The previous holders of this Chair, which was the first in the world in business history being founded in 1927, included Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and Thomas K. McCraw.
Jones's works have concentrated on the historical evolution of globalization, international banking and trading, and foreign direct investment by multinationals.
In 2017 he published a historical study of green entrepreneurship from the nineteenth century until the present day called Profits and Sustainability.
A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership (Harvard University Press, 2023)[3] Born in Birmingham, Jones attended Corpus Christi, Cambridge.
Subsequently, the Business History Initiative developed a project called Creating Emerging Markets, designed to facilitate research and teaching on the business history of emerging markets, which includes interviews with long-time leaders of firms and NGOs in Latin America, South Asia, Turkey and Africa.
[15] From the 1980s, Jones, alongside Mark Casson, was also involved in calling for a more theoretical approach to business history, particularly in the use of economic theory.
[20] In this book, and elsewhere,[21] Jones has sought both to explain the growth of the beauty industry and to explore its impact over the last century on homogenizing beauty ideals worldwide.He has written Harvard Business School cases on leading entrepreneurs in the industry, including the iconic Helena Rubinstein, the founder of the American luxury cosmetics sector.