GEOFFREY G. JONES
Isidor Straus Professor of Business History
Geoffrey G. Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History and Faculty Chair of the School's Business History Initiative. He holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Cambridge University, U.K. He has an honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki, Finland. He taught previously at the London School of Economics, at Cambridge and Reading Universities in the U.K., and at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He has also held Visiting Professorships at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, and Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia.
Professor Jones researches the evolution, impact, and ecological and social responsibility of global business. His research ranges from the beauty and fashion industries to banking, reinsurance and commodity trading. In recent years, he has focused on the history of business and sustainability, as well as the business history of emerging markets. He launched and co-ordinates the Creating Emerging Markets oral history project at Harvard Business School. Professor Jones developed and teaches the Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism course, which explores the role of entrepreneurship in the globalization cycles of the last two hundred years, in the second year of the MBA program. He is a Fellow of the Japan Academy of International Business Studies, a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Professor Jones's books include British Multinational Banking 1830-1990 (Oxford, 1993), Merchants to Multinationals (Oxford, 2000), Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2005), Renewing Unilever. Transformation and Tradition (Oxford, 2005), and The Oxford Handbook of Business History (edited with Jonathan Zeitlin, Oxford, 2008), and Beauty Imagined (Oxford, 2010). Profits and Sustainability: A History of Green Entrepreneurship (Oxford, 2017) provides the first global history of green entrepreneurship in the United States, Europe, Japan and elsewhere from the nineteenth century until the present day. His most recent book (co-authored with Tarun Khanna) is Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind (Penguin Business, 2022) looks at iconic business leaders in South Asia and elsewhere who have built long-lasting businesses which have contributed to the betterment of society. Professor Jones is currently completing a global history of business responsibility which will be published by Harvard University Press in 2023.