Learning to use the past: the development of a rhetorical history strategy by the London headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company

Abstract

Organization studies scholars are increasingly interested in how managers use the past to obtain competitive advantage. Little research has been done on the history of the corporate use of history which means that we know little about the circumstances in which the corporate use of rhetorical history was pioneered. This paper historicizes rhetorical history. It uses the experience of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) to develop understanding of how companies used the past to advance interests in the face of political threats. Founded in 1670, the HBC is one of the oldest firms in the Western world. For much of its history, its senior managers invested few resources in the firm’s ‘heritage infrastructure’ and rarely used history in its communication with outside stakeholders. This paper shows how it learned to use history as a strategic asset gradually and by observing other firms. At the end of World War I, it began to make substantial investments in heritage infrastructure. This allowed the firm to turn its long history into an asset. This paper stresses the politicized nature of the corporate use of the past.

Keywords:

• Rhetorical history
• uses of the past
• historical narratives
• storytelling
• history

Introduction

This paper seeks to help us to answer the following question: Under which circumstances do firms adopt the strategic use of rhetorical history? The ongoing ‘historic turn’ in organization studies (Clark and Rowlinson 2004; Kiesen 2015; Rowlinson 2015) has resulted in the expansion of research into the relationship between organizational and social memory. As our literature review below shows, organization studies scholars are increasingly interested in how firm managers use the past to obtain competitive advantage. A key concept here is rhetorical history (Foster et al. 2011; Suddaby and Foster 2017, 30; Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010): by telling historical narratives about their firm and its relationship to the wider community, managers can communicate more persuasively with customers, workers, and other stakeholders.

Despite the apparent growth of interest in organization studies in the uses of the past, little research has been done on the history of the corporate use of history. In other words, while we have a rapidly improving understanding of how present-day firms use history to communicate with stakeholders, we know less about how the practice originated. Basic facts about the chronology of the emergence of corporate history have not yet been determined. For instance, we do not yet know the identity of the first company to publish an official history or to employ an in-house historian. Nor does the existing literature on the uses of the past and rhetorical history tell us when companies began to invest resources in celebrating their anniversaries.

The existing literature on the corporate use of the past means that are moving towards the development of a model that explains whether, why, when and how firms choose to use the past rhetorically. Historical research on the invention of corporate rhetorical history can help us to refine our model by improving our understanding of the circumstances in which a given firm is likely to adopt the strategic use of rhetorical history. However, as Foster and Lamertz (2017) argue, we still lack a satisfactory explanation for why some corporate rhetorical histories are more efficacious than others. We argue that a firm will adopt the rhetorical use of history only when the historical culture in which it operates rewards organizations that use history rhetorically. Following Woolf (2003) and Karlsson and Zander (2004), we define historical culture as the distinctive way in which people in a particular society think about the past. If there is a lack of alignment between the wider historical culture on the one hand and historical narratives available to the firm’s managers on the other, the firm is unlikely to use history rhetorically. A rhetorical history strategy is likely to be efficacious when there is a close fit between the historical narratives used by the firm and the wider historical culture. The paper thus makes a theoretical contribution by adding ‘historical culture’ to our model of whether, why, when and how firms use history rhetorically.

This paper will historicize rhetorical history while suggesting that the rise of corporate history was made possible by prior shifts in the historical cultures in which firms were embedded. The paper uses the experience of the London headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) to develop our understanding of how companies began to use the past to advance their interests in the face of a variety of political threats. Founded in 1670, the HBC is one of the oldest firms in the Western world. For much of its history, the HBC’s senior managers invested few resources in the firm’s ‘heritage infrastructure’ and only intermittently used history in its communication with stakeholders outside the firm. The firm’s apparent awakening to the value of its history came in the years surrounding the World War I. As we shall see, the firm then began to make substantial investments in the heritage infrastructure that allowed it to turn its long history into an asset. These investments included the publication of The Beaver, a magazine for employees that built organizational identity by celebrating the firm’s history (Geller 1990), and the firm’s archive. The paper observes that the firm’s adoption of a costly rhetorical history strategy came about in a context in which the legitimacy of capitalism itself was being challenged by the rise of social democracy in Britain and Canada. We also argue that the HBC would not have begun to use its history rhetorically had there not been a prior shift of the historical cultures in which the firm operated. These shifts in the historical culture included the emergence in the late nineteenth century of compulsory mass education and the advent of a school curriculum in Canada designed to teach a version of history that celebrated British imperialism.

Literature review

Organization studies scholars are increasingly interested in how firm managers use the past to obtain competitive advantage (Decker 2014; Feldman and Feldman 2006; Foster et al. 2011, 2016; Godfrey et al. 2016; Greenwood and Bernardi 2013; Maclean et al. 2014; Rowlinson et al. 2014; Suddaby, Foster, and Trank 2010; Ybema 2014). An early piece of empirical research on the uses of the past by companies was the seminal paper by Rowlinson and Hassard (1993) on Cadbury’s manufacturer. In 1931, Cadbury produced a centenary history that was given to workers. Rowlinson and Hassard show that this text presented Cadbury’s history as that of benevolent employer and was an attempt by managers to generate goodwill towards the firm. In the two decades that followed, organization studies scholars have developed our understanding of how firms use the past to achieve their goals.

One outstanding piece of empirical research in this area is the paper by Foster et al. (2011), which looked at the use of historical narratives by Tim Horton’s, a Canadian coffee shop chain that was established in the 1960s. This paper looked at the firm’s use of history in the early twenty-first century, when the company faced a competitive threat from Starbucks, a foreign (US) rival, which expanded aggressively into Canada after 1996. Their paper looked at how Tim Horton’s used references to events in Canadian history, particularly military history, to appeal to customers. In other words, the references to Canadian history that appeared in the firm’s communications with customers were designed to connect patriotic sentiments to the firm’s products. As Illia and Zamparini (2016) in their study of the uses of history by Spanish hotels, corporate historical narratives appropriate pieces of the cultural ‘commons’, the sense of the past shared by people in particular community. Poor et al. (2016) suggest that the success of the rhetorical history strategy of Colt, an American gunmaker, was due to the resonance between the firm’s historical narratives and the ‘national mythology’ of the frontier. These findings are congruent with the research by marketing academics who have developed our understanding of how social memory, corporate heritage, and consumer nostalgia for particular ‘imagined decades’ are enlisted to help sell products and build brands (Balmer and Burghausen 2015). The study of the use of history by the Carlsberg brewing company has added to our understanding of how history is enlisted in marketing by showing that for historical appeals to be effective, they need to be seen as ‘authentic’ i.e. supported by real historical facts and sources that corroborate the historical narratives being disseminated by firms (Hatch and Schultz 2017). According to Hatch and Schultz, the corroborating historical artifact that that was most to Carlsberg’s rhetorical history strategy was a prominent inscription on a stone in a building connected to the firm. A Latin phrase in the inscription became the name of a premium, heritage-themed beer successfully marketed by Carlsberg. Their research also shows that images and written texts in the firm’s archive also lent authenticity to the firm’s use of history. The research of Hatch and Schultz is consistent with the position of Foster and Lamertz (2017), who use the experience of Ontario microbreweries to argue that rhetorical history is of greater strategic efficacy when stakeholders perceive it to be authentic.

The focus of the research described in the previous paragraph is on the use of history in communication with customers and other external stakeholders. A parallel body of research literature explores how firms use rhetorical history in their internal communications with their workers (e.g. Anteby and Molnár 2012; Maclean et al. 2014). Analyses show that managers tend to emphasize continuity and connections with the founders of the firm. They invent traditions in order to create a sense of identity binding all members of the organization to the traits epitomized by the corporate ‘founding fathers’. In other cases, managers exhort members of organizations to resurrect the lost virtues that allegedly existed in the earlier ‘golden age’ of the organization (Howard-Grenville, Metzger, and Meyer 2013; Ravasi and Phillips 2011). Another important empirical paper on the uses of the past is Delahaye et al. (2009), which document the features that are common to most of the corporate histories produced by Anglo-American Fortune Global 500 firms: recurring themes include inspiring ‘rags to riches’ narratives, a focus on heroic firm founders, and an emphasis on innovation and ‘masculinity’ (32). As Oertel and Thommes note (2015), the existing research shows that a firm’s rhetorical history can be based on either the history of that firm (‘micro-level’, as in Rowlinson and Hassard 1993) or ‘field-level’ history (i.e. on the history of the industry, cluster, locality, as in Voronov, De Clercq, and Hinings 2013) or both.

The existing research on the use of history by firms allows one to learn several facts about how the corporate use of history has evolved over time. For instance, a reader of this literature would know from Rowlinson and Hassard (1993) that history was being used by firms as least as early as 1931, the year of their case study. Unfortunately, the paper by Rowlinson and Hassard did not say when British firms began using history in this fashion. Delahaye et al. (2009, 33, 34) mention that the form in which firms present their history has changed over time. They note, in passing that ‘lengthy, bounded books’ were the oldest form of corporate history. They note that this format came to be replaced by image-rich ‘coffee table books’ and then, more recently, websites with animated timelines. To sum up, while the existing literature on rhetorical history is not completely indifferent to the fact this technique of corporate persuasion has evolved over time, no sustained research on the history of the corporate use of history has been undertaken. As a result, such basic facts as the name of the first company to publish an official history or to state are history-themed marketing campaign are not yet known.

Our model of why, when, and how firms adopt a rhetorical history strategy

Our starting assumption is that the nature of the particular historical culture in which a firm is embedded is important in determining whether that firm will adopt a rhetorical history strategy and how any rhetorical history strategy will be developed. The term historical culture refers to how people in a particular society think about the past. Although an interest in the past may or may not be universal to all humans, there is an abundant body of literature on social memory that shows that the ways in which the past are perceived vary dramatically between cultures (Olick and Robbins 1998). The research on how historical thinking differs between societies has improved our understanding of the use of rhetorical history by political actors in societies ranging from ancient Athens (Steinbock 2013), medieval Europe (Louthan 2012), eighteenth-century England (Woolf 2003), and present-day Korea (Kim 2015).

The historical cultures of present-day advanced industrial democracies differ considerably from one another (Thijs 2008) even though such societies are similar compared to other historical and currently existing societies. Moreover, the historical culture of a given society can change over time. For instance, white Americans in 2000 did not think of the American Civil War in the same way they did in 1900, due in part to increasing sensitivity to the concerns of African-Americans. As the historical culture changed, Hollywood representations of historical events such as the foundation of the KKK in 1865 also altered dramatically, shifting from highly positive to decidedly negative (Blight 2001). Differences in historical cultures can be relatively basic, such as variations in the calendar used to record the date, or can include profound cosmological differences in how people think about historical change, causation, and the nature of time itself (Farriss 1995). We now know that the custom of commemorating the anniversaries of political events is a relatively recent development, much like the custom of celebrating individuals’ birthdays: historians have established when and how the practice of commemorating the anniversaries of events became widespread in Western cultures (McDonald and Méthot 2006).

We hold that if there is a lack of alignment between the wider historical culture on the one hand and historical narratives available to the firm’s managers on the other, the firm is unlikely to use history rhetorically. A simple thought experiment should demonstrate why this alignment is important. Readers will know from personal experience that companies in many countries incorporate the year of the firm’s establishment into its logo or advertising. Firms inform potential customers of their age with a view to building up trust and establishing that they are not ‘fly-by-night operators’. To an individual who came from a historical culture that did not use the same calendar used by the firm, the four-digit number in the advertising would be meaningless. Moreover, for a customer from a culture in which people have been socialized to be indifferent to history, the date of the firm’s foundation would be a matter of no interest. Indeed, to a customer from a culture in which novelty was valorized and antiquity denigrated, a reference to a great age of the firm might be alienating. We also maintain that a rhetorical history strategy is likely to be successful when there is a close fit between the historical narratives used by the firm and the wider historical culture.

From the literature on the corporate use of rhetorical history discussed in the previous section, a model for understanding whether, why and how a firm will use history rhetorically emerges. The existing model shows a firm will make strategic use of rhetorical history when doing so is consistent with its overall strategy. Hatch and Schultz (2017) show that Carlsberg used the firm’s history in marketing an upscale range of beers. In return for paying a premium for this product, consumers can buy the sense of being part of the firm’s history. Logically, it would seem that a firm that is competing solely on price, which is one of Porter’s generic strategies (Porter 1980), would be unlikely to expend significant resources in telling its customers about the firm’s history. Anteby and Molnár (2012) focus on how managers used rhetorical history to communicate to workers in an aerospace company with skilled workers and long-term employment relationships. When workers stay with a firm for a long time, it makes sense for the firm to invest in using history to build a strong organizational identity. Logically, a firm that employs workers on extremely casual basis as in the so-called ‘gig economy’ would have far less of an incentive to use rhetorical history on their employees in this fashion. The existing literature also suggests that the emergence of a new strategic threat will prompt a firm to begin using history rhetorically. Rowlinson and Hassard (1993) show how managers confronted with restive, unionized workers used history. Foster et al. (2011) focus on Tim Horton’s use of history to appeal to customers in an increasing competitive market. Delahaye et al. (2009) show the nature of the media technologies available to a firm’s managers will influence how they communicate historical narratives to internal and external stakeholders.

All of the factors identified in the existing model are indeed relevant in determining whether and how a firm’s managers use rhetorical history. However, this model is missing a very important element, historical culture. The existing model also, in our view, massively downplays the importance of politics. Our model takes the historical culture in which a firm operates into account. If people in the society have been taught to believe that history is important, it may make sense for a firm to use a rhetorical history strategy on internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, or both. The historical narratives used by the firm’s managers need to be congruent with those prevailing in the historical culture of the wider society. If the firm is seeking to secure the loyalty of customers, it will direct its historical narratives to them, but if it wishes to inculcate loyalty among the workforce, rhetorical history will be used in internal communication. If the prevailing historical culture teaches that historical narratives must be based on primary sources to be authentic, then the firm will invest in gathering and preserving primary sources in an archive. If the firm is the subject of political attacks, it will create and disseminate narratives designed to show that it has a long history of patriotic service.

As we shall see below, all of the preconditions for the adoption of a rhetorical history strategy were present in the HBC’s social environment at the time the firm began using rhetorical history in its internal and external communications. The rhetorical history strategy adopted by the HBC c. 1918 was successful because it was aligned with the wider historical culture. The HBC bolstered the credibility of its historical narratives by investing in the creation of a corporate archive. The resulting historical narratives were communicated through text and motion pictures and were used to inspire both consumers and employees.

Research methodology

As Vaara and Lamberg (2016) note, the literature in management journals on history is highly heterogeneous in terms of onto-epistemology and methodology. They identify three main strands of historical management research: realist history, interpretative history, and poststructuralist history. Vaara and Lamberg note that realist historical research seeks to understand what actually took place in the past. In its ontological and epistemological foundations, the realist approach corresponds to the set of assumptions that are dominant in history departments and which were robustly defended by Evans (2001). While our approach is fundamentally realist, it also indebted to the poststructuralist-influenced research that focuses on perceptions of the past rather than the actual events of the past. From the poststructuralist author Ricoeur (2000), we have derived an appreciation of the power of social memory over social actors. As Godfrey et al. note, (2016, 25) the influence of Ricoeur’s research on social memory is evident in management research such Palazzo, Schrempf-Stirling, and Phillips (2016) and Mena et al. (2016)

The realist approach to the study of the past identified by Vaara and Lamberg embraces a vast range of different research traditions and research methods. For this reason, simply stating that our approach is ‘realist’ in its ontological and epistemological foundations does tell the reader much about our research methodology, so further precision is required. We have followed the research methods that are prevalent in the business-historical intellectual tradition associated with Chandler (1962), a scholar who sought to build theory and generalizable statements based on research in corporate archives (McCraw 2008; Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker 2014, Table 2). Lipartito (2014) and Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli (2014) have recently formalized the research practices of Chandler and the business historians who have been inspired by him. Lipartito observes that within this research methodology, ‘the fundamental rule of source validity is that those texts, objects, artifacts, and images that were produced during the time under study are the best primary sources’ (2014, 290). Lipartito also notes that Chandlerian business historical research centers on the interpretation of documents that were created for internal use and which were subsequently preserved in corporate archives Lipartito (2014, 288–290).

Building on Lipartito’s insights, Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli (2014) explain how the techniques of triangulation, source criticism, and hermeneutics improve the robustness of the conclusions arrived at by business historians. For business historians, ‘triangulation’ denotes the craft of looking at documents created by different observers of the same event (Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli 2014, 316). Source criticism involves asking a series of questions about each document encountered by the researcher (Kipping and Lamberg 2016, 313). Hermeneutics is ‘a theory of textual interpretation that posits that the meaning of language and texts arise through their relationship to’ their context, which means that ‘specific texts, or parts of texts, therefore need to be understood in relationships to contexts and vice versa’ (Kipping, Wadhwani, and Bucheli 2014, 320). Hermeneutics requires knowledge of ‘the cultural, social, as well as temporal context’ of document’s creation. Hermeneutical research in archives results in research outputs in which only a small portion of the documents read by the researcher are actually cited in the paper.

The principles outlined by Lipartito and Kipping et al. inform the research methodology operationalized in this paper. Our account is based on primary sources (i.e. texts created at the time of the decisions described) in the firm’s archive, which is now located in the HBC Archive in Winnipeg, Canada. To engage in triangulation our research in the HBC Archive involved the study of other primary sources, including Canadian newspapers, the British financial press, and court rulings. We have used internal correspondence preserved in the HBC’s archive to observe to the conversations HBC executives had as they planned the firm’s adoption of a rhetorical history strategy. Readers will observe that we have adopted a single-case rather than a multiple-case approach. We have done so because the single-case approach allows for an extended and empirically rich study in which theory is related to a ‘critical’ or ‘revelatory’ case (Yin 2013, 48). Our decision to focus on the HBC was informed by the existence of a rich source of data and because of its historical significance. As Yates (2014, 268) observes, we business historians select cases for study based in part on the perceived historical significance of the organization and its relevance to theory development: business historians use ‘theoretical’ rather than ‘statistical sampling’. We believe that it is fair to regard the firm we have studied as a suitable basis for a critical-revelatory case for the following reasons: it existed for a long period, was an early adopter of rhetorical history, and was ‘historically significant’ in that it played an important economic role. As Eisenhardt has observed (see Gehman et al. 2017, 10), single-organization case study research should be based on multiple data sources, particularly in cases when the firm went through ‘multiple temporal phases’. Our research was based on multiple data sources that include the firm’s archive as well as printed primary sources such as books and newspaper articles. We tracked the firm’s changing approach to rhetorical history through several phases in the evolution of the historical culture in which it was embedded.

For the benefit of readers who are not familiar with archival research, we must explain how we selected the archival materials that were the empirical basis for this paper. The HBC archives are a vast complex of shelves holding three kilometers of documents. No researcher could hope to read all of these documents in the hopes of discovering texts relevant to our research question. We began our research by reading secondary and printed primary source related to the history of the HBC, using these texts to identify the dates of the key decisions that led to the firm’s adoption of a rhetorical history strategy. We also identified the units and individuals in the firm who were responsible for the company’s rhetorical history. These data were crucial in locating the boxes containing sources that might be relevant to our study, since departmental structure and chronology jointly inform the hierarchical organization of boxes of documents within the HBC archive. The professional archivists of the HBC also used their deep knowledge of the collection to direct us to documents relevant to our research question. As boxes of documents were brought to a special reading room, one of the researchers methodologically searched through them to find relevant primary sources, which were then recorded in research notes on a laptop and digitized with a camera. These notes and images were later used to reconstruct the process of how the firm began to make extensive use of history in its communications with stakeholders. All of the primary sources cited in this paper were read by both co-authors, who used a service named DropBox to organize shared primary sources.

Evolution of the HBC’s strategy

Scholars in history, accounting, economics, and other disciplines are continuously adding to our understanding of the history of the HBC (Binnema 2014; Carlos and Lewis 2012; Ogata and Spraakman 2013; Vanek 2014). The paper does not pretend to offer a new interpretation of the early history of the HBC. However, to understand how the HBC’s London headquarters used the past at various points in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is necessary to draw on the scholarly secondary literature to present a brief account of the firm’s activities in North America. The ‘Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay’, was incorporated in 1670 to trade in the area around Hudson Bay in present-day Canada. The HBC’s royal charter granted an exclusive legal monopoly over the fur trade in a vast area of North America: in the eyes of British law, it was illegal for other British subjects to travel there to trade. The territory covered by the charter was known as ‘Rupert’s Land’ and included much of what is now Canada. The company traded with the local Indigenous peoples for furs, exchanging them for European goods (Carlos and Lewis 2011). The HBC was a chartered trading company and was thus similar to the contemporaneous East India Company (EIC), another firm that is sometimes regarded as a proto-multinational (Fitzgerald 2016, 30–40; Jones 2000, 21; Stern 2015a; Wilson 2015).

Annual voyages brought European goods to the HBC trading posts and returned with furs for sale to London. The HBC attempted to maintain its position as a monopsonist in the territories covered by its charter, although competition from various groups of French, British, American, Russian and other interlopers was a frequent problem. From 1779 to 1821, the HBC and a Montreal-based fur-trading outfit engaged in intense competition. After the merger of these companies, the HBC’s managers rationalized the trading post network and increased profitability (Rich 1961, 2: 390–399). In the middle of the nineteenth century, the HBC faced a new set of strategic threats. Many historians regard 1846 as marking the effective end of the epoch of British mercantilism and the beginning of a period of ‘liberal imperialism’ (Howe 1997; Trentmann 2008, 31–46), was also a watershed year for the HBC. This period was crucial as the political culture in both Britain and Canada became increasingly committed to the free-market ideology of classical liberalism and many actors came to regard statutory monopolies as anathema (Ducharme and Constant 2009; Fecteau 2004; Searle 1998). Concurrent with the British Empire’s shift towards ‘Free Trade’, the regions of present-day Canada with white majorities acquired internal autonomy from Britain (McKay 2010). The devolution of power to locally elected parliaments in British North America increased the political risks faced by the HBC: after 1850, white populations of present-day eastern Canada grew impatient with the HBC’s territorial claims. Many in this region thought that the territory was suitable for agricultural settlement and that the HBC was preventing white settlement in the region in order to protect the fur trade (Rich 1961; vol. 3, 794–815). Although the British parliament decided in 1857 to uphold the company’s rights in Rupert’s Land, the organizational legitimacy of the HBC was eroding (Synge 1863).

In 1863, a syndicate called the International Financial Society purchased a controlling interest in the HBC. The company’s new owners planned a radical change in the firm’s strategy that would shift the focus from trading furs to selling plots in Rupert’s Land to white settlers. This strategy was predicated on a shift from a fur-trade frontier to a frontier of white settlement, which had ominous implications for the Indigenous peoples of Rupert’s Land. Although the Indigenous inhabitants of the region believed that they were the rightful owners of their traditional lands (Miller 2000, 199), the HBC’s managers and shareholders (Dodds 1866) believed that its charter had granted it freehold tenure over Rupert’s Land. Some of the white inhabitants of present-day Ontario regarded the property rights claimed by the HBC as wholly illegitimate, while other in the same region expressed some willingness to pay the HBC for Rupert’s Land (Careless 1963, 2: 178, 179). In 1865, the relevant minister in the British government decided that it the HBC ought to sell Rupert’s Land to Canada. Prolonged bargaining over the price and the terms of the sale ensued (Smith 2008, 133). In 1869, the British Government dictated a compromise whereby the HBC would be paid £300,000 for its claims to the territory. The company was promised that it would be given five percent of all fertile land in the territory. These lands totaled almost seven million acres (Hamilton 2012, 2). The HBC’s shareholders reluctantly approved these terms of sale in late 1869 (Smith 2008, 133).

Until the first decade of the twentieth century, the fur trade continued to supply most of the firm’s profits. However, the HBC’s land sales department became increasingly important to the firm’s bottom line, as did the general stores that served white settlers rather than Indigenous trappers (see report of AGM in Economist, 1909). After 1885, Canada’s transcontinental railway accelerated white settlement in the former Rupert’s Land, with Indigenous inhabitants increasingly surrounded by white agriculturalists (Daschuk 2013). To cater to the increasingly sophisticated tastes of consumers in the rising cities of the region, the HBC opened modern department stores in the early twentieth century. These stores were developed using the expertise of Richard Woodman Burbidge, the ‘retailing wizard’ behind the success of Harrod’s of London (Monod 1986, 174). An increasing proportion of the HBC’s profits came from selling to the urban consumers who flocked to its ‘palatial’ department stores (Economist, 1909).

During the World War I, the French Government made the HBC its official purchasing agent in North America for food and war materiel, thereby involving the firm in the international armaments trade. The HBC undertook similar work for Russia, Romania, and other French allies in Europe (Economist, 1917). The wartime profits of the HBC were partially offset by higher taxes in both Canada and the UK: the managers of the HBC were particularly aggrieved by double taxation, since the purely Canadian department store chains with which it competed did not labor under this burden (Financial Times 1920). It was in this fraught political environment that the HBC decided to invest considerable resources in public spectacles designed to commemorate its 250th anniversary and the firm’s historical contribution to the development of Canada and the British Empire more generally.

The historical cultures in which the HBC operated

Woolf has shown that tales about the past have been an important part of many cultures around the world. Political, military, and religious leaders used historical storytelling to motivate followers for millennia. Until the eighteenth century, however, the importance of basing historical accounts on primary sources from the period described was not widely understood, even by Herodotus and Thucydides, the alleged founders of the Western tradition of historical research (Woolf 2011, 41, 80, 130). During and after the Enlightenment, the credibility of a narrator in the eyes of Western consumers of historical knowledge came to be dependent on the referencing of primary sources, which meant that the rhetorical–historical narratives created by organizations, be they nation states or companies, required archive (Woolf 2011, 282). The growing centrality of primary sources to historical research resulted in the investment of societal resources into local and national archives. The establishment of the French national archive in 1795 was driven by the cocktail of nationalist, republican, and Enlightenment ideas that had earlier shaped the French Revolution (Wilson 1973, 4). Similar political and epistemological ideas informed the decision to create the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane in London opened in 1838(Kenyon 1984, 88, 95–96; Levine 1986). Without the funding of such archives, the various patriotic narratives created by professional historians would have had less credibility with the reading publics of their respective nations. These narratives would have lacked credibility because Hume and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had convinced Westerners that for a historical narrative to be true, it had to be based on primary sources that had been viewed by the historian (Kenyon 1984, 150, 151, 197, 198). In other words, a belief in the importance of archival sources had become deeply entrenched in Western national historical cultures (Berger 2013). To be accepted as authentic by stakeholders, a nation’s historical narratives had to be based on archival materials.

Historical narratives were frequently used in political debates in Hanoverian Britain related to business, overseas imperialism, and a series of costly wars against France (Hicks 2002; Kasmer 2012; Kenyon 1984, 41–87, 59–61). As a way of managing elite public opinion, the British state invested in the production of historical narratives with academic credibility. In 1763, the post of Historiographer Royal of Scotland was given to Professor William Robertson, who duly published historical accounts that were useful to King George III (Hargraves 2000). This period saw the emergence in Western countries of the custom of celebrating special anniversaries (McDonald and Méthot 2006), such as the 1788 centennial of the 1688 Glorious Revolution (Schwoerer 1990) and the three-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, which was marked in 1818 (Landry 2014). Philanthropic and religious organizations then started to commemorate their anniversaries. By 1831, many charitable organizations in London had adopted the practice of marking their anniversaries (Imperial Magazine 1831). In other words, by the nineteenth century, British people had acquired the habit of thinking in terms of anniversaries. The first documented case of a for-profit company celebrating an anniversary came in 1875, when the directors of England’s North-Eastern Railway decided to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington, the world’s first public railway (Henderson 1875).

Rising literacy rates and incomes in the nineteenth century meant that historical knowledge of this type came to be consumed by a large segment of the population, rather than just the propertied elite. The move towards universal male suffrage in both Britain and Canada meant that policy-makers became concerned that schoolchildren be taught the ‘correct’ historical narratives that promoted patriotism and respect for the existing political order. Policy-makers concluded that controlling the historical curriculum in primary schools was crucial to controlling their new masters, the electorate (Chancellor 1970; Prentice 2004). The Canadian government developed its own national archives in the late nineteenth century (Wilson 1973; 5) to serve the needs of the country’s emerging historical profession, which was dominated by British-born Oxford-trained historians who produced narratives that celebrated Canada’s growth within the British Empire (Wright 2005, 30–39, 187). These policies had a profound impact of the historical culture of Canada. By the early twentieth century, most people in English-speaking Canada had a rudimentary knowledge of their country’s history. The version of history that had been taught in Canadian schools since the nineteenth century celebrated British imperialism and Canada’s proud place within the British Empire (Walsh 2008). The historical culture also stressed that historical narratives ought to be based on primary sources. The rhetorical history developed by the HBC c. 1918 was aligned with this wider historical culture. The historical narratives produced by the HBC celebrated the firm’s contribution to the development of the British Empire and of Canada.

Development of the HBC’s rhetorical history strategy

Having reviewed the evolution of the overall strategy of the HBC and the development of the historical cultures in which the HBC operated, we are now in the position to analyze the development of the firm’s rhetorical history strategy. During the first two and a half centuries of the firm’s existence, the senior managers of the HBC invested little in building its capacity to use rhetorical history. Our survey of contemporary London newspapers shows that the firm ignored important anniversaries, such as their centenary in 1770 and bicentennial in 1870. The HBC’s apparent indifference to its own history is particularly striking when compared to the British East India Company (EIC) of the same era, which invested in systems that increased its capacity to engage in rhetorical history. As we show below, the EIC was an early adopter of the strategy of using rhetorical history in corporate communication. The HBC’s London headquarters, Beaver House, was near East India House and the firms had overlapping investor bases (Rich 1961, vol. 1: 38–42, 353). Despite the proximity of the HBC’s senior managers to those of the EIC, the HBC appears not to have emulated the EIC’s elaborate rhetorical history strategy. In the period before 1900, the HBC used rhetorical history only intermittently and in ways that did not involve substantial and sustained expenditure.

The EIC appears to have begun investing significant resources in the production of credible rhetorical histories in the mid eighteenth century, when it urgently needed to improve its reputation with members of parliament and the landed classes more generally. In 1769, when the EIC was under intense criticism in Britain (Ogborn 2008), it appointed an official Historiographer, the world’s first in-house corporate historian. The EIC’s successive Historiographers produced useful historical works designed to celebrate the firm’s accomplishments in India (Delgoda 1992; Stern 2009). To facilitate the creation of useful knowledge about its past, the EIC also paid the salary of a Registrar and Keeper of Records from 1771. This individual was tasked with preserving and cataloging the old documents that had accumulated in the corporation’s London office as well as organizing documents that were arriving from overseas. In 1801, the EIC funded the establishment of an extensive library and archive (British Library 2015; Moon 2008). As we mentioned above, post-Enlightenment Westerners believed that a historical narrative to be authentic, it had to be based on archival documents. The EIC also established a museum as a way of improving its public image in London (Ratcliff 2016). The HBC did not emulate the EIC in establishing a similar archive at this time: although historical documents were steadily accumulating in the HBC’s London headquarters, the firm’s archive was not established until the 1920s (Ross and Morton 1985), more than a century after the EIC invested in organizing its archive. We can connect this difference in the priorities of the two firms with reference to the political history of the period. Debates over the EIC were important in British political life, since critics of the firm charged that it was corrupting the entire British political system and exploiting the population of India (Stern 2015b). While the affairs of the HBC also occasioned debates in parliament (see below), they did not capture the attention of the nation in the same way as those of the EIC. The HBC thus had less of a need to produce credible, archive-based rhetorical histories to improve its public relations than did the EIC.

One early example of the HBC’s managers recognizing that knowledge of the firm’s history might be an exploitable resource comes from the 1740s, when there was a challenge to the HBC’s monopoly by Arthur Dobbs, a London merchant who sought a charter to create a rival fur-trading company (Vanek 2014). Dobbs created a historical narrative (1744) that lambasted the HBC for failing to live up to the terms of its 1670 charter, which had obliged the firm to search for the Northwest Passage, the elusive ocean route through the Arctic Archipelago that would connect Europe to Asia. Dobbs’s attack on the HBC (1744) included a lengthy section on the history of European exploration in the Pacific from the 1519 voyage of Ferdinand Magellan. This section, 25 pages of Dobbs’s 211-page book, was included so as to suggest that the HBC was standing in the way of the discovery of the Northwest Passage.

In 1748, Dobbs’s lobbying resulted in a parliamentary investigation of the HBC (Simmons 2007, 65). The HBC’s attempt to influence parliamentary and public opinion at this juncture also included the publication in 1748 of the pamphlet the Case of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This work argued that the HBC had valiantly sought to explore the region covered by its grant, but efforts had been continuously frustrated by the severe cold and the ‘hostile Depredation’ of the malevolent French. The pamphlet poured scorn on the unnamed merchants (i.e. Dobbs’s clique) who sought to ‘reap the Fruit of this Company’s Labour’ by trading into the territory that the HBC had originally opened up (1748, 1). In 1749, parliament decided to uphold the company’s monopoly over Rupert’s Land (Rich 1961, 2: 584). The HBC’s defeat of Dobbs and his associates was clearly successful, although it is difficult to determine to what extent this victory was due to the use of historical rhetorical in the 1748 pamphlet.

The HBC also employed a rhetorical history in 1857, when the company once again faced an existential threat, this time from political opponents in both Britain and present-day Canada who regarded its 1670 charter as illegitimate. In an 1857 open letter to the British prime minister, HBC critic Andrew Freeport described ‘the Charter granted by King Charles’ to the HBC as ‘one of those old obsolete Charters, which gives them rights and immunities’ that were ‘incompatible with the policy and feelings of the present day’ which favored the principle of ‘Free Trade’ (Freeport 1857, 1). Freeport argued that the HBC’s charter was no more valid than the dead-letter ordinance passed by ‘Edward the Third in the year 1337’ restricting the right to wear fur to the upper classes (Freeport 1857, 2). Faced with a British parliamentary committee’s investigation into its affairs, the HBC’s London headquarters returned to rhetorical history to combat critics. To bolster its case, the HBC printed a pamphlet on its history that highlighted the ways in which the company had promoted British power, increased geographical knowledge, and prevented the sort of bloody frontier warfare seen on American territory (Hudson’s Bay Company’s 1857, 7). This historical narrative presented the HBC, a monopolist, as the paternalistic protector of the Indigenous inhabitants of Canada.

The 1863 takeover of the HBC was followed by a period in which the HBC appears to have de-emphasized the use of rhetorical history in the texts it wrote for the benefit of government officials. In the correspondence between HBC and British Government officials in the period leading up to the sale of Rupert’s Land to the Canadian government in 1869, the HBC’s representatives rarely use historical arguments to bolster their claims. Over the course of the 1860s, the successive Governors of the HBC, Henry Berens, Sir Edmund Head, Lord Kimberley, and Sir Stafford Northcote exchanged number of letters with British and Canadian government officials about the future of Rupert’s Land. In comparing the letters written by these individuals certain stylistic differences are evident (for the collected correspondence, see Great Britain Colonial Office, 1869). The letters by the HBC Governors consistently fail to mention the firm’s history beyond brief and legalistic references to the 1670 charter. These representatives of the HBC might easily have referenced the historical role of the HBC as a bulwark of British power in North America in the course of arguing for favorable treatment, but they did not do so. The absence of historical argumentation in the letters written by Governors Head (1 letter) and Northcote (6 letters) is particularly striking as both men had studied classics at Oxford and displayed lifelong interest in history that is noted in their entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Rubinstein 2004; St Leger 2004).

In contrast, the Canadian government, which was seeking to obtain the lands of the HBC at the lowest possible price, used a variety of historical arguments in the letters it sent to the relevant British government officials. For instance, a 1864 memorandum on the HBC by the Canadian cabinet sent to the Colonial Secretary declared that ‘the history of the American Continent is replete with examples of the great evils resulting from the locking up of extensive tracts of land in the hands of wealthy Corporations …’ (Legislative Assembly of Ontario, 1882, 104). Here, the Canadian government created a historical narrative that depicted that HBC’s charter as just one example of a pattern of corporate misrule. Siding with the Canadian government, the Times newspaper denounced the HBC’s charter as ‘the last great monopoly which the improvidence and reckless favouritism of Charles II inflicted upon the commercial world’ (Times, 9 December 1868). In this editorial, the Times was trying to create a discontinuity between the historical epoch in which the HBC had been chartered (i.e. the distant reign of the discredited Stuart monarch Charles II) and the modern, liberal, free-market reign of Queen Victoria.

At the close of the nineteenth century, the HBC’s senior London managers appear to have become conscious of the rhetorical value of the firm’s history. Lord Strathcona, the HBC’s Governor from 1896 to1914, instructed the HBC’s London office to grant access to historical documents and to independent authors who wished to write romantic accounts of the early history of the firm. Propagandistic works emerged with Strathcona’s support. For instance, journalist Beckles Wilson published The Great Company, a laudatory history of the HBC (Wilson 1900). George Bryce published a broadly similar history of the company and in the acknowledgements he thanked Strathcona for helping to arrange archival access (Bryce 1900, vii). In 1913, Stratchona denied archival access to Professor W. Stewart Wallace for reasons that remain obscure (Simmons 2007, 188).

The company’s managers directed significant resources into celebrating the firm’s 250th anniversary in 1920, an important milestone in the history of the company’s ability to manage its heritage. The idea of an elaborate celebration of the company’s 250th anniversary originated with Herbert Burbidge, the manager of retail operations (Burbidge, 26 July 1918). Burbidge’s belief that the firm’s history could help the company to market its products and build up goodwill has to be understood with reference to the immediate context in which he wrote. In the correspondence related to the planning of the anniversary, Burbidge referred to the Bank of Montreal’s centenary in 1917, which had been marked with commemorative activities across Canada (Burbidge, 18 February 1919). Canadian consumers in 1918 were thus primed to think in terms of corporate anniversaries. As Burbidge noted in his letter, many Canadian schools already taught the history of the HBC, as ‘children read of its creation and earlier activities in their school histories’. Burbidge ended his letter by expressing his hope that the war would be over by 1920: ‘if so it might be possible for the Governor and some members of the Committee to visit Canada, when a real gathering of Hudson’s Bay employees could take place at the old headquarters in Winnipeg’ (Burbidge, 26 July 1918).

Although Burbidge did not mention it, the HBC was then locked in a political battle with Canadian tax authorities (Judicial Committee of the Privy Council 1919). This context helps to explain why the HBC’s headquarters was willing to invest resources in an effort to promote public goodwill. The decision of the HBC to spend freely on commemorating its role in Canada’s development can also be connected to the ongoing leftward shift of the centre of gravity in Canadian politics. The final phases of the World War I witnessed an upsurge in left-wing sentiment in Canada that saw increased labor militancy and the election of progressive and ‘agrarian socialist’ governments in the very region of Canada in which the HBC was most active (Friesen 1987, 326–329). In May and June 1919, the city of Winnipeg was convulsed by a General Strike that some in the business community, and the Canadian government, interpreted as a Communistic attempt to overthrow the government and establish a quasi-Bolshevik regime (Kramer and Mitchell 2010). The HBC, which was among the most anti-union employers in the region, vigorously supported the efforts of the authorities to suppress the strike (Belisle 2011, 212). It was against this background of war and domestic political unrest that the HBC made its plans for the commemoration of its 250th anniversary.

The letter in which Burbidge proposed an elaborate anniversary commemoration was dated July 1918. Shortly after the November 1918 armistice with Germany, Burbidge’s proposal was considered at a meeting attended by HBC Governor Lord Kindersley, the directors, and a special visitor, H. Holford Bottomley, a London advertising agent. Bottomley then designed an elaborate campaign to mark the anniversary, including extensive print advertising, a film about the firm’s history, an illustrated history of the HBC, an essay contest for employees, and a new pension fund for loyal workers (Minutes of the Governor and Committee, 6 January 1920a; Rumble, 14 April 1920). Bottomley’s plan represented a sizeable investment for the firm. For instance, the cost to the HBC of bringing ‘Indians, Eskimos, etc’ to the celebrations in Winnipeg, was £6,000 (Bottomley, 24 November 1919). This colonialist spectacle was similar to earlier ceremonial events in Canada in which ‘picturesque’ Indigenous people performed for white observers (Radforth 2003). The anniversary was marked by extensive renovations of the HBC’s Calgary department store (Minutes of the Governor and Committee, 13 April 1920b) that allowed attendees of the anniversary banquet to dine in a new Elizabethan-style restaurant. The menu for this banquet reminded diners that ‘the history of Canada, more especially Western Canada, is bound up with that of the Hudson’s Bay Company’ (Souvenir Menu, 1919). Cinemas were booked and store managers distributed free tickets to the historical film to the affluent consumers the firm wished to target (Geller 2011, 98). The overall thrust of the celebrations was to remind the public of the positive role of the HBC is building up the Canadian economy, a narrative that was clearly opposed to that socialist worldview that had inspired the general strike of the previous year.

The HBC hired the London journalist William Schooling to write a 129-page illustrated history of the company. The format of this publication was modeled on the 1915 centenary volume that Scottish Widows, a life assurance company (Schooling, 19 February 1920a). A recurring theme in this history was the firm’s loyal service to the Crown in military conflicts from the seventeenth century to the recent war in Europe. The word ‘service’ recurred 57 times while ‘war’ appeared 14 times in the text, which also mentioned the deaths of 78 HBC employees in combat (Schooling 1920b, 127). Thirty thousand copies were distributed in May 1920 (Ross and Morton 1985). The total budget for the 1920 festivities of C$313,000 or £50,000 (Summary of Discussions, March 1920), represented a major investment given the firm’s after tax profits for 1920 were just £204,960 and the company was then coping with the effects of a postwar recession (Financial Times 1921).

The 1920 anniversary became the basis of a permanent rhetorical history system that supported communication with customers, workers, and others. The Beaver, which began publication in October 1920, was created to improve worker morale by informing HBC employees about the firm’s past and present (Geller 1990). The linchpin of the HBC’s evolving system for using its history was the corporate archive. Readers will remember that the perceived authenticity of historical narratives in post-Enlightenment Western cultures was closely connected to archival documents. In the 1930s, the company’s chaotic collection of old documents was systematized and made available to academic researchers (Madsen 2008, 31). By the 1930s, the company began actively encouraging academics and other outsiders to use its archive, doing so in the belief that these authors would produce ‘a very cheap and fairly helpful form of unpaid propaganda’ (HBC executive quoted in Simmons 2007, 219). Douglas Mackay, a historian, was appointed as HBC public relations manager in 1933 (Gregor 2001, vii). Writing in 1936, Mackay recalled how the HBC had ignored its history until recently: ‘If ever a historic organization was indifferent to the glamour of its past, it was this company of adventurers during the first two and a half centuries of its existence’ (MacKay 1936, 34).

Analysis

Mackay’s observation made suggests that the HBC had only recently become aware of the value of its history in marketing, internal communications, and public relations. Mackay was likely overstating the degree to which the firm had been indifferent to its past prior to the World War I, as the firm did occasionally use history in its communication with policy-makers, as we have shown above in our discussion of the texts produced by Joshua Sharpe and others. However, the firm’s use of history to advance its interests in the period before the World War I was intermittent and did not involve the expenditure of sizeable resources. As we have seen, Lord Strathcona, the Governor of the HBC, assisted authors to access historical materials in the HBC’s London office in the late 1890s. Although giving these outside authors access to old documents kept in the head office doubtless imposed some burdens on the firm’s clerical employees, the costs to the firm were minimal. The 250th anniversary celebrations mark the first time the firm expended considerable resources on rhetorical history.

Several lessons can be derived from our study of the process by which the HBC came to recognize the rhetorical importance of its history. First, the HBC adopted an elaborate rhetorical history strategy only after the focus of the firm has shifted from the fur trade to department stores catering to affluent Canadian urbanites who had a choice of retail options. Had the HBC’s customer base remained people in remote Canadian communities in which the HBC enjoyed a local monopoly, the HBC likely would not have invested resources in history-themed marketing campaigns and the production of documentary films. In addition to be aligned with the firm’s overall strategy, the HBC’s rhetorical history strategy was aligned with the wider historical culture in which it was embedded. The HBC’s rhetorical history strategy was successful because the themes stressed in the firm’s historical narratives, such as loyalty to the British Empire, were congruent with the wider historical culture of English-speaking Canada in that era.

In the aftermath of its highly visible and expensive 250th anniversary celebrations in 1920, the HBC decided to invest in the creation of a costly corporate archive. This decision raises the question of why the firm felt it was necessary to reinforce the legitimacy of its historical narratives in this fashion. After all, it would have been possible for the firm to have invented and disseminated useful historical narratives without the expense of an elaborate archive staffed with professional archivists. The HBC’s investment in this infrastructure to support its narratives was necessary due to a prior shift in the historical cultures of which it was a part. The Enlightenment had permanently changed the historical cultures of Western countries by promoting the idea that for a historical narrative to be true, it had to be based on old documents kept in an archive. Had they not been based on archival documents, the historical narratives created by HBC employees would have lacked credibility.

Another pattern that is observable in our research is that the firm’s creation of a full-fledged internal heritage system based on an internal archive came in the early twentieth century, when there was a profound change in the nature of the political threat faced by the HBC. Previously the main threat to the HBC had been from rival groups of merchants and from economic liberals who opposed the firm’s chartered monopoly rights. In this period, the legitimacy of capitalism itself was being challenged by the rise of socialism in Britain and Canada, the markets in which the HBC was most involved. The paper suggests, therefore, than in thinking about the history of the corporate use of the past, we must also take the history of socialism and other anti-corporate political movements into account. As we have seen, the decision of the HBC to invest resources in the 1920 celebration of its 250th anniversary took place against a backdrop of intense industrial and political unrest in Canada as represented by the General Strike of 1919. Against the socialist narrative of capitalist exploitation, the HBC presented a celebratory account of the corporate past that emphasized loyal service to the state and a positive role in the economic development of Canada and the British Commonwealth.

By introducing the concept of historical culture into our model for understanding whether, when, and how firms use rhetorical history, our paper has identified new areas of research for management and organization scholars. First, since historical cultures are constantly evolving, we need more research on how firms adjust their rhetorical history strategies in response to shifts in the historical cultures in which they are situated. In other words, if the perceptions of the past in a given society changes, how do firms that use history respond? Second, since historical culture varies geographically, particularly between countries, how do multinational firms adjust their rhetorical history strategies in response to local conditions? For instance, common historical events are perceived very differently around the world. How then do multinational firms that use history in their marketing and which operate in all of these nations adjust their messages in response to local conditions? Moreover, historical culture can vary differently within a single country, since generation, race, ethnicity, and political persuasion all influence how people perceive the past. African-Americans, for instance, perceive the American Civil War differently than either white Southerners and recent immigrants. We need to know more, therefore, how firms adapt the rhetorical history strategies so as to appeal to as many demographic groups as possible.

Conclusions

This paper has explored how the HBC developed its capacity to use rhetorical history in the years surrounding and following the company’s 250th anniversary. Prior to that point, the HBC’s use of rhetorical history was intermittent and directed primarily at policy-makers in London. In the aftermath of the World War I, HBC used rhetorical history to persuade a wide variety of stakeholders, including consumers and workers. The case study presented above has helped us to refine our theoretical model for understanding whether, why, and how firms use history rhetorically. If there is a lack of alignment between the wider historical culture on the one hand and historical narratives available to the firm’s managers on the other, the firm is unlikely to use history rhetorically. A rhetorical history strategy is likely to be successful when there is a close fit between the historical narratives used by the firm and the wider historical culture, as was the case with the HBC’s 250th anniversary celebrations.

In addition to helping us to refine the existing theoretical model for understanding why and how firms use rhetorical history, this paper points to new research directions for business historians. As we have seen, the HBC’s rhetorical history strategy was inspired by looking at the use of history by other firms, such as Scottish Widows and the Bank of Montreal. Understanding how the HBC learned how to emulate the rhetorical history practices of these firms is relatively straightforward, since these were firms operated in the same countries as the HBC. More research on how the practice of celebrating corporate histories diffused across linguistic frontiers and continents could help us to understand the relationship between historical culture and corporate rhetorical history. We know from bibliometric data that Japanese companies are more likely to invest in publication of celebratory official historians than are comparable Western firms (Matsuzaki 2014). How this pattern relates to national differences in historical culture and thinking about time is not yet known. More research would seem to be required. By investigating the corporate use of rhetorical history in a variety of national historical cultures, we may be able to further refine our theoretical model of how firms use history in different contexts.

Notes on contributors

Andrew Smith is a Senior Lecturer in International Business at the University of Liverpool Management School, Department of Organization and Management, University of Liverpool Management School, Chatham Street, University of Liverpool Liverpool, UK L69 3BX (Corresponding Author).

Daniel Simeone is a PhD student in the Department of History and Classics at McGill University, History 845 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 0G4 He is also a lecturer in Labour Studies at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.