From Institutional Change to Social Responsibility: Synthesizing a Digital Archive for Global Management Research

Between 2007 and 2025, the Creating Emerging Markets (CEM) project at the Harvard Business School assembled a unique digital oral-history archive featuring 196 in-depth interviews with senior business leaders across 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. This working paper examines the project's evolution from a regional pilot to a global research resource, highlighting its role in documenting how firms navigated institutional voids, managed political risk, and drove innovation in rapidly transforming economies. Unlike traditional archives, CEM provides rich, qualitative evidence on why management practices in emerging markets often diverge from Western models, offering new insights into diversified business groups, and reputation as a meta-resource. By analyzing the project's impact on teaching cases and scholarly literature this working paper demonstrates how longitudinal oral histories can bridge the gap between historical context and contemporary management theory. The CEM project provides a scalable model for future efforts to document the evolving intersection of business and society.