Geoffrey G. Jones

Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, and Faculty Chair of the School's Business History Initiative. He holds degrees of BA, MA and PhD from Cambridge University, UK. He has an honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and an honorary PhD from the University of Helsinki, Finland. He taught previously at the London School of Economics, and Cambridge and Reading Universities in the UK, and at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He has held Visiting Professorships at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, and Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, and is an Affiliate Professor of Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. Elsewhere at Harvard, he serves on the Executive Committee of the Harvard Center for African Studies, the Faculty Committee of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and on the Policy Committee of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Professor Jones researches the evolution, impact and responsibility of global business. He has published on the history of global business, specializing both in consumer products, including beauty and fashion, and services such as banking, reinsurance and commodity trading. He has written extensively on the business history of emerging markets, especially in Latin America, South Asia and Turkey, and launched and co-ordinates the Creating Emerging Markets oral history project at the 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 an International Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a Fellow of the Japan Academy of International Business Studies, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2022 he was the recipient of the European Business History Association's first Lifetime Achievement Award.

Professor Jones's books include Merchants to Multinationals (Oxford University Press, 2000), Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to Twenty First Century (Oxford University Press, 2005), Renewing Unilever. Transformation and Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2005). and Beauty Imagined (Oxford University Press, 2010), which provides the first history of the global beauty industry from a business perspective. His more recent research has focussed on the ecological and social impact and responsibility of business. Recent books include Profits and Sustainability: A Global History of Green Entrepreneurship (Oxford University Press, 2017), which provides a global history of green entrepreneurship from the nineteenth century until the present day, Varieties of Green Business (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018), which explores variations in the nature of green business between industries and nations, and over time. and (co-authored with Tarun Khanna) is Leadership to Last (Penguin Random House, 2022) which examines the nature of business leadership in India. His most recent book, Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership is published by Harvard University Press. It looks historically and globally how a small number of business leaders have sought to combine profits and social purpose in their businesses. The book shows what socially and ecologically responsible businesses have really looked like, and asks whether they can work, what trade-offs have to be made, and whether they are even desirable.