Elizabeth Abbott Burnham papers

Elizabeth Abbott Burnham (1904-2000) was a researcher and educator who specialized in the study of retailing for business administration programs, primarily at Harvard Business School. Burnham was born August 4, 1904, in Newton, Massachusetts. She studied at Wheaton College where she received a Bachelor of Arts in 1925.

Burnham joined the staff of the Bureau of Business Research (BBR) at Harvard Business School (HBS) in 1927 where her responsibilities included supervising the work on the annual cost studies for retail firms and performing statistical work for faculty research. Her research was also published in BBR bulletins and in articles for the Harvard Business Review. Burnham presented her research on business costs in a speech to the Store Management Group Session at the National Retail Dry Goods Association conference in January 1942. Outside of HBS, Burnham worked with the Boston YWCA as the chair of the Business Girls' Department Committee in the late 1930s and later director in 1943. From 1940 to 1942, Burnham served on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission.

HBS appointed Burnham as an associate professor in 1942, making her the second woman professor at the school after Henrietta Larson. In the same year she became the acting chief of the BBR until the BBR was merged into the Division of Research at HBS in 1944. Continuing her position as an associate professor, Burnham’s role transitioned to working closely with Professor Malcolm P. McNair in 1947, researching and writing case studies for his course in Retailing. Additionally, Burnham would attend McNair’s classes, where she would take notes and frequently get called upon to clarify points in the case studies. In the late 1950s, Burnham researched and wrote cases on retailing of mobile homes and prefabricated houses. Burnham was a co-author with McNair on Cases in Retail Management (1957) and contributed significant research to his book The Department Store: Past, Present, and Future (1963).

While maintaining her faculty position at HBS, Burnham became an instructor in Retailing in 1947 for the Management Training Program at Radcliffe College (later the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration), a position she held until 1956. In 1959, Burnham became Special Instructor in Merchandising and in Personnel Problems in Retailing at the Simmons College Prince School of Retailing. Burnham retired from her teaching positions at Simmons and HBS in 1970 but continued to work at HBS editing case studies through the 1970s. Burnham died on July 11, 2000.