Shane Hamilton
Biographic Data
| ID | 3773018 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shane Hamilton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shane |
| FAMILY NAME | Hamilton |
| SIGNATURE | HAMILTON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2960-5946 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 36 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Structure and meaning in strategic paradoxes
This paper uses a historical case study of the emergence of a set of agrifood standards to explore the historical development of strategic paradoxes. The paper demonstrates the value of historical methodologies of 'zooming in and out' for understanding the contexts in which paradoxical organisational structures develop over time. We explore the evolution of a significant strategic paradox, showing how changing relations between UK poultry produce…
Managing the Farm
“Management” is routinely understood by agricultural historians as an exercise in rational expertise, targeted at driving ever more efficient, “businesslike” practices on the farm. However, insights from critical management studies suggest that farm management, as a body of theory and as a form of practice, may be grounded in something less savory than epistemological superiority or the ability to improve farming practice. This article explores h…
From Monsanto to ‘Monsatan’
This historical case study of the multinational agribusiness Monsanto explores the challenges organizations face when attempting to translate a problematic past into strategic gain. We draw on Resource-Based Theory (RBT) to explain how the relative ability to own and control history as an intangible resource enables or constrains effective managerial deployments of history. Our analysis explores three modes of using the past strategically: learni…
New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness
In the mid-1990s, Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro insisted that the firm he headed, primarily known since its founding in the early twentieth century as a commodity chemical manufacturer, had become a forerunner of a new and “more ethereal strategy—sustainability.”1 Biotechnology was core to this strategic transformation, explained Shapiro, for only via “the substitution of information for stuff,” that is, by shifting from agrochemicals to informatio…
Crop Insurance and the New Deal Roots of Agricultural Financialization in the United States
A range of private and public institutions emerged in the United States in the years before and after the Great Depression to help farmers confront the inherent uncertainty of agricultural production and marketing. This included a government-owned and operated insurance enterprise offering “all-risk” coverage to American farmers beginning in 1938. Crop insurance, initially developed as a social insurance program, was beset by pervasive problems o…
H elen T angires . Movable Markets
The business of wholesaling has received remarkably little attention from historians. There are journals devoted to the history of retailing and consumption, but not to the crucial tasks performed by the “middlemen” who buy goods in bulk and sort and repackage them for sale. Historians have generally paid little heed to the oft maligned middleman, leaving analyses of wholesaling to the largely ahistorical research done by marketing and operations…
Distributing legitimacy
Questions of how best to feed the urban masses in an economy largely dependent on petroleum have permeated Venezuela’s domestic and international political spheres since World War II. A state-initiated project, run by American capitalists under the direction of Nelson Rockefeller, developed Venezuela’s milk distribution system into one of the country’s most important agrifood industries by the late 1960s. The ways in which the firm navigated comp…
Theory and Theorizing in Agricultural History
The field of agricultural history could benefit from interdisciplinary engagement with theoretical work.Rather than chiding agricultural historians for avoiding theory, this essay suggests specific ways in which many agricultural historians are already engaging with theory.In particular the practice of colligation may be an especially productive mode for agricultural historians to broaden the audience for their research and enrich their teaching.…
The Big Rig
When Dave Dudley recorded the hit country song “Six Days on the Road” in 1963, long-haul trucking was an industry providing decent jobs. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, led by Jimmy Hoffa, wielded collective power to bolster wages and improve working conditions throughout the industry. Regulations established during the New Deal stabilized an industry that in the 1920s was a poster child for the dire consequences of cutthroat competit…
The Profit of the Earth
Reviewed by: The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture by Courtney Fullilove Shane Hamilton (bio) The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture. By Courtney Fullilove. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Hardcover $40. This is a curious book. Nearly every page conveys the author's curiosity and her insatiable appetite for collecting historical anecdotes, allegories, oddities, and, befit…
Revisiting the History of Agribusiness
Nearly sixty years have passed since the publication of A Concept of Agribusiness by John H. Davis and Ray A. Goldberg. The book, which circulated widely among agricultural policymakers, business leaders, and academic economists, cemented the neologism “agribusiness” in the English lexicon. By opening up a new discourse for understanding the political economy of agriculture, Davis and Goldberg introduced a potentially revolutionary strategy for e…
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. Sunbelt Capitalism
Nominally focused on Phoenix, Arizona, this book provides a remarkably wide-ranging and masterful analysis of the political economy of the mid-twentieth-century United States. Phoenix was just one Sunbelt city that rejected its hinterland past to become an economic powerhouse at mid-century. Readers specifically interested in the rise of the metropolitan Southwest will learn much from Elizabeth Tandy Shermer's fine-grained analysis of Phoenix's r…
Agribusiness, the Family Farm, and the Politics of Technological Determinism in the Post-World War II United States
This historical political etymology of the term agribusiness (coined in 1955 by John H. Davis) traces the rise of a significant keyword in post-World War II American discourse. Contentious U.S. domestic farm politics of the 1950s shaped the discourse on agriculture and technology, producing a rhetorical context for Republican attacks on New Deal-era farm programs. This political climate produced new meanings for another relatively recent term, fa…
Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization
Book Review| April 01 2010 Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age. Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie. Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2010) 84 (2): 256–257. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-84.2.256 Cite Ic…
Fresh
Reviewed by: Fresh: A Perishable History Shane Hamilton (bio) Fresh: A Perishable History. By Susanne Freidberg. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 408. $27.95. Refrigeration's omnipresence in our modern lives makes it difficult to imagine a time when the American and European masses considered cold-stored food dangerous, rotten, or otherwise offensive to standards of freshness and economic fairness. But as Susanne Freidberg ex…
Response to Joseph E. Lowndes' review of Trucking Country
Joseph Lowndes questions whether the independent truckers I write about were “central to the rise of the Right.” He suggests that truckers were mere dupes of “the architects of the modern Right,” who “selectively appropriated various forms of discontent in the land and turned it to their own purposes.” I disagree for at least three reasons
A Revolution down on the Farm
Journal Article A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929. By Paul K. Conkin. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. xiv, 223 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-2519-0.) Get access Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton University of GeorgiaAthens, Georgia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 96, Issue 1, June 2009, Page 263, https://doi.or…
Uncommon Carriers (review)
Reviewed by: Uncommon Carriers Shane Hamilton (bio) Uncommon Carriers. By John McPhee. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006. Pp. 248. $24. The technological arteries of global capitalism—trucks, trains, barges, warehouses, and ocean freighters—are the subjects of New Yorker staff writer John McPhee’s latest investigation of the social lives of obscure but essential things. Stocked with extraordinary characters like Don Ainsworth—a [End Page 80…
The Populist Appeal of Deregulation
After spending a decade as an independent trucker hauling milk, watermelons, and paper across the United States, Mike Parkhurst sold his tractor-trailer in 1961 and used the proceeds to establish Overdrive magazine—the “Voice of the American Trucker.” Believing “truckers were ready for a magazine that would pull no punches,” Parkhurst launched a decades-long editorial assault on transportation regulations that he believed bound American enterpris…
Elemental South
Book Review| January 01 2007 Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing. Dorinda G. Dallmeyer. Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2007) 81 (1): 128–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-81.1.128 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Hamilton; Elemental South: An…
Chicken
Book Review| October 01 2007 Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. Steve Striffler. Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2007) 81 (4): 575–577. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-81.4.575 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Hamilton; Chicken:…
A Companion to American Technology (review)
Reviewed by: A Companion to American Technology Shane Hamilton (bio) A Companion to American Technology. Edited by Carroll Pursell. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Pp. x+463. $141.95. Neither a textbook nor a staid encyclopedic reference work, this volume represents an effort to map out the terrain of the history of American technology, staking boundaries around fields of past and present concern to scholars and pointing toward future explorations. Yet …
Trucking Country
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Liquid Land
Book Review| April 01 2004 Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades. Ted Levin. Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2004) 78 (2): 236–237. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-78.2.236 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Hamilton; Liquid Land: A Journey through the Flo…
The Economies and Conveniences of Modern-Day Living
American frozen foods were originally considered a luxury product; the industry did not develop a mass market until the late 1940s. Only a few years after achieving mass-market sales, however, frozen-food producers tried to segment the market in order to increase profits. This change was partly the result of internal factors, such as technological developments and interfirm competition. The new marketing strategy also hinged on industry executive…
The Economies and Conveniences of Modern-Day Living
American frozen foods were originally considered a luxury product; the industry did not develop a mass market until the late 1940s. Only a few years after achieving mass-market sales, however, frozen-food producers tried to segment the market in order to increase profits. This change was partly the result of internal factors, such as technological developments and interfirm competition. The new marketing strategy also hinged on industry executive…
From Monsanto to ‘Monsatan’
This historical case study of the multinational agribusiness Monsanto explores the challenges organizations face when attempting to translate a problematic past into strategic gain. We draw on Resource-Based Theory (RBT) to explain how the relative ability to own and control history as an intangible resource enables or constrains effective managerial deployments of history. Our analysis explores three modes of using the past strategically: learni…
Crop Insurance and the New Deal Roots of Agricultural Financialization in the United States
A range of private and public institutions emerged in the United States in the years before and after the Great Depression to help farmers confront the inherent uncertainty of agricultural production and marketing. This included a government-owned and operated insurance enterprise offering “all-risk” coverage to American farmers beginning in 1938. Crop insurance, initially developed as a social insurance program, was beset by pervasive problems o…
Agribusiness, the Family Farm, and the Politics of Technological Determinism in the Post-World War II United States
This historical political etymology of the term agribusiness (coined in 1955 by John H. Davis) traces the rise of a significant keyword in post-World War II American discourse. Contentious U.S. domestic farm politics of the 1950s shaped the discourse on agriculture and technology, producing a rhetorical context for Republican attacks on New Deal-era farm programs. This political climate produced new meanings for another relatively recent term, fa…
Structure and meaning in strategic paradoxes
This paper uses a historical case study of the emergence of a set of agrifood standards to explore the historical development of strategic paradoxes. The paper demonstrates the value of historical methodologies of 'zooming in and out' for understanding the contexts in which paradoxical organisational structures develop over time. We explore the evolution of a significant strategic paradox, showing how changing relations between UK poultry produce…
Theory and Theorizing in Agricultural History
The field of agricultural history could benefit from interdisciplinary engagement with theoretical work.Rather than chiding agricultural historians for avoiding theory, this essay suggests specific ways in which many agricultural historians are already engaging with theory.In particular the practice of colligation may be an especially productive mode for agricultural historians to broaden the audience for their research and enrich their teaching.…
Revisiting the History of Agribusiness
Nearly sixty years have passed since the publication of A Concept of Agribusiness by John H. Davis and Ray A. Goldberg. The book, which circulated widely among agricultural policymakers, business leaders, and academic economists, cemented the neologism “agribusiness” in the English lexicon. By opening up a new discourse for understanding the political economy of agriculture, Davis and Goldberg introduced a potentially revolutionary strategy for e…
A Revolution down on the Farm
Journal Article A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929. By Paul K. Conkin. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. xiv, 223 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-2519-0.) Get access Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton University of GeorgiaAthens, Georgia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 96, Issue 1, June 2009, Page 263, https://doi.or…
Managing the Farm
“Management” is routinely understood by agricultural historians as an exercise in rational expertise, targeted at driving ever more efficient, “businesslike” practices on the farm. However, insights from critical management studies suggest that farm management, as a body of theory and as a form of practice, may be grounded in something less savory than epistemological superiority or the ability to improve farming practice. This article explores h…
Cold Capitalism
The Economies and Conveniences of Modern-Day Living
American frozen foods were originally considered a luxury product; the industry did not develop a mass market until the late 1940s. Only a few years after achieving mass-market sales, however, frozen-food producers tried to segment the market in order to increase profits. This change was partly the result of internal factors, such as technological developments and interfirm competition. The new marketing strategy also hinged on industry executive…
Cold Capitalism
Frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ) was invented in 1945 by government researchers. To Florida orange growers beset by surplus production in some years and hard winter freezes in others, FCOJ was a "miracle" technology. Easily stored and transported, concentrate made it possible for orange juice processors to provide consumers with a uniform-quality product year-round. By the mid-1950s constantly rising consumer demand for FCOJ had essentiall…
Cold Capitalism
Liquid Land
Book Review| April 01 2004 Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades. Ted Levin. Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2004) 78 (2): 236–237. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-78.2.236 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Hamilton; Liquid Land: A Journey through the Flo…
A Companion to American Technology (review)
Reviewed by: A Companion to American Technology Shane Hamilton (bio) A Companion to American Technology. Edited by Carroll Pursell. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Pp. x+463. $141.95. Neither a textbook nor a staid encyclopedic reference work, this volume represents an effort to map out the terrain of the history of American technology, staking boundaries around fields of past and present concern to scholars and pointing toward future explorations. Yet …
Trucking Country
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Elemental South
Book Review| January 01 2007 Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing. Dorinda G. Dallmeyer. Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2007) 81 (1): 128–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-81.1.128 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Hamilton; Elemental South: An…
Chicken
Book Review| October 01 2007 Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. Steve Striffler. Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2007) 81 (4): 575–577. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-81.4.575 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Hamilton; Chicken:…
Uncommon Carriers (review)
Reviewed by: Uncommon Carriers Shane Hamilton (bio) Uncommon Carriers. By John McPhee. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006. Pp. 248. $24. The technological arteries of global capitalism—trucks, trains, barges, warehouses, and ocean freighters—are the subjects of New Yorker staff writer John McPhee’s latest investigation of the social lives of obscure but essential things. Stocked with extraordinary characters like Don Ainsworth—a [End Page 80…
The Populist Appeal of Deregulation
After spending a decade as an independent trucker hauling milk, watermelons, and paper across the United States, Mike Parkhurst sold his tractor-trailer in 1961 and used the proceeds to establish Overdrive magazine—the “Voice of the American Trucker.” Believing “truckers were ready for a magazine that would pull no punches,” Parkhurst launched a decades-long editorial assault on transportation regulations that he believed bound American enterpris…
Response to Joseph E. Lowndes' review of Trucking Country
Joseph Lowndes questions whether the independent truckers I write about were “central to the rise of the Right.” He suggests that truckers were mere dupes of “the architects of the modern Right,” who “selectively appropriated various forms of discontent in the land and turned it to their own purposes.” I disagree for at least three reasons
A Revolution down on the Farm
Journal Article A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929. By Paul K. Conkin. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. xiv, 223 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-2519-0.) Get access Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton University of GeorgiaAthens, Georgia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 96, Issue 1, June 2009, Page 263, https://doi.or…
Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization
Book Review| April 01 2010 Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age. Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie. Shane Hamilton Shane Hamilton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2010) 84 (2): 256–257. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-84.2.256 Cite Ic…
Fresh
Reviewed by: Fresh: A Perishable History Shane Hamilton (bio) Fresh: A Perishable History. By Susanne Freidberg. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 408. $27.95. Refrigeration's omnipresence in our modern lives makes it difficult to imagine a time when the American and European masses considered cold-stored food dangerous, rotten, or otherwise offensive to standards of freshness and economic fairness. But as Susanne Freidberg ex…
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. Sunbelt Capitalism
Nominally focused on Phoenix, Arizona, this book provides a remarkably wide-ranging and masterful analysis of the political economy of the mid-twentieth-century United States. Phoenix was just one Sunbelt city that rejected its hinterland past to become an economic powerhouse at mid-century. Readers specifically interested in the rise of the metropolitan Southwest will learn much from Elizabeth Tandy Shermer's fine-grained analysis of Phoenix's r…
Agribusiness, the Family Farm, and the Politics of Technological Determinism in the Post-World War II United States
This historical political etymology of the term agribusiness (coined in 1955 by John H. Davis) traces the rise of a significant keyword in post-World War II American discourse. Contentious U.S. domestic farm politics of the 1950s shaped the discourse on agriculture and technology, producing a rhetorical context for Republican attacks on New Deal-era farm programs. This political climate produced new meanings for another relatively recent term, fa…
Revisiting the History of Agribusiness
Nearly sixty years have passed since the publication of A Concept of Agribusiness by John H. Davis and Ray A. Goldberg. The book, which circulated widely among agricultural policymakers, business leaders, and academic economists, cemented the neologism “agribusiness” in the English lexicon. By opening up a new discourse for understanding the political economy of agriculture, Davis and Goldberg introduced a potentially revolutionary strategy for e…
The Big Rig
When Dave Dudley recorded the hit country song “Six Days on the Road” in 1963, long-haul trucking was an industry providing decent jobs. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, led by Jimmy Hoffa, wielded collective power to bolster wages and improve working conditions throughout the industry. Regulations established during the New Deal stabilized an industry that in the 1920s was a poster child for the dire consequences of cutthroat competit…
The Profit of the Earth
Reviewed by: The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture by Courtney Fullilove Shane Hamilton (bio) The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture. By Courtney Fullilove. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Hardcover $40. This is a curious book. Nearly every page conveys the author's curiosity and her insatiable appetite for collecting historical anecdotes, allegories, oddities, and, befit…
Distributing legitimacy
Questions of how best to feed the urban masses in an economy largely dependent on petroleum have permeated Venezuela’s domestic and international political spheres since World War II. A state-initiated project, run by American capitalists under the direction of Nelson Rockefeller, developed Venezuela’s milk distribution system into one of the country’s most important agrifood industries by the late 1960s. The ways in which the firm navigated comp…
Theory and Theorizing in Agricultural History
The field of agricultural history could benefit from interdisciplinary engagement with theoretical work.Rather than chiding agricultural historians for avoiding theory, this essay suggests specific ways in which many agricultural historians are already engaging with theory.In particular the practice of colligation may be an especially productive mode for agricultural historians to broaden the audience for their research and enrich their teaching.…
Crop Insurance and the New Deal Roots of Agricultural Financialization in the United States
A range of private and public institutions emerged in the United States in the years before and after the Great Depression to help farmers confront the inherent uncertainty of agricultural production and marketing. This included a government-owned and operated insurance enterprise offering “all-risk” coverage to American farmers beginning in 1938. Crop insurance, initially developed as a social insurance program, was beset by pervasive problems o…
H elen T angires . Movable Markets
The business of wholesaling has received remarkably little attention from historians. There are journals devoted to the history of retailing and consumption, but not to the crucial tasks performed by the “middlemen” who buy goods in bulk and sort and repackage them for sale. Historians have generally paid little heed to the oft maligned middleman, leaving analyses of wholesaling to the largely ahistorical research done by marketing and operations…
From Monsanto to ‘Monsatan’
This historical case study of the multinational agribusiness Monsanto explores the challenges organizations face when attempting to translate a problematic past into strategic gain. We draw on Resource-Based Theory (RBT) to explain how the relative ability to own and control history as an intangible resource enables or constrains effective managerial deployments of history. Our analysis explores three modes of using the past strategically: learni…
New Materialism and the History of Agribusiness
In the mid-1990s, Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro insisted that the firm he headed, primarily known since its founding in the early twentieth century as a commodity chemical manufacturer, had become a forerunner of a new and “more ethereal strategy—sustainability.”1 Biotechnology was core to this strategic transformation, explained Shapiro, for only via “the substitution of information for stuff,” that is, by shifting from agrochemicals to informatio…
Economics (18 works) · History (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Sociology (11 works) · History (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Business (8 works) · Economy (8 works) · Agriculture (7 works) · American Environmental and Regional History (7 works)