Steven Toms

Professor of Accounting
Leeds Business School

Steven Toms is Professor of Accounting at Leeds University Business School. He specializes in the history of the textile industry, with an emphasis on the determinants of successful and unsuccessful company financial performance. His talk is based on his (with Qi Zhang) forthcoming Business History Review publication entitled: ‘Marks and Spencer and the Decline of the British Textile Industry’, which offers a new interpretation based on records from the M&S Company Archive and other sources.

Abstract

Marks & Spencer and the British Textile Industry

For many years high street retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) supported employment and its own business objectives by sourcing the majority of its clothing from UK suppliers. These included prominent Yorkshire and North East based firms such as William Baird, Claremont Garments and Dewhirst. When M&S changed its policy in the late 1990s, a wave of factory closures followed. The talk will consider the reasons for the M&S decision and its consequences. In doing so it will address the wider question of whether domestic textile firms can survive in the twenty first century, and if so, how?