Overview

Rowena Olegario is Scholar-In-Residence in the Reputation and Strategy research area with a focus on the historical evolution of corporate reputation.  In addition, she was appointed in 2009 as the Centre’s first Case Study Editor.  She joins the Centre from Vanderbilt University in Nashville,Tennessee, USA where she was an Assistant Professor of History.

Rowena’s research interests are centered on the intersection of market forces, institutional change, and culture.  She is the author of A Culture of Credit:  Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business (Harvard, 2006), which traces the history of credit reporting – and, more broadly, the ideas about trust and financial transparency -- in the United States.  She is co-author (with Davis Dyer and Frederick Dalzell) of Rising Tide:  Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), a commissioned history that has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Thai.  Her current book projects include a book on the history of credit in America commissioned by Harvard University Press, and a study of how the institution of credit reporting spread from the U.S., the U.K, Germany, and other industrialized countries to Latin America, eastern Europe, and Asia during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Rowena was awarded the 1999 Newcomen-Harvard Special Award in Business History for her article on Jewish merchants and the problem of transparency, published in the Business History Review.   In 1999-2001 she participated in research conducted by the World Bank on institutions and markets and contributed a chapter to Credit Reporting Systems and the International Economy (MIT Press, 2003).  She appeared in the PBS production They Made America (2005) as an authority on the Mercantile Agency, the forerunner of Dun & Bradstreet.  She remains interested in the role of international institutions in global commerce.  

In addition to teaching courses on American and international business history, Rowena offered courses in a number of American history topics, including the Revolution and the Civil War.  Prior to Vanderbilt, she was Visiting Assistant Professor and Fellow of the Society of Scholars at the University of Michigan Business School.  She also developed and wrote case studies for Harvard Business School from 1993–1998.  Her non-academic experience includes working as a senior market analyst for Coopers & Lybrand (now part of PriceWaterhouseCoopers) in New York City.