The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has changed many lives in a short time. With fear and anxiety gripping many nations, governments have moved to restrict personal movements to reduce the spread of the disease. “Flattening the curve,” “social distancing,” and “lockdown” were unheard of just a few weeks earlier, but have become commonplace to the point of becoming a new normal. In academic, as in other professions, “remote operations” and “telework” have suddenly replaced the primary face-to-face mode of education and scholarship. The speed of the transition from brick-and-mortar to virtual settings has been a shock, even to those familiar with distance education modalities.

For this episode we discuss the history of a classic firm which exercised remote operations as a matter of course and faced multiple pandemics during its early existence. The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was chartered in 1670 by King Charles II at a time when the French monopolized fur trading with Native Americans in modern-day Canada. From then, the English would establish its own robust fur trading industry, establishing hundreds of posts from the western shores of Hudson Bay all across modern western Canada.

The case is exceptional in demonstrating the historical challenges of remote operations where communications were limited to letters sent annually with the fur shipments across the Atlantic. How could London possibly maintain oversight and exercise control under such conditions? To find out, we discuss an article by O’Leary, Orlikowski, and Yates from 2002, titled “Distributed work over the centuries: Trust and control in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670-1826,” published as a book chapter in Hinds & Kiesler’s book Distributed Work. The authors argued that trust and control are too often expressed as a dichotomy, whereas the HBC case showed how they were kept in balance despite the limited communications. We also explore an article by Paul Hackett, “Averting disaster: The Hudson’s Bay Company and smallpox in Western Canada during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” published in 2004 in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Smallpox was a feared and well-known killer in North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. But as vaccination became possible, HBC officials in Canada made some surprising decisions about employing it.

In our conversation, we draw parallels to the present-day situation. We hope you enjoy this special episode, and please stay safe!

Read With Us:

Hackett, P. (2004). Averting disaster: The Hudson’s Bay Company and smallpox in Western Canada during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 575-609.

O’Leary, M., Orlikowski, W., & Yates, J. (2002). Distributed work over the centuries: Trust and control in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670-1826. Distributed work, 27-54.

Referenced in this Episode:

Carlos, A. M., & Nicholas, S. (1993). Managing the manager: An application of the principal agent model to the Hudson’s Bay Company. Oxford Economic Papers, 243-256.

Cumming, R. P. (1968). Organization of a surgical unit in a remote area. British medical journal, 4(5629), 506.

Di Martino, V., & Wirth, L. (1990). Telework: A new way of working and living. Int’l Lab. Rev., 129, 529.

Olson, M. H. (1983). Remote office work: changing work patterns in space and time. Communications of the ACM, 26(3), 182-187.

Fayard, A. L., & Metiu, A. (2014). The role of writing in distributed collaboration. Organization Science, 25(5), 1391-1413

Additional resources:

Distance Teaching in Management and Organization Studies open document