they move to the social arena of the company as a field of investigation.